It all began with the morning commute that Taylor and I will be taking every day: 5 minute walk to a 5 minute train ride to transfer to another 50ish minute train ride out to Etampes and then another 5 minute walk to school. When you get to Etampes you feel like you're much more than an hour out of Paris; it's a kind of quintessential little French village that has a really nice calm feel to it (the sun shining and blue skies helped too). We had somehow managed to turn up an hour-and-a-half early for class, so after a leisurely trip for breakfast and a coffee the day was underway.
First up each morning is a movement class; the majority of them across the Bouffon block are going to be led by a guy named Carlo who Taylor hasn't had before. Being the first day of the block, every person in the course starts today together. I hadn't realised this, but for the rest of the course the class is split in two (probably a good thing as there is nearly 40 of us) and one group does their classes in the morning and the other slightly later in the day - Taylor and I are electing the morning option. (Philippe said that the only way you can change group once you've chosen is if a minimum of 10 family members die back in your home country). But for today we all did it together. And it was intense. 40 actors from all around the world, with 40 massive personalities all taking a movement class together in a room that really isn't meant for that many people. At times it was chaos. We started with some basic stretching and waking up of the body type exercises which were good, and then moved into an exercise where everyone walks around the room and when Carlo bangs a drum you have to stop and be touching a certain number of people, starting with one and growing to as many as you can. That was fun, but also complete madness. This, and the other exercises we went on to do with Carlo (including jumping over sticks while counting, doing the same holding hands with a partner, and a couple of kinds of variations on musical chairs) all seemed to be geared at finding joy and lightness through game and play, but the class seemed to have real difficulty focusing. It was probably mainly due to the large number of people, but the room was never quiet - even when Carlo asked for an exercise to be done quietly - and people would talk over the exercise or laugh or whatever. While it was a fun environment, it was kind of hard to work in at times - I think there's a fine line between taking pleasure and joy in an exercise and just mucking around, and I think the group often crossed that line.
Then came the Bouffon class with Philippe. When he first came into the room everyone carried on their usual business, but I had this moment of "oh my God, I'm in a room with Philippe Gaulier". Even just looking at him you can tell there's something pretty amazing about him. Within about 5 minutes he called everyone in and we all sat down ready to start our work. He began by getting one person up on the floor and then getting others to transform her into a rough appropriation of a Bouffon - this involved altering her clothes so she had no arms or legs, wrapping her head so only her face showed, wrapping her in other gross clothing and dirtying her face until she looked pretty awful - while he told us the story of how Bouffon as a form originated. He then had her perform a series of improvised parodies based on prompts he gave her to demonstrate to us in the audience that this deformed person singing and attempting to dance could be very funny.
Then he had another 10 people get up with her and get deformed too. They then acted out, as a group and individually, more improvised provocations designed to parody something. When it wasn't working Philippe banged his drum and it moved to the next person to try (this would often happen after no more than a few seconds). The group of 10 was up there for about 25 minutes, then we swapped and another 10 got up, then the same thing again. Some of the provocations Philippe gave included:
- Sing a boy scout song soft and well
- Be the Pope
- Be like a snob, someone who directs an art gallery
- Primary school teacher
- Pedophile priest in Dublin
- Group holding hands and singing a religious song and laughing together
- Charming singer
- Prostitute
And more. As you can imagine, these played out by ugly deformed actors in a line on their knees was often quite humorous. Here's a picture so you can get an idea of how it looked.
It was interesting though to see the difference between when something was interesting and funny and when it wasn't - and a lot of the time today, with a few good exceptions, it wasn't really funny. I was in the second group up and had two chances to play something individually and neither of them worked or were very funny at all. My most successful was being banged off by Philippe after about 10 seconds. It seems to be a very fine line between what works and what doesn't, and I don't know what the technical difference is yet, or how to make something work. But as an audience member and as a performer you definitely know whether it's working or not. I just want to figure out WHY.
So what is Bouffon? At the end of day one, through what I gleaned in class today, and my very basic notes of what Philippe said, this is the best I can describe it: a Bouffon is one of those at whom the finger of scorn has been pointed, for whatever reason. Those who were labelled the children not of God but of the devil. Who were exiled or ostracised or otherwise abused and mistreated. They are normally deformed or hideous in some way, but through mockery and parody of those who scorned them (the "bastards" as Philippe calls them) they speak the truth of something terrible and in that way they are beautiful. They are the beautiful blaspheming opposite of what is sacred.
Already I'm finding this course harder to write about than the work I did in Fullerton. There's something incredibly hard to describe about Philippe and the way he teaches and the general atmosphere of the class. In Fullerton I feel that the more technical approach to craft made it really easy to reflect on what I learned in a much more quantifiable way, whereas here things are taught through metaphor and through experience and through recognising where joy and pleasure are in a performance or performer. It's hard to write about because writing is inherently at least a partially intellectual act, but in Philippe's style of teaching you can't really make sense of it with your intellect but just through experiencing and absorbing it. Even that doesn't really make sense now that I've written it. Gaaaah. There's a lot to think about though. And I think my thinking will become more manageable when my class size shrinks a bit. We'll find out.
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