Start of week two today - Taylor and I had to miss Friday's Auto Cours classes because of unexpected amounts of travel time required for our weekend in London. Philippe's class started off today with an extended warm-up: a particularly long game of "Samuel Says" (I made 2 mistakes) and then a game of Mr Hit. All this took up close to three quarters of an hour, but it was good fun and quite a nice relaxed way to start, especially since the heaters didn't seem to be working properly and it was absolutely freezing in the studio.
So after all that was done we sat down and Philippe asked if anyone had any bastards they wanted to work on. First up was an Australian girl to work on a couple of different bastards she knows: first a disgusting man she met on the train and second her local priest and godfather. The exercise was an extension on the work on bastards we'd done last week and it really helped to make a lot clearer for the whole class what it was actually about. This particular exercise, unlike playing the swamp people, is not about 'playing' the bastard as such; rather the actor is supposed to take delight in destroying this person but as themselves This destroying can be done through stories about the bastard, through moments of imitation, through description, but a couple of things are essential: we must get a sense of who your bastard is and we must be able to see them clearly, and we must see the actor loving and enjoying how nasty they are being about this person. As Philippe says: "We see you arrive with the joy to say f*** you to your bastard."
So the first couple of attempts were not all that strong. We discovered that the first bastard being demonstrated probably didn't even qualify as being a bastard - they were either sick or just an idiot. Not a bastard. The litmus test for a bastard is "someone who will write a letter to the Gestapo about their neighbour with the long nose". A certain amount of calculated malice seems to be a prerequisite, not just stupidity. The second bastard on show we could all agree was probably a bastard, but the actor didn't give us a clear enough picture of this person - we couldn't see them - and so again it didn't work.
The next couple of people again were trying to work with examples of people who were not really bastards. One was just kind of an ignorant trash sort of character and the other was Sophia Loren. It was clear that neither of them were never really going to work. There wasn't enough nastiness towards these people for the actors to take delight in, in fact in both cases the actors seemed to harbour a sort of weird admiration for their subjects. Picking the right bastard is the first important step.
Next up I decided I wanted a turn. My bastard was Mohammed, the homophobic sexist ageist misogynist Pakistani driver's licence tester from Wellington (a real person - and absolutely horrible). I really enjoyed getting up and being able to describe him and my experiences of him to everybody else, and I got some good responses and we were all in agreement that he really was a genuine bastard. I impersonated him, I told stories of his bastardly exploits, I embellished and exaggerated a few details (which you're allowed, or even encouraged to do) in order to make him even more vivid and hateful, but it was all based in truth. All this stage of the exercise worked reasonably well for me and I enjoyed doing it and the audience seemed to enjoy much of it as well.
Then Philippe started asking me questions about Mohammed, prompting me to go further with my nastiness - questions like: "How does he s*** in the morning?"; "How does he f***?"; "How does he speak arabic?"; "What does he have to say about politics?". In hindsight I can recognise that these questions were all about propelling me further into the fun of being nasty and ruthless, but at the time I kind of let them squash my fun - I needed to be able to answer Philippe's question in a funny and nasty way and I needed to do it NOW. I went back to my old tricks of playing for result and trying to play my clever ideas. And Philippe, and the audience, saw right through it.
"We see your idea, not your pleasure. We don't see pleasure in the eyes we see your idea. No. You want to be good too fast - it is no good to be good too fast. Take more time to imagine, to have fun with thinking 'how nasty can I be?' You are too nice. For Bouffon you must be nasty and you must like it."
Another big lesson was about hesitation. once or twice when he asked me the questions I would begin with something like "probably" or "perhaps" or "I'm not sure, but..." - in Bouffon you must know. Even if you don't know you must know. You make it up, you exaggerate, and you have fun to do it. If you are unsure about your bastard then the audience is unsure about them and it doesn't work.
However, Philippe must have seen something in my version of Mohammed, because as I went to sit down he said: "We will see you do this bastard again, but you will have more fun." So I'll get another chance to destroy Mohammed and next time I'll do it properly. Yes! (I've also got a couple of other bastards up my sleeve who I'd love to have a crack at but we'll see how we go.)
The person up after me was parodying this super-wealthy super-upper-class English family that they know. And there were some absolutely great moments in what they did. First of all she made these people very vivid for us all in the way she described and mocked them - the better you know something the easier it is to destroy it. And they were also the perfect candidates for Bouffon bastards. On top of that, she had a lot of fun doing it and that really is the key thing. She ended up being on the floor working for a really long time because she was doing so well, and even moved away from those bastards on to a whole new set of bastards from her time at an English girls' boarding school. Very funny. And I could see her picking up on the mistakes I'd made when I did it and taking on the notes Philippe had given me, and it made a lot of sense watching her do it.
So this bastard work took up the whole lesson today, but it was really good for us all to get a bit clearer on what exactly this mocking of the bastard thing is all about. From my understanding of it though this is only one layer of the work: in a Bouffon performance I think the actor is supposed to combine the work with the Swamp people and their deformities with this bastard work - so it becomes the Swamp person mocking the bastard, not the actor. What stays the same is the joy of the performer, as this is the crucial element - without it the performance is just nasty and mean and vulgar with no beauty to it at all. And if the actor can pull off this combination well then I imagine Bouffon can be painfully and devastatingly funny. We've already seen that each component by itself can be hilarious, so I can't wait to see both in action.
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