Day Thirteen

Today was a day of mocking in Philippe's class - the exercise we spent the entire class on was having one person from class stand up and be interviewed by Philippe as themselves, while others from the class got up beside them and tried to have fun to mock that person through imitating and parodying what they did. Overall it was a pretty funny class.

The first person to go up was Kura, and she turned out to be quite good fodder for parodying. The first person to get up to parody her didn't last very long because they weren't having enough (or I would suggest any) fun with their mocking, and so Philippe asked them to sit down. From there though, a couple of people were very entertaining with Kura as their subject matter. One person was good fun to watch and was clearly having a good time, but their parody really had very little to do with Kura and what she was doing, so the success of her parody was limited, Philippe said: "You have good fun, and we like you. But what you do means nothing. Nothing! It is not parody. But we like you."

The other person mocking Kura was great. She had great fun with Kura's gestures and her voice, taking subtle little moments or habits and twisting them or exaggerating them until they became a sort of in-joke between us, and twisting Kura's words ever so slightly and taking a bit of liberty with what Kura really said to make it ridiculous. There were some absolutely hilarious moments. The key to it seemed to be the way that she really took it quite far and in some ways was quite nasty, but because of the pleasure she took in the mocking it never seemed mean-spirited or nasty. She made it look easy (which I soon found out it isn't).

So then I got up to mock the second person, an English woman called Sophie who I feel I know reasonably well and also is quite good for taking the piss out of (she wouldn't mind me saying that). But it was not as easy as I had thought it might be. I found that when I was up there I became too focused on imitating Sophie properly and doing a good job of the impersonation and generally getting it right. Dumb. I had no real fun or play in what I was doing and I didn't take joy to be nasty about her. The key ingredient and I just forgot it. And Philippe let me know. Suffice to say I was sitting down again relatively quickly.

The rest of the class passed in a similar fashion, with about six different people being mocked in the end and nearly everyone in the class having a go at the mocking. There were some good moments from quite a few people, but nobody that I felt really stood out -except the same girl who did Kura really well: she got up again to parody someone else and it was the same story again. She had everyone in hysterics and just seemed to find the pleasure in the exercise extremely easily while also doing a really good job of the impersonation. It was great to watch.

The relevance of this exercise to other Bouffon work was pretty clear I think (a nice contrast to Monday and Tuesday's classes). This parody is the same thing the Bouffon do to the bastards, just on a smaller scale. Philippe summed it up with: "Your parody is good, but we don't hate Kura so the nastiness only goes so far. With a bastard the parody is one hundred times more. When a Bouffon does parody of bastard, the bastard walks in and sees the parody of themself and dies of heart attack."

I spent the afternoon after class with my Auto Cours group locking down exactly what we're going to do on Friday and planning all the logistical side of our performance. What we're trying to do is really ambitious and I really like that. We're all committed to working hard on it though, and we all seem to have fun with our idea so I think it could be really good. We'll have another rehearsal tomorrow afternoon and then maybe Friday morning before we perform on Friday. Exciting. Even if we get banged off straight away by Philippe I don't mind so much, because at least this week I feel we've worked as hard as we could on it and it will be the best we can do in the time provided - work that at least we can be proud of doing even if it fails. Hopefully it won't though. Hopefully we'll be great. Time will tell.