Day Three

Philippe's class started today with him giving us our provocation for Auto Cours on Friday (Friday is the day that every student presents the work they have created and rehearsed within a group during the week based on a provocation, and this is called Auto Cours). He gave us a Bouffon script of a scene between God and Adam where they are figuring out what Woman should be like. It's very vulgar and pretty funny. In groups of whatever size we choose we are to take however much text we like and work on it and present it in a way that we are taking joy in being nasty. It's pretty open ended. Taylor and I are going to work together this week and we aren't entirely sure what we're going to do.

Then straight into work. We started today with work on 'the bastards'. Philippe had someone get up and describe to us, taking great pleasure in being nasty, a particular bastard they know of within their own life. It was a pretty strange, and I think quite difficult, exercise. The idea is not to play the bastard, but to take joy in mocking them. You might imitate or play a certain accentuated quality of theirs for a bit, but you always return to yourself and your own pleasure. Nobody was particularly successful at this exercise. Philippe offered some interesting insights into why this was and into the right way to mock a bastard.

"If you are too stiff with the person you mock, then it is no fun. The fun is what gives the quality of the parody, not your clever idea."
"You are too much serious. We are in sociology class."
"You don't start so nasty. We don't like you then. We appreciate the fun with which you little by little destroy your bastard."
"We buy your spirit, not your bastard."

Someone asked Philippe if it helped you to pick a bastard who is someone you are personally oppressed by, someone you really hate. His reply was really fantastic:
"Stop hating. Have fun. Mock. It is much too painful to hate. It is much more terrible to destroy with mocking. In a way, the mocking is after hate. It relieves the pressure of hate."

Then we went on to working on our deformity of the day: the Fat Belly. Same nubs for arms, same legs tied together, but this time with a really big fat belly that leads you wherever you go. Similar procedure as with the previous deformities; five or so people go up as a group and work through a series of provocations from Philippe, as a group and individually. I got up in the second lot of people, and I immediately felt more comfortable in this character than in the hunchback. First thing we had to do was as a group do a really sexy dance to entice the audience. I had a wee bit of success here, and found a couple of moments of real fun and connection with the audience, and there was a lot of fun to be had with sexily waving your nubs and shaking your belly with all the other freaks. Then individual work: start with the sexy dance for the audience and then when the music lowers you go into a horrible fish-sellers voice trying to sell your fish to the audience while continuing your sexy dance. Again I did ok with my sexy dance - perhaps it was a bit less fun and a bit more self-conscious than when I did it with the group - but it was ok. Then I went into my fish-seller's voice and I really just tried to go for it - holding back at all seems to be the one thing you really can't afford to do in Bouffon. It was ok, but not great. After about 20 seconds Philippe stopped me and told me "Too much force. It was very strong, but we don't see your fun. Not excellent." Oh well, I actually didn't mind that and I agreed with him. And I think I cared less about failing than I did yesterday which is good: I gave it a good go and it wasn't great and I knew it, move on.

I'm finding that my tendency when things aren't going great is to push really hard and try to force myself to have fun and take pleasure in the work and be funny. Hmmmmm... seems counter-productive. Like I said, caring less is a good first step for me, but I need to find a way to just let go and enjoy myself. Sounds easy, right?

After school Taylor and I went up to a park behind the train station in Etampes to practise our Auto Cours for a bit. It was pretty funny and we didn't really know what we were doing - especially funny when people walked through the park and we didn't realise they were there until they were about 10 meters away, us on top of one another with nubs for arms thrusting and grinding and generally being disgusting and looking ridiculous. Oh well, it's all in the name of art...