Day Two

Started the day again with movement class led by Carlo. Lots of stretches and and moving around the room to begin with, moving into more games and a bit of singing to round it all out. We sing a song in rounds which has a really cool melody, and the words are: "I like your eyes when you lie to me / I like your voice when you say my name / But they make me crazy are your funny shoes / When you walk I'm dizzy and I want to die with you." It's great. I don't know what's going on in Carlo's class 100% of the time, or what the exact aim of any given exercise or game may be, but it's always fun and light-hearted and easy enough to go along with and enjoy. And I figure that's maybe enough by itself.

Class with Philippe today began with him talking us through some more history/theory of Bouffon and giving us examples of artists who work in the realm of Bouffon who we might want to look up. This was very interesting, but I think I missed quite a bit of it as he can be quite hard to decipher in the way he speaks and unlike the others I haven't gotten used to it yet. We then straight into working on the Hunchback (yesterday's character was the Dwarf, I found out). Philippe had one actor get up on the floor and then had their arms removed again, legs tied together at the knees, a really large hump put on their back, covered in lots of clothes, and then a stick held over their neck by two others so they can't stand up straight ("If costume is comfortable, then is not hunchback"). The hunchback must also always smile, as "God loves the happy people, the optimists". He then had the person do several impersonations along similar lines as what we did as dwarves yesterday, with varying degrees of humour and success. Some of the best advice he gave was: "You don't have to be natural. Bouffon is not natural. You find something different, and we love you in a special way."

Then it was time to get seven hunchbacks up in a line to work, so I got up in the first group. I got all dressed and made up as a hunchback, and dear lord was it uncomfortable. Then, one by one, we worked through more of Philippe's provocations, getting banged off by his drum whenever we were doing badly. First up, the catwalk model. I did my walk and made it back without much response from the audience, before being told by Philippe: "Is not charming enough. Not excellent at all." Next the singer: I sang Hero by Enrique Iglesias and got some good response initially from the audience and managed to keep singing for about  30 seconds, but was eventually banged off because I wasn't smiling and I stopped having fun with it. Next up is an important director having an artistic crisis: I got three words out and was banged off - completely wrong. Last chance to impress was a snob playing golf: I lasted a little while before being banged off, but I could tell that it was never really going anywhere. I wasn't really taking any pleasure in the mocking I was just pushing too hard and trying to avoid Philippe's drum. No good.

Philippe then went down the line of the seven of us and, based on our performances so far and how much the audience liked us, asked people in the audience whether they would save us or kill us. Unsurprisingly, I think five out of seven of us were killed. It sounds kind of brutal when I write it down like this, but it all happens in a spirit of fun and playing a game that makes it easier to take being bad. It's much better to be bad than to be boring at any rate. When someone does a bad performance Philippe will often take great pleasure in turning the onus of letting you know you were bad onto one of your fellow classmates. He'll turn to someone and ask a very loaded and usually very creative question like: "So, did we think he was fantastic? Did we say 'yes we love you, please come and play again'? Or did we think he was more like a primary school teacher in a neighbourhood of Muslims?" A little offensive maybe, but that's kind of the point of Bouffon. And it does it in a way where everyone knows the answer anyway and Philippe is taking delight from his mockery.

Then we had two more lots of hunchbacks up before the end of the day. Again, it's so blatantly obvious as an audience member when something is working and when something isn't, but I'm still having real trouble pinpointing why it is. And I think it's a really individualised thing that you have to find for yourself by doing it, and you can't just watch and copy what someone else does. It all comes down to the joy and the delight that the actor has within the mockery, because without that it's just kind of mean and hollow (and often boring). I definitely haven't experienced it for myself yet so my goal is to stop pushing and trying to force it to happen and just try and enjoy myself when I work. Of course, it can be a pretty unnatural and terrifying environment when you're up on the floor that isn't always conducive to just 'having fun' but I suppose it's our job to figure out how to do that.

So all in all a pretty difficult first couple of days and I still don't really know what I'm doing at all. It's a very bizarre and unpleasant felling to be up on the floor and realise you have literally nothing to offer and have no idea of how to make something work. And to know that you're supposed to be funny, but that for whatever reason you just aren't. Oh well, I've got three weeks to figure that out. Onwards and upwards.