Back into it today with an extremely confusing and difficult class with Philippe where nobody who got up to work really experienced any great degree of success. Everybody seemed to really struggle with the exercises and not really know what they were meant to be doing. It was the first day I've been here that I haven't gotten up on the floor to work, but even just sitting and watching was confusing enough for me.
We'd been asked to bring in costume elements to work with today, but a bunch of people (myself included) had sort of misunderstood what we were supposed to be bringing and so couldn't really get up. What Philippe wanted us to have was a costume for a 'modern Bouffon': someone unemployed, or homeless, or a refugee, or a prostitute, or a transvestite, etc etc. The modern day equivalent of all the hunchbacks and whatnot - anyone at whom the finger of scorn has been pointed. A couple of people had brought the wrong kind of stuff (one guy was just dressed as a Muslim and another girl wanted to be a bear), so it wasn't really going to work and they had to sit down.
So Philippe started working people in groups of three. They would go and stand in a huddle right upstage while someone from the class kicked and hit them while the rest of the class threw tennis balls at them - this was very good fun - to get the whole outcast sort of thing going I suppose. Philippe would then put on some music, and very slowly they were to come out of their huddle and come towards us and then start into this piece of text that Philippe had us all memorise. The first group was pretty bad at this. Philippe said to them: "You start to break our balls with 'my character is so miserable, I am so sad' - the children of God they are happy. You look as if you apologise. You are not proud to be who you are. Horrible."
So after not too long they sat down and another group had a go, with pretty similar results. It seemed like nobody really knew what kind of qualities of performance we were supposed to be hitting, or what this particular Bouffon was all about. I think it made it hard that the subject matter and text that they had to use wasn't in and of itself funny, and also possibly just the mere act of having to use text might have tripped some people up. So much of the Bouffon work we've done up til now has been improvised and has been aimed at being very obviously funny, that this work was very confusing and I felt like we didn't really know how to do it.
I think it was all aimed at finding the beauty particular to each person within their Bouffon, but nobody really was able to find it because nobody could figure out what that meant within this particular exercise. There was one moment of a girl laughing as her Bouffon that everyone agreed was beautiful, and that we saw the beauty of the actor in this moment. It was a short moment though, and wasn't a funny or vulgar moment like I would normally associate with Bouffon either, so that was a bit confusing. Someone then asked of Philippe "When you laugh as a Bouffon, why are you laughing? Are you laughing at the audience or with us or at something else?" To which Philippe replied: "Why was she laughing? We don't know. As an audience when we don't know, we are happy." I think it makes sense to me but I'm still figuring it out.
All in all a very confusing day, and I'm hoping to find a costume for tomorrow that will mean I can get up and work and hopefully figure it out by doing (or at least try to).
Before class ended Philippe did offer what I thought was a wee gem when he critiqued someone's work for them being too self-conscious and worried about looking bad: "If you are a bit ashamed you cannot play on the stage. You have to be beautiful and happy in your shoes."
PS - we got our next Auto Cours text today as well: it's a scen between the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist's mother thirty years after their sons have died. On first reading I had no idea what we were going to do with it and was totally uninspired, but Taylor and I have teamed up with two other people and now have a pretty outrageous idea with lots of possible material to work on (it involves the two women undergoing various gynecological procedures at the hands of two priests - it's better than it sounds, I promise). We even did a couple of hours of rehearsal. Already feeling much better about this week's Auto Cours.
No comments:
Post a Comment