Day 2 of Week 2 of Le Jeu at Gaulier

A comment from a fellow classmate made me wonder today: How does feeling “pleasure” on stage (a core part, if not THE core part of Gaulier’s teaching) go along with being – for want of a better word – authentic…

Or as I usually think of it “turning up as you are.”

One of the most useful teachings I’ve had regarding clowning came from my first clown teacher, Holly Stoppit.

In the first class I did with her, she said something like “Do clowning as you are. If you are tired, do your clowning with that tiredness. If you are angry, bring that anger to your clowning.”

This is a core part of clowning for me. It means clowning, for me, is about being honest.

Here at Gaulier, there is a lot of focus on feeling pleasure with the things that you are doing. That any action, line of dialogue, or other thing you do on stage should come from a place where you, as an actor, are enjoying doing it.

And this is useful.

It is a good approach, I think.

It sets the bar high for any form of performance. Using the barometer of pleasure, you can, I expect, start to cut the dead wood from your performance by ruthlessly removing the parts where you feel like “meh, this section is a bit boring.”

But what if you’re not feeling that pleasure?

One thing I notice – which was inevitable – is that my energy and is going up and down each day. This is a long course, 6 weeks, and if you were doing courses during the year (which I’m thinking about maybe) you are coming at your performance from different directions every day and week.

This year, in 2022, I have christened the year “Alex’s Year of Mental Health.”

As part of that, I have started to tune in to how my energy and mental state are on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis – not in much of a structured way, I just mean I’m paying attention to my mental state.

And there are plenty of days in my life when I’m “just not feeling it.”

When my energy and will are drained.

When I don’t feel that I can give that “pleasure” as a human being.

When I will watch art produced by other people rather than creating it myself, often, because it is on those days I need someone else’s creative pleasure to feed me… because I’m drained of it myself.

For example, on days when I’m particularly low I’ve often found myself watching comedy clips on YouTube back to back. Why? Because they give my brain the injection of the chemicals it needs (I think dopamine from my research, but I’m no expert) to not feel like shit.

On such days, it’s hard to provide that pleasure from yourself.

It’s on those days when you say to yourself “I’ll just get through today.”

So how do you bring pleasure to your performance when you don’t feel pleasure on a particular day?

I have a feeling I know what Gaulier would say…

I feel he might say something like “Your audience is paying 40 Euros a ticket. You should give them your money back. You can’t say that you are just not feeling like it today. You are an actor.”

And, if that is what he would say, it’s true.

We do have to perform on days when we are not feeling it. Whether as actors or as anything else.

But it is hard when the thing you are being asked to bring is “how you feel on stage” (the pleasure) rather than “technique.”

In the past, on those days when I’m just not feeling it I have often found it useful to lean into the technique.

Sure, technique-driven performance isn’t as dynamic and interesting (e.g. improv comedy scenes where you just make “the right” moves most of the time and leave the more creative stuff to the other actors on that day). But it gets you through on those days when you lack the pleasure to play fully.

But maybe it makes sense to just “turn up as you are” and find something… let’s call it pleasure, but perhaps the word itself is unhelpful… that we can lean into on those difficult days.

I have no clear conclusive answer on this day.

Let’s just call this post an opening of the discussion with myself.