A reflection on the whole course of Le Jeu at Gaulier.

Today, I’m heading into week 3 here at Gaulier. And that means we’re moving onto a second of the 2-week courses: Bouffons

So before my brain gets blasted with a new firehose of teaching, it makes sense to reflect a little on what I’ve learned from Le Jeu.

It’s a strange course.

In many other courses in this world, you could summarize them by listing the “learning outcomes” or the topics you covered each day… perhaps by reading each topic off the top of your detailed, printed handout.

This is not applicable here. And that’s a good thing.

It’s not just that this is a very practical course – it’s quite practical but not as much as others… there’s a lot of sitting around. It’s that overtheorizing here is sort of irrelevant and could even be damaging. The more you theorize about the learning, the less you “feel it.” As performance is very much about feeling your way through it, this is important.

But some people have asked me “What have you learned in the course so far?”

So I’ll tell you what I tell them.

I feel like the underlying goals of the training here at Gaulier (in Le Jeu at least) are:

* To raise the aesthetic level of the whole class.
* To teach both the audience and the performer to be able to *feel* when their performance is going badly.
* To, slowly, develop our instincts as performers that when what we are doing on stage is not working, we “make it better.” This could mean doubling down on our idea, switching up our idea completely, “going big”, committing fully to what we are doing, or many other options. This is the opposite of our natural tendency, which is to shy away when things aren’t going well.

How does the training “raise the aesthetic level of the class”?

I think the core method is the way that Philippe gets us in the audience to “cast judgement” on our fellow classmates.

Gaulier is well known across the world for insulting people. But just to say that he insults people is not fully representing the purpose of those insults. It’s not like Simon Cowell insulting contestants on XFactor (At least, I don’t think so. I don’t watch that program).

Philippe almost always turns the insults around to us in the audience in a dialogue.

Someone will give a performance. And he’ll stop it abruptly by banging his drum.

He turns to us in the audience and asks us something like “When this actor walks across the stage. Do we look at them and say. ‘Ahhh they are so elegant and beautiful. I want to take them home to my parents.’? Or do they look like an old policeman going to buy donuts?”

I made that insult up. His are funnier (I’ll need to remember to write a few down during class).

The point is that he has given us, in the audience, two options. And Philippe has a very skilful way of looking at the actor, seeing the way they speak or move, and coming up with a funny, “comedy roast”-style insult that exactly describes what is not working about their performance in that particular moment.

Of the two options, we usually pick the insult. Because it is truer.

And so he sends that actor off stage. Their chance is gone.

This can seem pretty harsh. But, as students, it means we get a few things that develop our own aesthetic understanding:

* We see immediately when something the actor does isn’t working.
* We get a strong, and usually funny, description of what isn’t working.
* We are the ones to pass judgement on the actor, so we are actively involved in that judgement.
* We see that the “punishment” for not getting it right is quick, decisive, and strong – get off stage.

What’s the effect this has had over the course of 2 weeks?

There are various times when an actor has done something on stage, and I have thought something like “This performance is boring me.” or “They are speaking too quietly.” or “They said that line in a clumsy way.” or “The actor isn’t feeling pleasure.”

At the start of the course, I probably wouldn’t have thought that. But the training is developing my sense of what is working.

There are a whole host of markers that can “go wrong” in an actor’s performance. And the teaching method here trains us to recognize when that is happening.

What are those markers of things that can go wrong in a performance?

Here are a few of the “topics” (for want of a better word) that we have covered:

* Major vs minor. Who has the attention of the audience in any moment?
* Passing the Major to another person on stage (at the start of the course, this was by throwing a ball to the other person).
* Complicité. How the actors are working together.
* Pleasure. When the actor feels pleasure about their performance.
* Rhythm and tension. How the actor moves and speaks, and playing with contrasts when there is more than one actor.
* Speaking. Loudly enough so the people at the back of the huge theatre can hear, but with grace, elegance, and power.
* Fixed point. A moment of stillness amid the movement so the audience can see you.
* Always being ready to leap into action with “something wonderful”.
* The Impulse. The energy from which great things happen (I reckon a whole blog on the impulse is necessary).

And there are certainly more. Maybe I’ll come back and add to this list if I think of any subsequently.

For now, we’re on to Bouffon’s!