End of day one of Bouffons at Gaulier

I got a bit of a break today.

Well, I say break. I took some chances today and was rewarded by some concerted stage time – a little personal workshop for a few minutes.

Which, I felt, was nice of Philippe. For the first time, I felt seen.

I feel like maybe I was partly given this chance because I couldn’t participate on Friday due to my fall. Maybe not, but I did mention that I had injured myself and couldn’t take part to Philippe after the day on Friday.

Whatever the reason, I had some time on stage today to show at least something I could do. In this case, sing.

The exercise I’d gone up for was to do a “parody” of someone – a satirical impression.

I couldn’t think of anyone I regularly do impressions of off the top of my head. The only person that came to mind that might be easy was Boris Johnson. As nobody else was volunteering to get into the spotlight, I decided to take the plunge.

What was the worst that could happen? After having taken a physical Big Leap on Friday that hurt my back so much I’ve been in pain the whole weekend, the prospect of being sent off stage for being boring didn’t seem that big a deal.

I came on stage with the best Boris impression that I could manage with zero practice. Philippe stopped me almost immediately.

To the audience, he asked “Is he lovable? Do we love him?”

No.

A strange feedback you might think, Boris Johnson is hardly lovable. But this isn’t the point of the comment.

One teaching that has come up again and again here is that “We should love you (the actor) even if we don’t love the character.”

In parody, as well, you’re not “playing the character”, you are imitating them to make fun of them. So I first needed to come on stage as myself (and be lovable in the process) and then go into the imitation.

I was given a second chance. Which, I think, is the first second chance I’ve gotten on this course!

Why did I get it? Partly because second chances were being given out today. And partly because I asked for one.

My second try was a bit better. I tried to come on stage “as me.” And I introduced my imitation of Boris. And did the impression for a while.

But he stopped me again.

And so began my little personal workshop section.

In it, he got me to sit on the chair. He asked me things about Scotland (many things here at Gaulier seem to be related to our countries, questions are often directed at where we come from).

Philippe asked me a bunch of questions. Then he got me to sing a traditional Scottish song.

Which I did.

And the song went down well. I guess that shouldn’t be too surprising to me.

I know that I can access pleasure when I sing. I can’t always do it on stage at the drop of a hat. But when I’ve been given the space to become comfortable – which I had here – I can sing in such a way that everything else falls away for me.

In fact, it’s singing that made me take up performance in the first place. Years ago, I was playing saxophone in a band. One day, I offered to sing one of the songs. And I remember the rest of the band being surprised by my performance – “Alex can sing!” That started a chain of events that brought me to where I am now.

The trickiest thing is how to bring that quality of singing with pleasure into my speaking.

When I speak, Philippe told me, I am not lovable.

And I understand what he means by that.

When you come on stage, you have to feel like you are lovable to the audience.

This is hard.

Trying to access pleasure in your performance is one thing…

But feeling that people love you?

This is pretty difficult.

Because my tendency is to believe that people don’t like me. I know I’m not alone in that feeling. I don’t say it as a kind of “Oh poor Alex. Let’s pity him. He thinks people don’t like him.”

I mean it in a very practical sense. My brain has a tendency to continually search for evidence that the people I’m interacting with don’t like me. Again, I don’t think I’m unique in this regard – this is, I believe, quite common.

Even when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary – i.e. that people maybe do like me – my brain still manages to find that one piece of “strong evidence” that shows that really they dislike me. And I have to fight that feeling continually – this is exhausting and I frequently lose the battle with my own thoughts and end up fretting over the feeling that I am disliked.

The challenge is that, if the prerequisite for giving a great performance is that you both have to have pleasure in your performance AND believe that the audience loves you… well, that’s bloody difficult.

And, of course, you have to be Good on top of that (by which I mean Not Boring).

The song I sang today, I recognize, capitalized on one of my strengths. It was a slow, sad, mournful song. Which are the types that I tend to do well at. Because, of all of the emotions, sadness is the one I tend to have the readiest access to most often. It’s not that I’m always sad, but I spend more time there than anywhere else at this point in my life.

This is good, I think. It makes sense to lean into your strengths in a performance.

It’s just that we don’t all feel the same amount of pleasure, lovability and not-boringness for all the ranges of human emotion and activity we can show on stage.

When I access anger, I’m like a basket of furious cats that have burst into flame, that fizzles out as quickly as it started.

When I’m happy, it’s a fleeting, low-level happiness that doesn’t project much further than beyond my own toes… i.e. it’s easy for you to miss it when I’m happy.

And so on with other emotions…

But what we can say is that I made a move today. I took a leap.

And that’s got to be worth something.