The washing machine

"Pour diner ce soir" Christine tells me, Soup de chouflour est broccoli est crevettes de chinois.
I love their soup especially on this cold January night but the thought of eating chinese ties concerns me.
Crevettes?
Oui. Regarde.
She opens the fridge and instead of revealing a plastic tub of sweet and sour neckwear she shows me an ornate dish full of spicy deep fried prawns.
Ah, france.
ces't foridable.
She tells me that Francois is unwell , that he has been chewing too much gum and has upset his stomach. The 2 untouched baguttes on the worktop testify to this fact. He normally eats about 2/3rds of a baguette in an evening so if they are untouched it must be serious.
Christine opens a bottle of red "from the loire" she says "near where francois grew up.
I pour her a large glass and me a larger one, take a glug and then top it back up again.
I've been looking forward to this.
I'm very lost at the moment.

Very lost.

I have no idea what acting or theatre are anymore.
I explained it this way to a friend earlier.
"It's like all my ideas are in a tumble dryer and I can hear them rolling over one another as the dryer spins but when i open the dryer there is nothing inside, so i close the door and i hear the cycle start again."
And if that makes no sense to you now, then I'm not sure it did to him either but I think what I'm trying to get at is that averything is being turned on its head, spun around and around and all I know is that I don't know anymore.
Wow what a place to be!
My ideas of theatre are constantly being challenged by the wonders of the classroom.

It's like the discovery that the world isn't flat, I don't know what to do, it's all new territory.
And it occurs to me that we all have a couple of choices, either retreat back into our little villages ignoring this new discovery or forge our world and ourselves a new in the light of the discovery.

A new world. A dream world where the music of the wind dances in the chimes.
A world where conventional acting and convential theatre are just that, conventional.
Conventional; ordinary, the accepted form, general consent.

Conventional acting, the obvious route or as Philippe so concisely put it today, "anybody can do that. Even my sister could do that."

Yes I accept that I am a conventional actor.

I don't want to be conventional anymore.
I want to be great.
I want to be special.
I want to be beautiful.
I want to be Free.
Beautifully free.

Right now my conventional ideas are tumbling in the drum of a dryer.
Actually no, not a dryer, a washing machine and not just my ideas, my whole being.
I'm being cleaned, rinsed, and bleached and when the door opens I will be cleansed of the dirt of convention.

I will climb out anew, discover my wings and soar.

I have every faith that this will happen.

Let's go Monsieur Gaulier
Where will you lead us?
What will we discover?
What winds will chime in us?
What will spark our individual poetry?
What fires will ignite our freedom?
What games will we play?
What rhythms will we play with?
What lands will we dream?

So many questions?

And for now I happy to be disorientated, tumbling round and round knocking my head on the drum, getting bruised and battered as the machine washes me.

It's good to be lost.

For only when we are lost can we truly find our way.