Bouffon across ze channel

Been a few days since the last blog.
I was originally going to try and blog almost every day but it has become obvious to me that this is not a good idea. Firstly it puts undue pressure on me to have lots of interesting things to say and secondly I think my learning is deeper when I allow myself to absorb Philippe's teaching by just being there in class, watching, listening and experimenting in the space rather than frantically scribbling notes trying to grasp at an understanding. I think this was what he was getting at when he told me to stop writing during the clown module. It means my focus is elsewhere and not in the moment.

I do have something that I think is worth saying at the moment though.

I was in London last weekend.
On a trip.
2 of our classmates were performing at Sandra's Sunday Dinner Club in Bethnal Green.
It was a really strange moment to see my classmates up there with crippled bodies, dirty faces and blackened teeth. We see it everyday in class but here are a room of strangers, yes some support from 5 or 6 Gaulie-ites but thats it in a room of 50-odd.
Out comes Mia holding a London map in her "good" arm and muttering about "De Beyeg Clok. De Beyeg Ben" and then Ling appears with a plastic bag and an umbrella. I'm not going to tell you what happened in the performance, there was certainly a lot of laughter and the piece needs work but Ling and Mia seem to play well together.
For the purpose of this blog I'm more interested in th audiences reaction. As far as I could gauge, it was a mixture of confusion, joy and "what the fuck is this".
It was definitely challenging and some of the laughs were out of confusion but if you could take these 2 actors who play beautifully together, and if they can really find the spirit of the outcast and downtrodden and have something to say, and they say it in a beautiful way then wow, this could be really powerful stuff. Magical stuff. Otherworldly stuff. Stuff that can only be conceived in the games of players, born on stage, to live in the imaginations of the audience and that for me is where this work is moving towards. Tentative steps out of school. A shuffle becomes a limp, becomes a dance. A grunt that turns into a song. An inspired idea becomes art.

These beautiful outcasts from another time, from another world, a higher, more beautiful world come to deliver messages to the audiences of now.

And how can they fail to be beautiful for as Philippe says Galileo is a friend of the bouffon, Mozart, Da Vinci, the scientists and artists deemed heretical or unnatural are the bouffons allies.
In the maestro's words, "Ze Bouffon he 'as ze beauty of ze devil."