A little break....

It is good to be out of Paris for awhile. Miraculously, I made it to Christmas without packing my bags and fleeing to southeast Asia (I seriously considered it at one point).

Now I am in Greece eating delicious food, sleeping well (and taking naps), and frankly not doing much of anything. Oh but yoga. It feels good to me to be doing yoga every day again. And eating foods that taste good. I feel so much more free in my body this way, more alive. It is good to be crazed. When you are not crazed any more, you realize how good it is not to be crazed. Maybe, at last, I will learn to stop being crazed.

I doubt it.

Anyways, I will be on holiday until January 8th. Greece and then Turkey. Not so bad. The Parthenon, the Eye of Sophia...

Not so bad at all.

A bientot, Monsieur le Professeur!

Aphorisms for the Theater, from Myself with special thanks to M. Prof for three months of falling on my ass.

A few reflections on my first three months with Monsieur le Professeur:

Lesson: It is horrible when actors push to be good.

Lesson: It is beautiful when an actor is surprising.
Lesson: An actor can be full of surprises if they are free to play.
Lesson: Play comes out of a game between the actors and the audience.

Lesson: It is horrible when I have an idea before I go onstage.
Lesson: When I go onstage with no idea but trying to play a game, people love it.

Lesson: Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never GO ON THE STAGE AND TRY TO BE EMOTIONAL. EVERYONE WANTS TO SLAP ME WHEN I DO THIS.

Lesson: People are more beautiful, more alive, when they are in the shit. A great actor, so confident, goes onstage and then drops an expensive prop into the pit orchestra. Hah! Their face lights up like a Christmas tree because they are in the shit.

Lesson: Really playing a game puts actors in and out of the shit all of the time. Pretending to play a game, no matter how convincing your pretend is, bores everybody. The actors have to really play.

Lesson: When I go on the stage and pretend to be in the shit, I am horrible. When I go on the stage and am playing a game and happen to fall in the shit, I am alive.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAA

SON OF A BITCH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

(te he he) AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

(Burble burble burble) AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

(oink oink oink) AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMUTHAFUCKA

I know I can do this! I feel inside myself that I am two thousand percent capable of this

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA (SHMerrrrrrr)
It JUST
SO
HAPPENS
THAT EVERY TIME I TRY TO DO SOMETHING

MMMMMMMMMMMaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

IT IS LIKE I AM TAKING A BIG SHIT!!!!!!!!!!

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Oh god I can still smell the shits I took last week.
They are wafting through Monmartre all the way from Sceaux.

But GOD DAMN IT
I TELL YOU
I TELL YOU
I WILL FIND
MY WAY
AND WHEN I DO
I WILL BE BACK
AND UNTIL I DO
I WILL KEEP TAKING BIG
BIG
WHOPPING
STINKING
SHITS ON YOUR STAGE

You will have to change what you do.

On the stage.

Wearing a dress.

Worked on the scene for two weeks.

I say two lines. I am stopped.

"Who wants to slap Monsieur?"

Half the class raises their hands. Several are rather enthusiastic to slap me.
A girl approaches me and slaps me across the face hard.
Slap.
Begin the scene.
Slap Slap Slap.
Begin again.

"NO. YOU HAVE TO CHANGE WHAT YOU ARE DOING. YOU HAVE A SHITTY IDEA AND IT IS NOT WORKING. CHANGE"

I say a word.
NO
I open my mouth.
NO.
I say-
NO
I-
NO
I try to push throu-
NO NO NO NO NO
I start again-
NO! NO YOU ARE ABSOLOUTELY TERRIBLE. WE DO NOT SEE YOUR CHARM WE DO NOT SEE YOUR PLEASURE
I try aga-
NO.

(well when it isn't going well it isn't going well. No marvellous breakthrough today, apparently)

GET OFF THE STAGE IMMEDIATELY. LOO LOO BREAK EVERYONE.

No. I want to keep working!

WELL THE PROBLEM IS THAT I DON'T WANT TO KEEP WORKING WITH YOU. YOU BRING NOTHING. AND THE WAY YOU LOOK ON THIS STAGE, NO ONE IN THIS ROOM WILL HAVE AN ERECTION FOR SEVEN MONTHS.

(At this point I have thrown down my scarf like a gauntelet. Hardly out of anger but more for the sheer fun of refusing to get off of the stage)

YOU HAVE TO CHANGE WHAT YOU DO.
LOO LOO BREAK EVERYONE
BOOM.

Really Playing the Game

"You always have to look for the game. Having fun on the stage is important, yes. But if you stop looking for the game with your partners and jump around the stage like a boy scout or a little girl on christmas we think you are a top idiot.

The actor always looks for the game. And the actor is always trying to play the game. To really play the game, not to be a boy scout or primary school music teacher, or a priest who just realized they are a pedophile.
Bon."

What You Can Learn in the Immigrations Department.

I didn't go to class today.

No Monsieur Le Professeur.

No "HORRIBLE! Adios immediately!"

Even more heartbreaking, no: "Would we be sad if this man left the stage and did not come back for a long time, or am I drunk?"

Not today.

Today, another visit to the prefecture. And as a bonus, a visit to the sanitation and health department convenietly located about 40 minutes and a bus ride out of central Paris.

If I got on a train now, I could probably catch an hour of class. If anyone would admit me into the building. But frankly, I feel a little sick and exhausted. Maybe it is the compounded stress of the blackmailing process with my former landlord, the lease complications with my current landlord, the missing wire transfer of 4,000 dollars to one bank, the other bank which has rejected my wire transfers twice on their own fault and charged me for it and now refuses to accept responsibility, the month-long process of opening a french bank account that doesn't actually work and the person who has hung up on me twice when I called for assistance, or maybe it is the nagging notion that if the French government finds out certain things certain people WILL be put in jail and it is all over me, or maybe it has something to do with the series of older men who have taken advantage of my vulnerable situation to try and force me into horrible sexual relationships in exchange for help I think at this point I could snap one of these days and go on a rampage with these creeps, maybe it has some connection to the cellhpone company problems and University of Minnesota bill problems in the United States that refuse to resolve, no no no I cannot imagine why I feel a little tired and exhausted and am gaining weight eating junkfood all of the time because I am exhausted a little depressed and don't have energy for much of anything any longer and frankly after all of the problems that I have encountered I don't have much money to solve the problems that remain which are more than a few and now I need to find a job where do I find a job when my french is still so horrible and people still sound like automatic weapons when they talk to me not that I really have time or funds to sit down and study french right now some mornings I think I still have enough grant money that I could flee to southeast asia and fat chance anyone will be able to track me down any time soon well it could be worse I could still be living in Minneapolis hahahahaha Minneapolis jesus christ can't find a good baguette to save your life in that city at least here I have a fighting chance of eating a good baguette I also can go to the louvre and look at winged victory for hours at a time sure as hell beats the cherry spoon

En fait, I need a vacation. And what timing! I fly to Athens a week from tomorrow for a three week spell of rest. Not a moment too soon, to be sure.

But this blog entry had a title. And that title had a point. Did I begin this blog entry with the intention of a rant that wishes it were the last 80 pages of James Joyce's Ulysses no I did not but sometimes these things happen. The blog was getting a little sterile anyways. Dusting off those cobwebs.

Oh right. So what did you learn today at the immigration department Harlan? I learned the need for play. The need for the clown. Everyone in their jobs looks so bored, so unhappy. Where is the poetry, the imagination? And how essential I feel these things to be to the life. How can we go about our days being sterile, nasty, by the book? Well god knows I've done it. King of the Tight-Assed Overachievers, c'est moi. But as I get over myself a bit, as I watch my ego start to relax a bit, I am realizing how dead to life we can be in our daily routines.

And the clown who plays, the actors who play cannot be dead to life. A healthy individual or society must have this dangerous presence of play that flouts utility, that defies order and logic, that refuses to be part of a corporate logo. The naughty play of life, like animals fucking.

So today I learned in the Immigration Department, I learned anew, what it means to be dead to life. Oh how badly I wanted to make a joke. Frankly, I was a little preoccupied finding a way to cheat on my eye exam. I managed the latter without too much of the former, although the opposite would have been much more interesting.

Ugly Carpets, Shit Mind

Life doesn't move in logical order like a dusty mathematician in the grocery store.

Who taught me to think in this orderly way? Where did I learn to think in like this?

My way of thinking is not ordered. It is Pollock-like. My mind moves clumsily in literal landscapes.

School taught me to think like an accountant. Everything in its proper place. What a nightmare. From an early age: the boys in this line who like race cars and the girls in that line who like barbie and no one speaks in the library with the ugly carpets.

I hate these neat ordered things. Yet I try and make my life neat and ordered when it is contrary to the way I work. Everyone wonders why I am a tight-assed wreck. Well now it is clear. I never liked race cars.

What is that you say? I have explained nothing?

Well it is simple. If you have to sit in the library with ugly carpets and learn how to use the dewey decible system, you are destined to become a tight-assed person. It's like in Star Trek. If you are a Klingon, then you are destined to be evil and try to destroy the Starship Enterprise. Or if you are from the Middle East, you are destined to be portrayed by CNN as a person obsessed with bombs and hating the United States. You simply have no choice in the matter.

So you see. Cause, effect. Ugly library carpets, horrible mind. Thanks a lot Westmont Hilltop Elementary School library.


_________________
"Our lives teach us who we are. I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art...It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go."
~Salman Rushdie

Advice from M. Le Professeur

Not the Chinese upperclass.
We cannot have your horrible Chinese upperclass on stage.
Not because it is Chinese-
for sure, all upperclass people are boring
everywhere in the world.

So when you play the Greek, you must loose this terrible upperclass behavior.
It is boring.
Maybe for Hong Kong television your Chinese upperclass was good.
But it is not good for the theater.

Remember the last time we put water on your head?
This time I want you to go put a liter of water on your head.

Je vous demander

Monsieur Le Professeur,

This way of learning Greek Tragedy....everything is perfect. The actors must be godlike on the stage. Everything is the opposite of natural- lyrical, elegant, profound...

There is no smallness- characters are never arrogant or militant. They are first and always beautiful.

Why do we learn Greek Tragedy this way? Life is not like this. Life is not elegant and noble. It is dirty, nasty, horrible. All of the time. So why play with this world, the world of the Greek?
..........
If only to learn to make on the stage worlds that are not like life. A world where we do not recognize the pharmacist and the horrible hairdresser with her dog who poos on the floor of the salon. The actor has a special aura that allows the audience to dream around them. The audience dreams around them the dream of the Greek Tragedy. Another world.

But the audience's dream is destroyed if you enter on the stage with your shitty natural behavior. If you remind the audience that you are human with your voice that sounds like the rabbit fart. You know the rabbit that farts and you cannot hear it? It is just a little poof of air. Boeuf..like that. And then the rabbit thinks to itself "Oh I have farted. Now I am tired for the rest of the day." If you come on stage with this kind of voice the audience cannot love you. Or if you have the voice of the little cat whos balls were cut off "ooooOOOOoooh my ballls my balls oooOOOOOooooo." This stuff is the shitty stuff. Never can you be an actor if you have this kind of voice on the stage because it is too small. And if you are small on the stage. If you are nervous, if you have the shitty voice, if you bend your body and break your aura...for sure, never can you be an actor. Or maybe you are an actor in Manchester bed and breakfast. Everymorning you eat the outmeal. Horrible.

Finding Your Clown

We do our Greek Tragedy scene: Orestes killing Clytemnestra.


Le Prof: "Bon. What do we do with them? We don't know what to do with you. You are completely ridiculous. You both enter from the same side of the stage, you come running on in your dress and almost fall. We are all laughing. Not so good for the Greek tragedy. And in this male chorus, could this male chorus look more idiot? Who is the biggest idiot in the chorus? Anyone? "

(Oh shit. He's not even going to work with us.)

Le Prof: "Set up to do it again. We have to wait for my assisstant. While we are waiting, I tell you a story..."

(The assistant returns, he has something in his pocket)

Le Prof: "Give them to the actors."

(We are given clown noses. We put them on and restart the scene. People ask, "Do we play it straight or like clowns?" The prof ignores them and the scene begins)

Clytemnestra (Running on wearing a clown nose): What's that noise? Who is shouting?!

(The entire room explodes in laughter. I'm waiting to make my entrance as Orestes doubled over laughing at this ridiculous clytemnestra).

Clytemnestra: Get me an axe! We'll settle who is master here.
( I run on with my chorus, waving my ridiculous sword)
Orestes: You now! That man has need of nothing more.
Clytemnestra: Aegisthus! My love...
Orestes: Your love. Join him, wallow in his tomb. (This is too much. I forget the lines) Be...faithful...forever...even unto death!
Clytemnestra: Orestes, can you kill your mother? These breasts were wet with the milk that fed you.
Orestes: Pylades, can I kill my mother? (I cannot resist. I thrust my face into her breasts).
Pylades: Remember Apollo, remember the promises you made...(this guy seems to be such an idiot that everyone is howling with laughter).

BOOM
Le Prof: Alors. You have something fresh. It is like a horrible amateur theater done by the 16 year olds. This one cannot remember his lines. This one is a total idiot. This one has a tit problem. You know, at this age there are the boys who always have the tit problems? But it is something fresh, you bring something special to it.
Thank you for finding your clown during the Greek Tragedy workshop.
BOOM

Why Give a Shit about Pleasure?

Voila. A long rant about pleasure.
This is not a proper blog entry but this is me putting some thoughts together.
So it is a little indulgent, a little blahblahblah.
But I'll publish it anyways because I typed the whole thing in the "Publish Window" and I don't feel like storing it in MS Word and editing it later.
But I'm warning you...

Pleasure
Le Plaisir.
PLEASURE....
"Was he a symphony of pleasure on the stage? Or was he a pile of spaghetti left in the pressure cooker for seven years?"
"You must show us your plesaure on the pleasure pleasure pleasurepleasurepleasurepleasurepleasure..."

Why should ANYONE give a shit about whether actors have pleasure on the stage? I ask myself.

At this school, pleasure isn't important to actors, it is their reason for being. No matter how badly you execute an exercise, you can always count on a positive comment if you "have the good fun" "at least they did it with pleasure" etc.

And why this obsession with pleasure? Because indeed, this is an approach to theater based 100 percent on having pleasure. The pleasure to pretend you are a god and you are playing Greek tragedy. The pleasure to make people love you even though you pretend are an idiot and fail at everything you do voila the clown. The pleasure to play with emotions voila the melodrama. The pleasure to play with the elements the animals the colors voila the neutral mask. The pleasure to pretend you are behind a fourth wall playing Chekov....and on and on and on.

But why all of this talk about pleasure?
What the hell is the reason that we need to feel good on the stage? God knows sometimes we feel like shit in life. Why on the stage be obsessed with PLAISIR?

Alors. The search in mon ecole is not for a movement based theater. It is an impulse based theater. Techniques and ideologies are treated frivolously before the god of impulse. And voila--

When the actors on the stage are going through a private emotional crisis- or when the actors onstage have a constipation problem- or when they are trying to be right, polite, clean, etc... (ie they do not have pleasure) the impulse is dead. The only hope for a live impulse onstage is a broken prop or dropped line.

I think any actor or serious theatergoer can attest to this. When the people on the stage are having a good time, whether they are playing King Lear or Moliere, there is more life on the stage. When the actors are a little messy, a little unguarded, a little "I don't know what the fuck is going on and I'm okay with that," we are happy to watch them for several hours. It is the same for the actors. When you are playing a boring show and suddenly there is a crisis on the stage, the actors love to run out and improvise, to try and get the show out of the shit. Actors love to be in the shit this way. And the audience loves them much more when they are scrambling, confused, and playing like mad.

I did this production of "Alls Well That Ends Well." Lets face it, the only thing anyone remembers about the show was the performance where I accidentally poked an audience member in the tit with a sword. And for the next ten minutes the actors had to scramble to pull the show back together because, well, an audience member got poked in the tit and the audience was having a hard time dealing with it calmly. And the actors had to adjust like mad to this audience that was out of control. And so we all became more open, more alive, and we had a lot of fun trying to continue playing shakespeare after the whole show was put in the shit by yours truly.

Hm. Just one example. But how many fucking boring pieces of theater have I seen where I only can remember some disaster happening and all of the actors suddenly coming alive to try and deal with this disaster. But the question, of course, is how to be this alive all of the time? Well of course one can just stage a play and then regularly fuck it up, but that isn't the point. The point is that these instances of fuck up are moments when the impulse leaps open. The actors have to drop whatever they think they should be doing and work from their impulse. And of course most theater, which is carefully structured, would like to be a carefully structured container for the creative impulse that can shift now and then for the given evening. Of course it rarely is.

And this is where the pleasure comes. The raison d'être of this fucking pleasure...When the actors have pleasure to be on the stage playing with each other, with their audience. pretending they are this and that...when they have the pleasure, they are open to impulse. When they are fixed, trying to get it right, etc etc....the impulse is DEAD.

I have found this always to be true. HORRIBLE actors who have pleasure to do whatever the hell they are doing onstage- I always prefer watching them to excellent actors who trudge out on the stage and "do their job." And when I am on the stage having good fun, I may be really bad, but I am never as bad as when I am onstage trying to get it right. I can even bore myself to tears this way. Or I want to play aggressively. I come onstage with force and will. Ah well this is shitty too.

The Kingdom of Kristine

This month, Monsieur le professeur has a partner. She is teaching some of his classes each week. Her name is Kristine, and she is very good. Her approach is the opposite of M. le prof.

I trust her a lot. Partly because her way of working is more familiar and helps me synthesize M. le professeur's approach with the water I swam in for several years in the classical American rep approach. I also trust her because she obviously has integrity and calls me on all of my bullshit.

I really suck at her exercises. I am used to sucking by now. When I am complemented, I feel like I did something wrong. I think I am here to learn how to fail well sometimes.

Anyways.

The other day, we were doing a greek scene. Of course, my work was safe, boring, and completely uninteresting. I mean shit, I was bored. Bored like hell. And I was doing it...this isn't a good sign, in my experience. I know I'm young, but this is generally a sign that Mr Flop is in the room.

After we worked together for awhile, she said to me

"You know, you are realy good when you don't know what you are doing. But when you have an idea, an approach to something, you work in a straight line. And it is very bad. You freeze up. You do a lot of homework, don't you? Stop it. Don't work in straight lines. You are so much better when you have an abstract idea or no idea at all what you are trying to do."

Hm.

Case in point, senior year of training.
Everything I did was TERRIBLE. Especially the final semester. We had these scene presentations, this senior show. Oh god was I shit. From start to finish.

But during the winter, when I was drowning in work, we did Chekov. And everyone thought I was quite good. I was doing Treplev in the seagull and I was so busy that all I did was learn my lines and show up for rehearsal half dead from exhaustion. I didn't do a fucking shred of work. And I have never felt so completely lost on the stage. And somehow, it was oddly fun. I constantly felt like I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going.

Hm. I also recal during "Hedda Gabler" that there was a point where everything went to hell and the only way I could find to fix it was to make myself forget I was in play and go onto the stage having no idea what would happen. Then the piece suddenly had ease and rhythm....

I think certain approaches I learned to actually actually contradict with the way I think. I am a messy thinker. I think in patches. Like a quilt. I don't think in a linear a to z form. I think first over here, then over there, then over there. And I think if I approach theater in this way I will work in a way more authentic to my "way." God this is a liberating revelation. I feel that I have been knocking around if for weeks. As soon as she said that I try to work in straight lines and I shouldn't, it was like lightning struck me. DUH!!!!! I am a patchwork thinker. I should try being a patchwork actor.

What does that mean? Well, I have a few months more here to play around and to find out what that means. But thinking about it too much is obviously not at this point going to help.

The Beautiful World of the Greek

"In the Greek theater, everything is beautiful, perfect. The actor on the stage must be so beautiful that we could watch them on the stage for hours and then go home and dream about them.

The actor playing Greek is never scared. Their character is never scared. Destiny taps them on the head and then they go in that direction. If they show their fear, the gods say 'oooo! Look at the poor human who is scared!!!' So the character can never be scared in the Greek tragedy. Even when they are about to be murdered or kill themselves.

Greek theater is not very funny. Maybe we laugh a little bit at this servant who comes in and is an idiot. But the actor in Greek tragedy makes the audience dream. The audience dreams around the actor, the aura of the beautiful actor on the stage. So the actor can never bend their body and break their beautiful aura. The actor is tall and strong.

In this scene, Antigone comes onto the stage and tels Creon that she will not follow his command. We must see this Antigone and think that we can remmber her for 2,000 years after. If Antigone is militant, if she thinks she is a police woman, then she is not beautiful. She simply is saying no to Creon. And we watch her and think how beautiful she is. And Creon does not get angry with Antigone. He does not act facist. The actor playing Creon may have the pleasure to yell, to command. But first is the pleasure. On top of the pleasure the actor yells and has good fun to make everyone obey him. And the spectators think how powerful this beautiful man must be. And always in the head of Antigone and Creon is the game "Can I win? Can I beat Creon?" So you move on the stage with the tactic of the game, to beat each other. To be more powerful, more beautiful. And if you bend your body and wave like a facist, we will never remember you. If you are still, if you are beautiful, then the audience can dream around you. A lot of things can happen in their imagination around your aura."

Greek Tragedy

We begin the Greek Tragedy.

We start with that terrible lecoq exercise where we balance the stage. But of course, in this school, we cannot be bothered with technique at the expense of playing. As soon as possible, this painfully boring technique is transported into a lively game of cat and mouse. Thank god. I always hated this exercise anyways. At least now it is interesting.


PS.
Thank you, Lucinda, for several years of excellent voice work. I would be 100% fucked without it.

The End of Neutral Mask

The final day of our neutral mask workshop. Really?

We are Greek chorus. A chorus of orange and a chorus of fire.

I am the chorus leader. I take of my mask and begin to speak a text.

“MORE” Professeur screams.

I try and give more.

“HE IS NOT GIVING ENOUGH” He says again.

I retry.

“SHUT UP AN PUT ON YOUR MASK. WE DON’T WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU ANYMORE TODAY. YOU ARE TOO SMALL.”

Oh I was pissed off. Completely. What the fuck am I supposed to do, scream like Laurence Olivier as he hammed his way through Othello? Damn you Monsieur le Professeur. Ok so I didn’t say that in class. Which he probably would have preferred to me putting me back on my mask- which of course I did. But this guy doesn’t give much of a shit for obedience. I missed an opportunity to resist, to earn my right to stay on the stage. Shit!

I was being to natural he told me. Of course I was. I was connected to what I was saying, I was working simply, and god knows I was fucking boring to boot.

Well I don’t feel about writing about the rest of the workshop because other people did really good work and it pissed me off. Cheers.

The Bitch Comes Out of the Closet

I’m sitting in a café talking with an old professor and friend. We are talking about my experiences at school here in Paris and formerly in Minneapolis.

“You hated what I taught you but you didn’t have the balls to tell me then.”

I like people who talk to me this way. People who surprise me. It is always a pleasure to talk to them, especially when it is not a pleasure.

I think back to my life in Minnesota. I have a lot of time to think about things now. I think when I was in Minnesota I was unhappy to the degree that I invented 2000 different ways to occupy myself. And as a consequence, I really wasn’t able to think about how unhappy I was. This is a very effective tactic, as the last two generations of my family could tell you.

But that isn’t the point. The point is that I didn’t have the balls to come right out and say most of the things that I felt when I lived in Minnesota. This had less to do with dishonesty than with my incapacity to feel what I was feeling- uhm, to allow myself to feel what I was feeling.

So now I am here. Thinking and feeling a bit more. And you know what I am learning?

I am a really bitchy person! It’s quite funny actually. I am a naughty naughty bitch. And I spent many many years developing a sunny and positive personality in order to deflect the severely bitchy thoughts that enter my mind every 15 seconds or so.

One could accuse me, of course, of adapting to this school and this teacher by claiming/adapting a nasty attitude. As nastiness is the lifeblood of this school (the charming and revealing kind of nastiness, not the boring kind. The nastiness of the court jester or the wacked-out ascetic monk). Hm. No, that is not completely true. No, I’m just hearing every day the person in authority saying really naughty things.

And I find them quite funny. So when my mind whispers a very naughty thought in my ear, I no longer smooth it over or pretend not to hear it. When I see someone on the street and think they look like a complete idiot, I do not scold myself. I have a laugh. And of course my bitchiness is not a superior sort of bitchiness. Not the bratty girl bitchiness. No no no. I’m the kind of bitch who laughs at how silly someone is and then proceeds to make a total ass out of myself and laugh about that too.

Sometimes I am a complete idiot. And it is very funny. It keeps things interesting. You know, I used to be so virtuous. How horrible! I don’t want to be virtuous anymore. I want to be a sweet idiot, or maybe a bitchy moron, or maybe a beautiful generous person. I want to feel alive damnit. I have had it with mind-numbing morals and coma-inducing slogans about how everyone should be this or that.

Slaugter on the Farm

This week, everyone is dying. Over and over again. Everyone.

We are doing farm animals. Cow, sheep, horse.

On the stage. Wear the mask, develop the animal.
BOOM.
Remove the mask.
BOOM
Resume moving. Play with each other. Become a human with these traits.
BOOM
Your name is called by le prof. You must begin speaking a text.
BOOM

“He is terrible? Or am I drunk?”
“Me, I kill everyone on the stage.”
“You know that sport where you go to the bridge. The high bridge. And you jump with the rope? Ah, bungie. Bungie jumping. If I took her to the bridge and paid for her to jump, how would you feel if I cut her rope ?”

“Do we see Harlan’s pleasure on the stage, or do we see his shitty idea? Susanna?”
Susanna: “Shitty idea.”
BOOM.
“Adios immediately.”

Fuck Your Shitty Technique

I have done neutral mask before. Oh yes I have.

You sit for hours watching people move about on the stage. It is generally a long, precise, and delicate process. And it takes a very long time.

The person is searching to express, through their body, the elements, the colors, animals, materials. How do you express glue through your body so that all of us can see it by watching just your body? Can you make us see oil? Olive oil? Truck oil?

What about
Acid, vinegar, a lake, the ocean, a spring, mud, quicksand, fire, cotton, a tree, a fly, a cat, a lion, a leopard, pink, blue, orange, red,…?

It is a very long process, in my experience.

But with Monsieur le professeur, it is a bit different.

You work in your body for a few minutes. Zero feedback about how you use your body except maybe “too stiff” “too heavy” “wrong rhythm” “not strong enough.” No painstaking feedback about how you use your spine, your fingers, you pelvis.

M. le professeur doesn’t give a rats ass about your shitty movement techniques.

Do you have the pleasure to pretend to move this way? Do we see your pleasure to pretend?
This is what is at stake with M. le professeur.

And how do we see your pleasure? Well, we back up a bit. We back up to the exercise. You have the mask removed from your face. Then you stand up as the element/material/element. You go backstage. Then you come onstage and perform in a cabaret. That’s it. Go out and sing, speak a text, dance, what-fucking-ever. Just do it. And be beautiful. Have the pleasure to pretend you are that element/material/whatever.

Professeur doesn’t want to teach us how to be good at the neutral mask. He doesn’t care if we can perform the neutral mask well. If our neck is held or free. If the spine is flexible. If the body movements are precise and revealing of something larger. No. He is using the neutral mask to teach us another way of playing.

I thought I would come here and do neutral mask. Learn the technique. But I am learning something I could have never anticipated: I am learning what it means to approach theatre techniques as different ways of playing.