First Day of Characters (I Love You Thomas!)

First day of 'Characters'. The key to this workshop: “Play with the pleasure: nobody knows who I am…nothing more.”

Nobody knows it's me...

Today we had to swap clothes with another classmate and then play them for the day. We danced with a partner and when we were accused of being bored we had to lie – as our character. We also had to play the game where you balance a tennis ball in between you and your partner’s forehead, and if we dropped it we had to lie – as our character.

I wore Anna’s clothes – grey leopard skin pattern tights, a long tight black top and a big fur coat. I also found a blonde curly wig to wear. I had a lot of fun playing her. Picking out little key things to mock and exaggerate. I played with her overly active swooping feet, with biting her finger, with her extreme eyes and scrunched smile. And at one point (which was mean, but we were encouraged to be mean) I whispered to Thomas the movement teacher (the same from Le Jeu who’s back now) “Thomas I love you”. I found a few little things that worked – that rung true to the audience and that saved me whenever I started to flop. I felt quite free today. Light and able to let things come – like the “Thomas I love you” thing. I saw him, the idea came, and I did it.

Claire from Canada played me. She did over the top big acting (a clue to what others see of me?), spoke some made up Maori, and said “fush ‘n’ chups”.

Andre was great as Nonika – sticking out his neck and opening his mouth the way she does when she’s trying to understand what’s being said to her. And Mia was great as Rodrigo, with a really loose body and broken English filled with ers and ahhs.

“You have to show the pleasure to be in major.”

We have some new faces in the class: Nadeer from Switzerland, Marco from Italy, and of course Victoria from New Zealand. We also have Lauren, Catarina and Ed – all who have been at Gaulier this year – but haven’t worked in the same class as me yet.

Tomorrow we have to come to class with a costume with instructions to be unrecognisable:

“If we doubt for three minutes that it’s you, the costume is good. If your pleasure is bad, the costume is bad.”