At the beginning of class Philippe compared Bouffon to a protest, where people throw stones, light cars on fire, and generally say “fuck you”. The beauty of people absolutely sick of their situations. The beauty of a revolution.
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My autocourse group (André, Sophia, Thomas, Duncan, Charles, Mike, and I) presented our abortion scene today.
Our task: A band of Bouffons come to a congress of people against abortion. Five Bouffons decide to go and do something to say ‘fuck you’. They can stay seven minutes, and then they run to avoid being killed. Start diplomatic. At the the end - a big blaspheme.
“Every week you go to a place where you can say something.”
Our scene involved a bunch of Bouffons gathered around a big wheelie-bin, with a Bouffon at the back holding a large Christian cross. We started humming, and then André rose from inside the bin as a priest. He droned out different things that can wrong for babies at birth - reasons why a woman might want to abort. “Human immunodeficiency virus...Amen...Infant Alcohol Syndrome...Amen...” Then I softly sang Des’Ree’s Life whilst each Bouffon ‘child’ came out and thanked God for their life, for not having been aborted, whilst alluding to a reason why their mother’s might have aborted them if they had had the choice.
“Thank you God for giving me life. Thank you Mum for giving me AIDS.” “I’m glad my mother’s only twelve years old, cause we can play together in the playground.” “I’m proud me daddy is a rapist. When I grow up, I want to be a rapist too.” Heavy, I know. After each Bouffon had prayed, we then all sang Life oh Life crescendoing into a big orgy, climaxing with André the priest having an orgasm. We then all stopped, burst into big laughter, then stopped, and apologised to the audience whilst putting André back into his closed bin.
Philippe said “good image...good actors...they understood something.” He asked about what we were trying to say, which we explained. He accepted our tactic, but we clearly didn’t make it so clear. It was a little complex. Philippe suggested we have scenes. Little acted out moments to make our point a clearer.
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Steph’s group also showed their autocourse scene, in which a ‘bad mother’ abused and threatened all of her horrific children in public. “We don’t see Bouffon having fun with the subject. We don’t think they are Bouffon who mock something.”
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“We have to see the actor.”
This means (I think) that we have to see the actor, the person, and his/her opinions, politics, and beliefs, in the performance. It’s not about playing a character. It’s you the actor using Bouffon to say something really big. Important. Nasty.
“We say, it’s really important I saw the actor.”
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Play a posh couple having tea in Austria, talking about the return of the Jews after WWII.
Play a posh couple having tea saying that they are not racist, but physically, blacks are horrible.
None of us really got this, although there were a few good moments. “We didn’t see them have so much fun to be racist...we were sad.” I think it’s difficult to do, because these are really sensitive subjects and people are afraid to go too far. But I think we have to go there. It’s not real. And it’s not really our beliefs. It’s to discover something.
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S U B T L E T Y ! You can’t just bang the topic on the head. Tread lightly. Trick us.
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Parody Soap Opera TV Shows...“Cheap TV”
The class had a lot of fun with this exercise - to make ridiculous plot twists and play almost-mélodramatic characters - with “the pleasure to blaspheme this style of theatre.”
I got up in a group of Australians and we parodied Home & Away.
I had a great time pretending to be a hunky life guard with a broad aussie accent looking out for shark attacks. As a group we weren’t bad but our “parody of Australians was bigger than the parody of the style of the show”. And none of the groups really destroyed soap operas, because I reckon we all secretly love them...
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