“You Have To Think Differently - They Are Naïve.”

Class is starting to be filled with numbers presented for the upcoming Clown show now. There were about eight today, most of which were unsuccessful, but momentum is developing which is positive. Some people were given the okay to shortened versions of what they showed (like Katy and her goofy acrobatic moves) and others received the reassuring “it’s possible” or “not impossible” which means if they work a bit more it will be in the show. There were also plenty of dreadfully quiet and unfunny flops that won’t see the light of day again...but we have to keep going!

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At one point I asked Philippe whether as Monsieur Loyale I could do what he does with Michaela (he yells at her and tells her she’s bad, which results  in her looking shocked and sad and us laughing) and he said yes but that I have to say “you are bad” in the same way you speak to a dog when they’ve been naughty. It’s stern, but there is nothing negative in it. It’s not really serious. It’s for effect.

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It looks like I’m going to do a number with Boris too as Monsieur Loyale in which I hit/punch him gently in a kind of ‘come on pal, toughen up’ way, which results in him weeping like a boy. So that will be fun.

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“If they do a number and they have pleasure but the number is bad...it could be good...they have fun to be bad.” 

“We don’t see they want to stay on the stage.”

“You have to think differently - they are naïve.”

“You have to present something that looks like improvisation.”

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After we got through all the numbers, Philippe said “for me, we didn’t get the point to have fun to be an idiot with language” so he proposed that we do an exercise in which we are a clown mathematics teacher here to explain the Pythagoras theorem, or E = mc², in a strange way.

Funny accent...Funny sounds...A made up foreign language...Gibberish...Pleasure in your mouth as if you eat ice cream... 

I had a go and did a made up version of the Mãori language with a ‘hoary’ accent and little snippets of songs slipped in here and there. “Guy - a bit.”

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At the end of class Simone, Sophie, and Kat presented their talcum-powder rockstar number again. 

Philippe stopped them before they made a mess though! “If they don’t look at us like they are champions of rock’n’roll...it’s a parody...we don’t see your pleasure...so we think you really are rock’n’roll.”