The first year, we go full steam ahead at the speed of a snail. We don’t dribble too much. It’s more like we salivate with a malicious pleasure: the pleasure of discovering oneself. Showing oneself to others and discovering oneself.
What does this convoluted, complicated, overornate sentence mean? That every year nobody understands how a group composed of English, Italians, Canadians, Americans, Germans, Australians, Greeks, Spaniards, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, etc. learn and how they discover dissimilar rhythms, music, colours, humour. And how others, from these same groups, discover nothing, they stay on the quayside dry as a bone. They always conceal themselves, they always mistrust themselves.
One day they will have to understand that in theatre, everything is created around play, the one that opens the doors to wonderful illusions, dreams, realities as light as the beautiful clouds that move with the trade winds. Everything is created around what’s fake. Let’s imagine for a moment that you were a character infatuated with reality, that you repeated to whoever would listen that a penny is a penny, a car: a car, America: America etc. I could go on and on. If you belong to this category of ballbreakers, don’t register at this school. You would suffer needlessly. Stay in reality, good old reality that has been a pain in the arse for everyone since the dawn of time until today.
If I had to qualify the work of the first year I would say: a meeting around a dream: that of playing what’s fake.
Second year.
Normally the first show of the second year: Clown. Why? Because the clown only exists around candour, naivety and simplicity. And this candour I will call it “The mother of theatre”. An actor also draws his freedom from it: candour. Whoever in theatre frees himself from candour will perish in Asiatic cyclones.
That’s my motto. I share it. Be careful, Asian cyclones are nasty. They kill the passing clouds.
The second show will be a “Vaudeville”, a play by Feydeau. To laugh! No problems! Everything there is rich, luxurious, sumptuous. That the actor, on stage, may not be concerned with the problems of society. That he makes us laugh! That he invents many and peculiar loves. That he forgets his keys in his pants at the house of his ex-mistress! And that it rebounds and rebounds all the way to the conjugal bedroom. Vaudeville is beautiful: therein are astounding intrigues that take us directly to the conjugal bedroom. Vaudeville? A grandiose homage to fucking…
Third show: the Bouffons.
How many times have I been asked the difference between clowns and bouffons. I almost always replied that clowns were paid to make spectators laugh and that bouffons made spectators laugh because a man who laughs is less dangerous than a solitary one who ruminates on revenge. If the public laughs, the bouffon, who has been blacklisted in a concentration camp or near the swamps and undoubtedly returns wounded and hurt to the bone, will make more fun of his executioners. Laughter will permit him to go further and further and further. Laughter helps the bouffon to beautifully parody the bastards who put him on the blacklist. Laughter helps freedom.
This work is important for those who think that theatre should engage in social conflicts by manipulating black humour, as black as possible!