too BIG

I wouldn't have thought it possible.

I though it was impossible.

Presque impossible.

Too big. For anything, at Lecoq to be too big, but yes, today, finally - the moment has arrived. And not just once. Twice, in the same day! Imagine that if you can.

It was invigorating class with Paola, all thunder and lightning. She's bullets man. After yesterdays laughter session with Joss this was a sharp return to the reality of how hopeless we all are. She entered, with her large march like a little, black, Italian raincloud. She knew just how bad we were going to be. Two victims: up they went. Non! Non! C'est pas ca. No, it wasn't ca. Or ca. Or ca. I rather enjoyed my beating. I was only sent off to re-enter about five times, so I had it very lightly. How old are you? She asked. You seem about two.

I found this very amusing as many of my friends have commented on how much my mask resembles my six month old nephew, who is also my screensaver. I think I had him on the brain when I was moulding my mask. They have they same large cheeks and rather gormless expression. Ahh.

And then it came. 'Your mask is too big. Look at these holes under your cheeks.'

Too big. Too big. I felt almost proud.

And then again with Susannah! Not specifically about my mask this time, but that our jeu was too big. Very interesting actually. She was saying it could be big and small at the same time. Or small with a large intensity. Not always the big bodies. Perhaps this is what happens in the week seven curriculum at Lecoq.

(extract from: The 'How to be a terific teacher at Lecoq!' Handbook.)

"Week Seven.

Hopefully by this stage, after a year and a quarter of being told to be bigger the students will have achieved a modicum of largeness. If not there is no hope, but we'll keep taking their money anyway. At this point it is useful to remind the students that they can be small and precise in their largeness. Ideally this should reduce some of the arm flailing."

At least this week we do all know how bad our autocours are. The feedback will be no surprise. I for one will be nodding my head along with the profs as they rip our mayhem to shreds.

Masks

Ahh, what bliss! We're doing masks again. After all my fears that it wouldn't work my mask, apparently, does play, so I'm very chuffed and all geared up to make another one. In fact, all in all, it's a good lot. No real horrors.

Poor Joss came into teach us even though he had a bery bad colb. It seemed to have gone right through to his hair which was standing up at unimaginable angles. He still gave a very good teacher. Ahh, if I could be a teacher like him, how happy I would be! Or an actor.

Its such a lovely thing to be able to do, to make a mask. It's one of those things, a bit like quiche, that you think will be really difficult to make, but in fact is very simple.

Mask au lecoq

(serves 1-33 drama students)

Ingredients
1 broadsheet
1 large piece of clay
vaseline
wallpaper paste
tarlatan or craft paper (opptional)
paints
water
elastic

Take one newspaper, shred.
Mix wallpaper paste in a bowl. Leave aside.
Mould a large piece of clay into a face shape. Be careful not to make it too flat or it won't play. Look at it from all angles at you make it and turn it up and down to see where the light falls. When throughly blended cover with vaseline.

Take the bowl of wallpaper paste and the morcels of newspaper. Cover each side of each segment of paper with the paste and then place in layers on your face mould. If you have time you can leave the layers to dry between additions, if not don't worry. If you want to make it tougher you can add a layer of tarltan or craft paper.

Set aside for two days in a warm, dry place and then, carefully remove from the mould.

Paint, not too brightly, usually in skin tones.

Finally, make holes for the eyes and at the side for the elastic to go through. Attach the elastic and volia! One delightful mask, suitable for all occasions.

top with basil and grated parmesan to serve.

What day is it?

I keep checking this blog to see if there are any new entries, and of course there aren't because I haven't written them.

We're all a bit week 6ish and trying to make masks. Mine is in the process of going horribly wrong. For some reason it hasn't stuck properly. Did Jacques ever have problems with glue? I don't think so.

And it's been raining. Grrr.

There are many other lecoqbloggers afoot. Check out

http://mimethis.blogspot.com/

and apparently there's a myspace one too, but I don't do myspace. I'm already wasting enough time on the internet as it is.

The first years are doing L'Exode at the moment. I overheard two having a serious conversation that went something like this.
...'but, I think it's a bit more serious, Exodus, than someone just going out for a little walk. I think there's more urgency in them going'.

I think so too.

Apparently a few years ago there was a group who started their with the neutral mask playing a game of volley ball on a beach. Perhaps they were planning to continue with a game of hide and seek in the forest and
grandmothers footsteps up the mountain, but sadly, they never got that far and were okay mercied early on in the game. Literally.

Lecoq - The Quiz

Answer the multiple choice questions and then add up the answers to discover which kind of a Lecoq student you are.

1. How many?

a) 5

b) 7

c) 9


2. What size?

a) Small, but perfectly formed

b) Medium

c) Large


3. What is the most effective way to insure a place in the second year?

a) Work hard and come into school to warm up early every day.

b) Sleep with a teacher.

c) Have rich parents.


4. What is the most effective way to become a teacher at Lecoq?

a) Having the right father.

b) Speaking good French.

c) Studying at Ecole Jacques Lecoq.


5. What kind of nut?

a) Hazelnut?

b) Walnut?

c) Nutcase?


6. What kind of work are you most lightly to get when you leave Lecoq?

a) Bar work.

b) Working at the Royal National Theatre.

c) Setting up your own theatre company and doing one night stands at small fringe theatre venues.


7. Is it a good idea to study at Lecoq?

a) Yes

b) No

c) I wish I’d gone to Gaulier instead.


8. Which one of the teachers is most lightly to pull a student at the Christmas party?

a) Paola

b) Christophe

c) Francois

d) Joss

e) Jason

f) Krikor


0-15

Oh dear. You really don’t spend enough time socializing, do you? Don’t you realise the whole point of being at drama school is getting drunk and drinking coffee, not learning about theatre. Plenty of time for that when you’re out of work after you’ve finished. Start gossiping and hanging out in Mauri 7 before it’s too late!


15-30

You seem to have the work-social life balance well tuned. You are a finely honed physical beast with a penchant for black lycra. I bet you get your ideas used in Autocours all the time, don’t you? Grrrr! You go girl!

30-50

You sad, sad person. How much do you know about this school. There is a world outside of rue du faubourg st denis you know. You’re in Paris. For God’s sake, don’t waste two years of your life in Mauri 7, get out there and explore one of the most beautiful city’s in the world. You’ll learn more in an afternoon sketching in a café than in a week of trying to understand Krikor.

1. All 1 point clever dick.
2.a. non, c’est pas ca. b bordel! C. pas mal.
3. a 1 b 2 c 3
4. A 9 b 3 c 5
5. A 0 b 5 c 10
6. A 10 b 0 c 3
7. A 10 b 0 c 3
8. A 1 b 2 c 98 d 0 e 5 f -98

Work and Play

lecoqblog

Last Night

My vague idea of having an alcohol free weekend has started very badly. I am not very hung over, but I was still in Mauri 7 about 2 o’clock this morning. I had not planned to spend my weekend in the place I spend most of my leisure time during the week, and that is what finally sent me home. But it took a while. It was a very good party.

Emil, Pablo and the beautiful Saira (from last year) were playing with their band, Scandamanics. As usual they were very good, although almost entirely drowned out by smoke and conversation.

Jason and Francois were both there, the latter in very high spirits. Jason’s mood was not quite so inflated, though he seemed quite cheerful too. Francois is rather interesting. Well all the teachers are rather interesting to us purely by virtue of being our teachers. Francois doesn’t teach the second year. (We were introduced yesterday to the hatchet-faced Susannah who is going to be teaching us next, the first time I’ve thought, ‘oh dear‘, when I’ve looked at one of the staff. But I may well be wrong. I was about lots of people from other classes I didn’t know until this year.)

So, although Francois has never taught us, I knew him by sight. But more from seeing him in Mauri 7 than in the school itself. He seemed to have metamorphosised from a scruffy drageur into a frencher looking version of Jason over the summer holidays. Light trousers, pressed shirt, lace-up leather ankle books and neatly coiffured hair. A reformed character, shaking his head in line with the other teachers during Autocours.

However, last night his hair seemed to have re-grown and disarranged itself and his clothes and complexion were once more creased. I overheard one of the first years telling a friend that he was hoping that Francois might be more friendly on Monday morning after tonight. ‘I just got a good few kisses on both cheeks from that man’, he said. Unfortunately for the first year I’m afraid those, like most kisses the French give each other, will turn out to be completely empty and meaningless. Well not completely meaningless. They obviously said a lot about what Lecoq Jnr had been partaking of that evening. I’m sorry to say that I suspect he hadn’t had a proper supper before going out.

Just before I left he was giving the hopeful first year a beer-gelled mohican. I’m afraid that this too will turn out to be completely meaningless in the cold light of Monday morning. So, if that stuff about the third eye contact and not looking at the students directly is true, where do beery hairstyles come in?

C'est Pas Ca

Mais c'est pas ca
Le jeu.
Non. Mais non...
C'est pas ca.

Ok, merci.
Vous avez trompez
Le theme,
Le jeu

C'est pas ca.
Qu'est-ce que c'est ca?
Cette, n'importe de...
Quoi?

Ou est l'espace?
Ou est la soupe?
Pourquoi cette,
BORDEL?!

Aieeeee,
Aieeee.
Non.
Merci.

Good Cop - Bad Cop

At the moment it feels a little as though the profs are playing a little game with us. The 'push them harder, push them harder' game. On the other hand it's dead on half-way through the term, so perhaps we have lost our initial energy and enthusiasm and are being a bit crap and therefore need a shove up the communal arse.
I strongly suspect, though am not completely sure that there is a strategy to the arc of the teachers’ response to our work. Sometimes last year I felt we got an overly good reaction for the Autocours at the end of a section of work because we were all getting depressed and weary and ditto often the response seems to be negative in order to push us to find better work when they feel we are capable of it. This week we are definitely being pushed, I think because we’re about to end a section of work and they want us to really find it.
I have a lot of feelings about this system of teaching. As a teacher myself I have always tried to teach from the good, hopefully allowing confidence to build and the bad to drop away. I think they would say that they don’t talk about good and bad, but when things are truthful and just and when they aren’t. That they don’t want us to fulfil their desires, just to be good - i.e. truthful and entertaining. Certainly we can all see when a group does get it ‘right’ and it works.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend who studied here 30 years ago when Lecoq was still alive and Gaulier still taught there. She had just had an ex-Lecoq teacher staying with her and he’d been telling her about his training to be a teacher. There is a third year for people to train to be teachers, though there haven’t been any in my time here. He was one of the last to be trained by Lecoq himself, he said he must have known he was dying because that year five people were training instead of one or two. Each week someone would be hauled over the coals and humiliated in front of the others. Perhaps unsurprising given the overall teaching methods. And now I think the teachers are much ‘nicer’ to us than Lecoq was. He was, without any doubt, a genius. The pedagogie is extraordinary and must have come from an amazing mind. But also, from what people have said, he was a real manipulator who played people against one another to stay in a position of undisputed fear and power. He taught something about a third eye, or eye contact where you never actually looked at the students in the eye. Or something like that. Weird and scary.
If it's a game of Good Cop - Bad Cop, Paola is definitely the Bad Cop. She keeps telling us that its the second year and that now she's going to really push and provoke us, but in that her behaviour is not noticeably different to last year. Perhaps she is a little more personal and has made more people cry. The thing is, when she says things that make people cry, they tend to be true. I think that there’s a more effective way of giving people information that they’ll be able to take on board. When you get scared and nervous it becomes much more difficult to improvise - you close up. She says that acting is tough and you need to be tough. She certainly is.
Joss then is the Good Cop, though even he is pushing us a bit more this week. And Christophe is the BFG somehow accidentally teaching at Lecoq with the most extraordinary selection of 80’s tracksuits. Sitting next to each other watching Autocours Christophe and Joss seem to match, both dishevelled, hair pointing in all directions, gently shaking their heads at disaster after disaster while Paola rants and rages.

Kissing in Paris

The Board of Culture and Tourism
For Paris made a decision.
In the summer months, late spring
And early autumn when the days
Are still warm and the sun
Lengthens and glows along Haussman’s Boulevards
various couples, (pre-selected)
will be paid a modest fee
to kiss on street corners.

Some aspects will be left to their own
Discretion; the length of the kiss,
whether they hold each other close
Or snatch while the air pulls
Them gently apart. Eye contact is
Optional, but preferred.

The couples themselves are carefully chosen.
Not too old, not too young, though
Obviously youth is preferable.
Beauty is tricky.
No one wants to imply
that love is only for the beautiful but,
well, Paris is beautiful and these couples
Should be a subtle reflection
Of it’s timeless charm.

Paris: City of Love. A place
Where anything is possible.
Not only for honeymooners or
Tentative first liaisons, no.
Here you can even find an occasional couple
Past the first flame of passion,
Dignified in their embrace.

As a marketing exercise this
Is hard to fault. In sleek suits,
Smoothly coiffured, they congratulate
themselves on their subtly.
They’re onto a winner.
And sure enough the initial
Statistical reports are enormously satisfying.
Tourism is up and each per capita spend
Has increased by 0.24%.
The French economy will be saved.

And all along the Siene
And in the Jardins Des Luxembourg
and outside cafes
Couples linger and kiss,
For a small fee.

Jessica

Okay, so it turns out that Jessica Lange wasn't a student here which is, on reflection, not all that surprising on a closer inspection of her work.
I have never seen Jessica portray any of the classic hallmarks of a Lecoq student - no arms flailing, no talking at the same time as the rest of her company increasing in volume and then suddenly all turning in another direction for yet more wide legged arm-flailing. No, I can believe that Jessica didn't study here.
On the other hand Geoffery Rush, if I remember his performance in that film about the pianist he got the oscar for, does portray some of the traits. Remember the bit on the trampoline? Quite a lot of arm waving if I remember correctly....

Autocours

The teaching, or the learning at the school is built around weekly Autocours. The students divide themselves into groups, are given a title and an hour and a half a day to work on it. The products are presented every Friday before all the staff and students in the Grand salle. In the second year it changes slightly, more time to work and less people watching. The first years aren’t allowed to watch the second year’s Autocours, I think because they are in a process of discovering and if they saw a more developed style would perhaps try to copy it. Or possibly just because they’ll be doing the same next year and they don’t want to give it away.
Autocours came about as part of the student revolutions of ‘68, or at least that’s the story I heard. The students at the time said, ‘we want to make our own theatre’ and the result is the weekly slaughter session in the grand salle.
To be fair it must be awful for the teachers to have to sit and watch groups of students coming up with the same thing over and over again and making the same mistakes. Sometimes it seems as though we have all disconnected our brains and imaginations and come up with some of the worst theatre I’ve ever seen. However, they are tough. The teaching style is to not say that things are good, unless people have got them just right, so it tends to feel as though you’re getting a litany of all the things you’ve done wrong. If you get a pas mal or a c’est bien you’re doing really well. But it tends to be ‘non, c’est pas ca’. On the other hand there’s an awful lot of dreadful theatre out there, and in here, so it’s good to try and rid the world of it.
A lot of the problem with creating the autocours is communication with your group. Perhaps 80%. Or even more. Probably more.
I saw one of the first years throw herself into the arms of another girl and weep for a full five minutes last week. The comforter looked very concerned, and I did wonder if she’d had some bad news from home, perhaps a relative ill or dying, or at least being dumped by her boyfriend. At the end of five minutes the other girl asked, gingerly what the matter was, and she uttered the immortal words, ‘my group, we don’t listen to each other!’ at which point she was dumped by her friend who suddenly lost all her sympathy.
There have been some beautiful moments in the creation of Autocours. One of my favourite moments of last year was when we were preparing our ‘Exodus’ which is done in the neutral mask. The neutral mask is epic, big, clean and bold. It doesn’t live in a flat in Paris, it doesn’t make soup. It goes hunting and never gets tired, that sort of thing. Exodus is in the arena of immigration, a disaster occurs and people are forced to leave their homes because of war, flood or famine. One of our group suggested the mask go through a passport check. Hum.
My other two favourite moments are from class. At the end of the year you create characters and come into school in costume. One person came dressed in a white linen suit and straw hat. When Paola asked him his character’s name he replied, ‘Don Corelone’. Paola said, ‘you mean he’s Italian? Be careful, x, I’m Italian. Find another name’. The scary thing was I don’t think he really understood why Don Corelone was not a good choice for a character name.
Playing a scene with one overriding characteristic- happy, clumsy, frightened, proud, etc. They played the scene and another boy was asked what his adjective had been. Blind, he replied. I was very impressed that the teacher managed to control himself while the rest of the class howled with laughter. He put his head down and held his mouth and just stayed that way for a few moments before re-surfacing to explain that that hadn’t been quite what he meant.
At the moment my year are in companies and have been since the first day of term. We divided ourselves up one, by one by choice. A bit like picking football teams at school, but the other way around because the people sitting down chose which group they went to. It’s very interesting to me how then, the groups have a very distinct character.
One group works incredibly fast and incredibly loud. They’re always shouting at each other and looking unhappy and stressed. They love each other and they hate each other. They think they have the best and most interesting ideas and in some ways are right. They’re always trying to do what the other people won’t, or rather not to do what other people will.
Another is the nicey-McNice-nice group. Their work hasn’t yet quite hit the mark, it’s rather soft and pleasant, though there are sometimes good bit in it. When they work they say things like, ‘yes I am agreeing with both of you’ and ‘I love my group’.
Then there’s the long group. Everything they do is very loooong. It starts really well, but then it goes on and on doing the same thing again and again. All they need to do is cut whatever they do in half and they’d probably have it sussed.
And finally there’s the slick group. Slick and sharp. Howya!
In an psychological experiment a group of people who didn’t know each other were asked to group themselves randomly, without talking about it. Amazingly, people group themselves together, unknowingly, according to type. For example, people who had been adopted at birth put themselves in the same group, but without talking or knowing that they had. Rather interesting in terms of the self-selection of these companies.
Phew, that was a long one. Quite enough for tonight I think.

Abandon Hope all ye who enter here!

Coming out of either Chez Jeanette or Mauri 7 you find yourself in Rue du Faubourg St Denis. Overshadowing it is a mini arc du triomphe, in absurd contrast to the sleazy hustle-bustle that surrounds the school. There are fruit and vegetable stalls outside shops, dirt and old cardboard boxes lying around, always people slouched against railings, smoking and chatting and around one o'clock and six o'clock groups of multi-coloured students in a dense cluster around the heavy iron door that leads into the passageway and up to the school itself.
Last year the cobbles of the passageway were constantly chewed-up with never-ending, ineffectual building work. You negotiated your way around workmen and past piles of sand and rubble. Now, in time for the 50th Anniversary celebrations that went on this summer and will continue throughout the year, the clean, grey stones are attractively even.
At the end of the passage, after a gasp of a courtyard, you push another door, this time smooth, dark wood and find yourself inside the school itself. The posters advertising theatre in Paris on the pinboard to your immediate left have been cleared away and in their place is a fantastic collage of passport photos of all the second year students that have attended the school. Great fun is to be had finding first yourself and your friends, then the teachers and finally marvelingng at the fashion choices people have been making for the last 50 years.
It'’s amazing how you can tell what era a photo is from, not just from the haircut and clothes of the protagonist, but the colour of the reproduction, the fuzz and black and white of the early years, the sickly orange of the ‘60's through to the sharpened variety of now. I've found Paola, Joss, Jin-Wu, Jason and Christophe. I've laughed at my own photo (eek!) and checked out the people from last year I fancied. I'’ve spotted Simon McBurney, Marcello Magni and Lilo Baur but I'’m still looking for Geoffery Rush and Jessica Lange.
Then in, past a table with flyers and general info on Paris and quite often a basket of walnuts from Fay's, (Lecoq'’s widow) garden in the country. Past the desks where Martine and the other wonderful secretaries sit and into the corridor with the changing rooms and toilets leading off it.
Whoosh! And you’re in the grand salle, the heart of the school. I think it started life as a music hall venue and certainly in one of it's previous incarnations was used for boxing tournaments. There'’s a fuzzy black and white photo upstairs in the mezzanine level that looks down onto the grand salle of a boxing match. The ring is in the centre of the space, a punch flying, white light blinding out the action and unintelligible, upturned faces all around it, blurred excitement, emotion and action. For me it's everything about the school and that room. I like to think of those matches, old sweat, adrenaline and excitement seeping into the fabric of the building, learning it, aging it ready for the black-lycra clad students to come tumbling in.