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.