Dogs

I have been heavy armed into 'upgrading to the new blogger account'. No you can do this if you want or you can just stick to what you're used to. Oh no. YOU ARE BEING UPGRADED TO THE NEW BLOGGER ACCOUNT, WANNA MAKE SOMETHING OF IT?

I think my overly strong irritation to this is probably due to tiredness. It's a long way into term, but a long way until the end. It's lovely what we're doing, but we're all knackered. I started thinking about going to bed at about seven o'clock tonight. In fact I started thinking about going to bed during Susannah's lesson, not that it was a bad lesson. It was rather good actually and will be very helpful in trying to improve our disastrously bad attempt at presenting a piece of Greek Tragedy chorus.

When we finished our autocours on Friday Susannah said, 'well that was very bad. You've made Theatre with a capital T and a director, I mean, a bad director.' We all agreed. It had been quite a spicy week. Too many chefs. Everyone with their very important idea that they have to say. I would love to say that over the weekend we had all seen the error of our ways and decided to shut up a bit more. I'd love to say that but what actually happened was that we didn't get onto our feet until 5.35 leaving us exactly 25 minutes out of 1h30. Impressive.

'But what do dogs have to do with tragedy?' I hear you asking yourself. 'Is this a weird Lecoq version of the chorus on all fours? I know they pretended to be animals in first year. Perhaps it was all leading to a version of Medea presented by ducks? Or cocks?'

All very possible and perhaps the natural progression from bouffon (a word I feel should never be translated from French into English) and mystere. But no. I have been dog-sitting for a little... black dog. When I took her for walks people would ask me how old she was and what breed and I would mumble 'oh well I think she's about... 18months or a year, or perhaps 10 months' leaving them very confused. Why did I not know my dog's age?

It's kind of the same as having a baby in a pushchair. You stop and chat to other dog owners while your dogs sniff each others bottoms and start running round each other and tangling up the leashes as they get more excited. (Allez! Allez Voltaire!)

For dogs the whole pavement is like a wonderful degoustation of lovely smells; leaves, bits of old baguette and chewing gum and tastiest of all - other dogs poo. I strongly suspect that I was the only person in Paris picking up poo, certainly the only person in the 16eme.

When I was about 10 or perhaps a little older my brother and I ran a campaign to be allowed a pet. We decided on subtle, subliminal tactics. We drew pictures of cats and dogs with CAT or DOG written in large, friendly letters underneath them and stuck them up around the house. Though most of them got taken down quite quickly somehow my brother's 'CAT' managed to stay on the bottom of the kitchen door until well after we had both left for university.

All our attempts were greeted with amused and total rebuts. My father does not like animals. They, on the other hand, seem to find him rather fascinating and are very keen to wag at and climb on him. For years he has been squirting washing up liquid at cats of all colour who come and poo in his garden.

I felt more than usually like an ill-done by Victorian heroine and wondered if it were possible to get consumption from lack of canine affection. I also felt worried for my father's sensibilities. Everyone knows that deep down people who don't like animals are cold and probably evil.

After a week with a puppy who is not house-trained I am in complete agreement with him. This is a very sweet tempered little dog - friendly, affectionate, etc. However. Its not just the picking up the foul smelling poo after they've been outside. Or the cleaning up when they've gone inside, (just after you've got back in from a long walk, or just as you've put your shoes on to take them outside for a walk). It's the constant need for attention. It would follow me around constantly. I'd open the toilet door and trip over a little black dog. If I am sitting with my computer on my lap trying to write that means that there is no room for a cat as well. Surely that's clear? If I have shut my bedroom door that means I am trying to read or go to sleep and do not want to be disturbed and no amount of wailing or scratching is going to change my mind. When I have been on a walk and got a little wet do I roll on the sofa? Do I come and stand very near to you and shake myself hard? No. I do not.

It's taken a few years and I feel mean saying it, but Daddy, I understand exactly where you're coming from.

None of that has anything at all to do with Lecoq, I just had to get it out of my system.

Tragedy

'Le coeur est un crystal' Krikor told us last week in the first of our lessons on tragedy. Angular- Brilliant-pure?

Across the ceiling of the grand salle a network of elastics has been constructed to form a star of David and then four elasticated cords hung from points of the internal square. When these were pulled on and the four pullers moved round the space above them a series of gemometric patterns tangled and untangled themselves and then eventually, when it was juste enough, people, reacting to the constantly changing shapes. This produced some incredibly powerful improvisations, often not thought out with the head, but instinctive and therefore inventive and often surprising. It worked like a big neutral mask. You could really see when people started pushing or forcing.

On Thursday we did speeches with Paola. Real people's speeches from a podium in the Grand Salle. We saw Hitler, Mussolini and St Juste. All rather scary, powerful.

Otherwise everyone is tired with colds and nasty bugs abounding. But most of all tired. What are we? Week 5 or 6? No wonder. I'm planning to sleep and write all weekend and watch the enormous TV in the enormous flat where I'll be dog-sitting next week.

Goodbye Hes

Here's one of my favourite poems for one of my favourtie people who very sadly for all is leaving Paris tomorrow. How we love you. How we'll miss you. Thank heavens for Skype!

Late Fragment

by

Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Bouffons that got left in the back of the fridge for 546000949302597 years

A re-re amendment

So it turns out that Jessica Lange DID go to Lecoq after all. I was misinformed. And how do I now know the truth? Because Julie Taymor told me. la la la. Get that for a bit of cool.

In fact it wasn't just in a personal tete-a-tete. I discovered this but in a talk she was giving to the whole school as part of a filmed press launch for 'The Lion King' soon to hit Paris, (and well worth seeing if it's as good as it was in London).

For this talk we had to sign to copies of a form which said we didn't mind this tv company being able to 'exploit our images in perpetuity'. Exploit seems to me to rather an unfortunate choice of words. Or maybe it's a very precise choice of words and there'll be photos of me sitting in the grand salle, nodding, all over Paris next week selling 'Lion King burgers'.

She, Julie not the cat's mother, was very inspiring. She came to Lecoq at 16. 16!! At 16 I was doing my GCSE's and learning to put on eyeliner. What have I been doing with my time that it's taken me this long to get here? She came at 16 and I am here at 31. She had set up her own company in Bali by 22 and was touring with them. Absolutely sickening.

She talked about how it's important the quality of the materials for the masks and costumes she uses and makes are so that the actor or dancer wearing them is infused with it, like inspiration. She talked about seeing shamens in trances in Indonesia and in India and how every costume or mask gives a little of the same.

Listening to her put together everything she'd taken from Lecoq, Indonesia, India and put it all together in her own intelligent, inovative way was inspiring in a very energising way.

It got me thinking again, as Les Ephemeres did, about what's next form me and what theatre and why theatre. I have a great sense of need to make plays that tell stories for women, show their stories. That sounds like hackneyed 70's feminsim, but if I'm still not feeling fulfilled enough as a female theatre goer in 2007, that's why.

There's such a huge back-log of male dominated drama from hundreds of years of female repression. But what bothers me far more is what is being made now. The war dramas and cop dramas with scores of men and then token wives and whores, which is why Les Ephemeres was so refreshing, and I mean really that. Refreshing in the sense that I was thirsty to see something that spoke of women's lives without them being raped or having their hands cut off. I'm sick of being an actress where there are loads more parts for male actors and loads more female actors. QED....

My head is jumping on to June, but not in such a bad way any more. Time to action some thoughts instead of checking my emails.

Mystere

When my younger brother and I were little we used to draw maps of fantasy islands in old exercise books .'Miss Herville, Upper 3 Religious Studies' metamorphosized into the strange land of Glodongy. We mapped out the mountains, the prophets lair, castles and drew the strange creatures that inhabited this world with biology textbook arrows pointing to their different parts, (leopards paws, owls beak etc.)

More than twenty years later I'm doing almost exactly the same, which is in some ways a little worrying and in others extremely satisfying.

We have left the territory of grotesques and have gone back to our original white bodies but are re-exloring them as strange creatures with a slightly different lilt. They have never been human, but dressed in human clothes, mocking human behaviour and society they became more humanistic. Now they're being stipped back to their inhuman nakedness and added to.

We had a fascinating lesson with Krikor, who is amazing, on thursday. He brought different materials; cardboard; brown paper; sheets of clear, floating plastic; thin wooden sticks and tape. Our brief, as usual, was to change our bodies.

Even with only 15 minutes to work on them people came up with some very exciting propositions, espcially those who did the LEM last year.

(To red herring for a moment, we had a very amusing talk today from two ex-students currently doing a play at Theatre du ront-point. They talked about how their set consisted of one small box placed on the stage and how that they never felt sure about where it should go. 'Where should we put it?' one says to the other. 'We don't know, neither of us did the LEM'.)

Going back to changing our bodies, the most effective were those where you couldn't see any body at all. C**** and S**** nearly had it. The creature created (creature and create - look at how similar those two words are linguistically!!) from stretchy, slightly shinny fabric stretched over a frame of poles moved in two parts and was almost alive until the poles started falling down or the arms lifted too high revealing S**** self-conciously giggling.

L** did one with three different colours. Grey on her head, a block of purple paper in an oblong block that she held in one hand and a smaller blue one in the other. She covered herself entirely with the translucent plastic, so you stopped being aware of her manipulating them and saw the three coloured shapes moving, which did somehow become a creature - until the clear plastic sheet fell off and then we saw L** holding bit of crunched up paper with a grey, netted hat on.

I find all this very exciting theatrically. As though it's something that I really will be able to use in the future in work I create and in my teaching. What I really want is to be able to take it further. Not just stop with what is proposed by the teachers. They give you a taster, but how much more exciting and interesting is where you go with all of this when you leave. My head is already jumping forwards to when I leave in June and what I'm going to do. As the moment although I have some ideas overall, as Krikor would say, 'on sait pas'. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Oh, and just to finish off, a little advertisment. I went and saw one of the most moving, life changing pieces of theatre I've ever seen, espcially (in my opinion) if you're a woman. So if you're in Paris check out 'Les Ephemeres' at the Theatre du Soleil.