what to do when you aren't a funny gorilla

Quotes of the day:

‘You do not show enough pleasure. We think you are a French philosopher thinking about the war in Serbia’

‘We want to see your legs. Many people are ridiculous when they show their legs. Especially here around the knees. The legs are really having the power to make us laugh.’

'She look like spaghetti overcook 5 hours in the pressure cooker.’

‘When you enter you are carried by the pleasure to meet the audience …even if you are scared.’

Costumes today: the tiny, dusty changerooms with their crooked-sloped ceilings are crowded with clowns showing off their new outfits. All the half dressed folk, somewhere between day-wear and the crazy thing he has asked them to be. Marilyn Munroe with a red nose, the choir-boy all pale cheeked and naïve-looking, a biker girl decked out in leather and a boxer complete with gloves and shiny short-shorts.

I wriggle my way through the crowd to don my gorilla suit and am appropriately admiring of the absurdities going on around me.

The first exercise today was to slowly walk towards the audience with the feeling that we had just bought our new costume and we were a little insecure, but that someone might just tell us how beautiful it was.

Then he told us if our costume was good or not.

It looked like he wanted to get a very clear picture straight away of what the person was trying to dress up as. He wanted us to look as though we had gone to some effort to create our look. Luke and Christy and I managed this.

Phew.

The second exercise was to come out, one at a time and to find something charming to say that would make the audience love us.

I had an extended time on stage where I struggled to do what he was asking. He had told me to speak louder on another day, and I had a hunch that he wanted me to dress as a gorilla because the laugh I had had previously was when I was trying to say I was intelligent. So I was loud and intelligent.

Hunch wrong.

He told me to shut up and that I wasn’t funny and that Australians are not funny.

He asked Alexandra onto the stage next to me and got her to do a monkey noise. She was totally hilarious, wide eyed and serious. She just kept making gorilla noises and looking out into the audience, turning her face just a little shakily from person to person. And it kept being funny.

Then he said I should try again.

I wasn’t funny.

He sent her off stage and said I should remember her and try again.

Disaster.

Then, thank god, he directed me. Telling me to pull it right back. Do tiny noises and after each one, to say ‘oh, I am not a very good gorilla today.’ And suddenly it was funny. I could hear the laughter and I understood that in that moment I was charming. As I trotted to the exit, despondent at what a bad gorilla I was, they laughed and laughed and I didn't want to leave the stage.

Thinking it over I feel a little bit like he was telling me not to be so arrogant. It was the lesson of the first day - 'You have to feel like a bad student.'

Watching the other folk doing the exercise, it became clearer to me what he was asking. I think he wanted us to come on, in no way performing the character, find a place to stand and then pretend for a moment to be the costume character. The whole time still taking pleasure in the audience, like a small child playing that character for someone they love.

So grateful to come home to this little flat with Luke and Christy and cook together and make hot drinks for each other and talk over all the little confusions and hilarities of the day.