Bastille day. I'm still looking for the metaphor...

I wouldn't exactly say I stormed anything today.

Luke and Christy and I trained in the park in the morning, tag-teaming acro doubles, doing stretching and handstands. Families out for Bastille day stopped and watched and we didn’t keep doing any one trick for too long, got through heaps and ate lunch happy.

Then in class I had the big hopeless.

The big hopeless is different to the big vulnerable.

The big hopeless thinks: ‘I actually can’t learn this. I can’t learn it. I am just going to turn up for the rest of the weeks and be pathetic; this pathetic and that’s it. I can’t do it. And neither will most people here.’

It's less humiliation than resignation.

I didn’t write down the insults today because I didn’t find them funny. And it wasn’t fun to hear him tell each person how bad they were today. Every other time I have been hanging off the hilarity of the insults. I have been avidly in each moment, watching as people try and then fail and then he insults them.

Today I wanted to put my head in my hands as each disaster unfolded onstage.

And I think this is supposed to happen. I think we are supposed to go here to the hopeless for some reason, but I’m not sure what yet. So I’ll just go back tomorrow and see what comes next.

Tonight about twenty of us went out for drinks and to ‘watch the fireworks’. We travelled absurdly slowly: the dithering of twenty people is a disaster. We barely saw the top of any fireworks from a crowded street. But it was cute. The wandering and chatting and photo-taking and all the little checkings in with each other that happened. The geraniums 3 stories up in the dark and the friendships which kick off as you wait for stragglers together on a street corner and you begin to hear about a person's loves and struggles.

Happy Bastille Day, Paris.

Happy Birthday Nana Pix. Respect.

'orrible

Caught the met to clown school again this morning. And here it is, our station. (I like the font for the sign. We would never have this font in Australia. We take our public transport way to seriously and it makes me just a little bit angry with my country.)

Did acro in the Cite Universitaire park in the sun. Trying stuff Luke and Christy learned in Holland, a pull up thighstand to two and a half high. Just wait, It’ll be in Kapow.

The new thing that I heard today was that the Clown is always missing the timing. With the stand up comedian, we laugh when they want us to laugh. Whereas the clown does something that she thinks is funny and the audience doesn’t laugh. What is funny is the clown’s confusion at the fact that the audience didn’t laugh. The moment after the flop.

The pleasure on people’s faces when we play Samuel Says and they end up being tortured, ‘Chinese burn! Guillotine! Guantanamo!’ he says as he twists people round and their faces are flushed and hilarious and sparkling (though it does actually hurt a bit). What is it that is so fabulous about being tortured? And about that moment when you finish performing and he says, “ ‘orrible, boring. To-tally boring. You get a zeero."

Something about it gives me a big sense of stupid happy relief.

Today he said about me, “If she was your daughter at a party and someone ask you, 'is she your daughter?' do you say, 'yes, She’s my daughter,' or 'no, I don’t know her at all?' I think you don’t know her at all.” It was the best part of what happened to me on stage.

Today’s exercises:

Do a noise (a Chinese pressure cooker, king kong) and then take pleasure in the noise you just made.

Be funny by doing a stupid voice/gibberish/stutter.