Gorillas at the Guerissol

It’s Saturday morning and we sleep in till 11:30 and then have a little panic when we realise the time. Today is costume-mission day. King Kong, Goofy and Peasant-Girl outfits to be pulled from somewhere.

A second hand clothing shop is called a guerissol here and there is a winner on the corner of Boulevard de Rochechouart and Rue de Rochechouart. A big black fur coat is the first thing we find. I pull it on backward and growl around the guerissol and Christy and Luke both grin at me and say it’s perfect.

I buy a child’s leather jacket to cannibalise into a gorilla chest. Then I go hunting for a barbie doll to clutch in my massive king kong hands. Here she is by my bed

The rest of clown school is also trawling Paris and we keep running into our friends on the hunt for angel wings, golfer trousers, girl-scout shirts, horse-guard uniforms etc. The fabric shops on Rue Dorsel are like a miracle of spangly, pom pommy, buttony goodness.

Christy finds a collection of brown and white peasanty drapes that are cutely tramp-like with her nose on. Luke gets a top the right shape and dyes it yellow on the stove at home.

We close the shutters to Paris and watch Amilie and Moulin Rouge while we sew our costumes. We laugh at ourselves but it is the perfect thing for three tired clowns who have been discovering Montmartre.

Luke sews a couple of socks to his hat while we are watching movies and voila. Goofy.

how to use a clown crush

It's Friday. On Fridays he says he gives everyone a score of seven as code for zero, so we can go home at the end of the week and tell our parents we got a seven. Even though we really got a zero.

He gives lots of people sevens.

This morning we give ourselves the morning off training. Instead we climb the Eiffel Tower and look over at where we live, Montmarte. Just like in Moulin Rouge

Quotes from today:

“You are funny and we love you a little bit, but you are not clown. You have to listen to the flop. You listen to the flop: you start to be a beautiful human who is being bad. If you keep being funny you are a comedian. Only the clown listens to the flop.”

“Between a horrible character and a clown the distance is not so far. The difference is a beautiful pleasure.”

“I teach with what character you can be happy all your life…the poetry of one person when the person has to discover his clown; that is what I teach.”

The two exercises today:

Come out and start the show “Alright, yes, we are about to start, ok, bon, no problem, the show is about to start.” A kind of continual beginning, when nothing actually starts but we believe you and you are happy to be with the audience.

You have only seen this kind of dancing once on television and there was no sound and now you are a child coming out to show your family, your mum and dad and cousins how well you can do this dance.

possibly the best thing about the Eiffel Tour is the sign on the toilet door

As well as the excercises today, Phillipe has a special way to demonstrate the kind of pleasure he wants to see. The clown is asked to choose someone who (in another life perhaps) they are attracted to (sometimes several people). The attractive people are sent behind the curtain to wait for when the clown flops and then the clown is sent back to be kissed by the attractive people. There is a lot of squealing and hilarity and clowns invariably come out bright, breathless, sparkling, delightful. We, the audience, love them. Then they continue to attempt the exercise.

Today was my most vulnerable day.

Naming someone I find attractive in front of forty people is on the edge of palpitating humiliation. The audience is cute and encouraging and I have seen how lovely it is to watch someone else in this position, so I do go for it, but it’s gut twistingly harder than I imagined.

It’s a moment of physically understanding a theory that I already knew: that the clown is an optimist, so the clown knows she doesn’t have much of a chance but she thinks, today she is lucky, today she might get the thing she wants. The clown isn’t held back by humiliation into hiding her wishes. It’s both aweful and good to be put here.

Then in the dance exercise I have a moment (probably less than 30 seconds) when I am looking and looking for eye contact from the audience, but no-one is looking at me. It’s that moment and the memory of that moment that make me cry for a second with Christy in the café afterwards. To suddenly, sinkingly think that whatever I am doing is so horrible to look at that everyone has turned away, to have no idea how to get people’s attention and to want it so much: it’s devastating.

But still, I trust the process. I’m completely prepared to put myself in his hands and to keep turning up. Three people say nice things to me afterwards and a whole cavalcade of us go out for dinner together, under the wing of the Quebecer who translates to English for us and then the Argentine translates to Portuguese for the Brazilians.

Christy makes a serviette rose for our friendly waiter

We dance up the escalators and fill up the streets and the boys do their slapstick moves and I feel like a crew of teenagers; boisterous and absurd and taking up too much space.

madame king kong

Quotes from the man today:

“I put the music on for bad student. It is better to be bad with music than with no music.”

“You are too noisy on your feet. When you walk on the stage we think you are the German army arriving in Paris in 1940.”

“Me, I like you a bit. It’s not a big love - it’s a love-ette”

Today we had to face our back to the audience and then turn around and say boom! And then enjoy what we’d done and think we were good.

I did my boom! and then had a little laugh. He asked if I thought I was intelligent and I said yes. He said that I was a total idiot, and asked Danny, his assistant and Danny agreed: “total idiot.” I said I was very intelligent and he said that I must have bad communication then, because they couldn’t tell I was intelligent. I said I was a good communicator too. I was giggling and I think people were laughing but I also feel a bit like I was fumbling in the dark.

Then he gave us all a costume that he wants us to find for Monday. Me, I am madame king kong. ("king kong is good for intelligent people, no?") So now I have to find a gorilla suit by Monday, Luke needs to find a goofy costume and Christy has to be a New Zealand peasant farmer from the last century. Whatever the hell that is.

this will be me in a few days time, dont you doubt it

The next exercise was to come on and pretend to be angry and enjoy it. It was a disaster. I was not funny. I told a member of the audience that I hated them and he said I wasn’t allowed to do that and sent me off. Most people suffered through it, looking too angry and frustrated and not finding the joy at all. Difficult.

But then a bunch of us sat in the café and had hot chocolates or white wine and laughed and told each other about our lives. The crew of people who made it here to Paris to study clown: so many freelance artists with other random day jobs.

And we quote Gaulier and laugh and are ridiculous, travelling together back into Paris.