Philippe Gaulier teaches a master class. Photo by Charles Ketchabaw.
You can’t clone clowns, and Philippe Gaulier has brought his unique master class in clowning to Los Angeles for the first time to instruct wannabe fools in how to find and express their inner idiots.
The two-week workshop is filled with aspiring clowns, from near and far. An LA audience will have the rare opportunity to see what the maestro of mirth has wrought when his 40 or so students perform an open class on the final day of instruction, September 6.
The globally renowned guru of clown-dom has been imparting the wisdom and technique of tomfoolery under the big top for decades. In 1971 Gaulier became the assistant of Jacques Lecoq, who in 1956 had established the famed L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq — which taught a particular style emphasizing movement and mime — in Paris. Gaulier created his own school, École Philippe Gaulier in 1980, training 30 students from around the world per class, which is taught in English.
Philippe Gaulier
For 12 years his school was located in England, where Gaulier’s students included UK thespians Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen and Emma Thompson. While École Philippe Gaulier is now near Paris at Étampes, Gaulier frequently presents workshops abroad. His stint, co-presented by LA’s Clown School and Toronto’s Fixt Point at the Inner-City Arts Center in downtown LA’s Skid Row area, is the first time the French fool has taught on the West Coast.
Eschewing costumed panhandlers as pretenders in makeup, Gaulier the purist calls them “just tramps asking [for] money in a hat, but they are not clowns. I was clown myself, and I want to show people from LA what is the beauty and poetry of a real clown.” Gaulier knows whereof he speaks, having performed at prestigious venues such as the Comédie-Française and Switzerland’s Knee Circus; his piece de resistance was smashing plates (Julian Schnabel, move over!).
Gaulier gives a jester’s job description: “A clown is an idiot and his job is making the audience laughing… With nothing. With a banana, with a plate, with a balloon… And he’s happy, he has a gag, he has plastic pooh… He’s an idiot with gag and he’s happy if audience laughs. He doesn’t have anything to say about politics about everything, he’s just in the world of gag and laugh.” Indeed, the 70-year-old’s persona projects a clown-like aura: Beneath a white Panama hat he has longish white hair, a wispy beard, wears red-rimmed glasses above observant eyes, a purplish shirt and laced shoes.
The high lama of laughter focuses on training clowns for the circus, not theater, and expresses his educational philosophy: “It is the beauty of your soul who is going to make you a great clown — it’s not the character, not the theater, it’s you. When you want to be beautiful, it’s when we see through your body how you were when you were eight years old. Where is the child in you? When we see that you have a special beauty…[then] you have an expensive actor. When you just play a character, without your soul, without something fantastic from you, you are just an actor for bed and breakfast… Me, I try to give the freedom to the student. I never give the style of myself, just liberté for acting… I give you a secret, you are giving your poetry, your imagination, is going to do everything for you.”
What did Emma Thompson — widely respected for her dramatic turns in 1990s screen adaptations of Shakespeare plays and “veddy” British novels such as Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility — learn during her two-year tutelage under Gaulier? He replies: “What Emma Thompson does from my teaching, I do not know. And I am happy not to know. But her — she knows.” Apparently so, because Thompson, who won the best actress Oscar for the 1993 film version of E.M. Forster’s Howards End, inscribed a sketch of an elephant, which she gave him, with the words: “Dear Philippe — Your school was one of the greatest creative experiences of my life!”
Master class students
To be fair, in addition to her Masterpiece Theater type roles, Thompson has appeared in the Harry Potter series, as well as in comedies, playing the magical governess in 2005’s Nanny McPhee and Agent 0 in 2012’s Men In Black 3.
It’s more readily apparent what Baron Cohen — the lead in the broad comedies Ali G, Borat, Brüno and The Dictator — may have derived from Gaulier’s atelier. “Sacha was always a funny student. He was fantastic — he was bad like everybody, like me when I was student. He has a fantastic spirit to mock everything and we appreciate his spirit. And we say, ‘You discover this way, go this way,’” Gaulier recalled. A booklet commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Clown Prince’s academy of idiocy quotes Baron Cohen as stating: “I owe my career and the discovery of my inner idiot to Philippe Gaulier. He has been and always will be the inspiration for my work.”
Clowning Around is Serious Business
It’s afternoon in the Inner-City Arts Center’s Rosenthal Theater, where the September 6 “graduation” performance takes place. Gaulier is conducting a session of exercises laced with his own comments, which sometimes seem acerbic and, to this American observer’s ears, politically incorrect.
If actors think they have tough acts to follow, imagine how clowns feel, entering after daredevil tightrope walkers and trapeze artists perform death-defying aerial acrobatics or — in the more traditional circuses — after elephants perform uncanny tricks. These costumed, red-nosed, be-wigged wags have 10 minutes or so to amuse circus audiences with some comic relief, as the next featured routines are set up. It’s during this entr’acte that Gaulier’s pupils have to imagine themselves regaling the rabble.
Students jump rope in the master class
The students, casually clad in sweat or stretch pants, shorts and T-shirts and all adorned with red schnozzles like 40 Rudolphs, deploy different techniques in their endeavor to entertain imaginary crowds under the big top: Mime, somersaults, speaking gibberish, making hand puppets, singing faux opera arias, etc., all under Gaulier’s watchful eyes, as he wields a white drum and drumstick to punctuate his points with Gong Show finesse.
One creepy clown who may have seen one Batman movie too many featuring the Joker, flips the proverbial bird, utters profanities, removes his T-shirt. But when he begins lowering his sweatpants Gaulier lowers the boom, declaring in his low, gravelly voice: “It’s not a strip workshop.” Ordering the pupil to put his shirt back on, Gaulier grouses, “He wanted to show his body. Exhibitionism.”
In his defense the young man declares, “I have lots to offer — sexually.” The sorcerer retorts to his apprentice: “It’s good there’s no confusion between sexual life and the workshop.” As the student sits (and, perhaps chastened, relocates to the back of the Rosenthal Theater) a female classmate says: “I liked it. You can take your shirt off.”
A slim young woman takes the stage and continues dancing, even after the taped music — which ranges from classical violin pieces to Edith Piaf songs, played by Gaulier’s collaborator and wife, Japanese-born Michiko Miyazaki — stops. Gaulier admonishes the dancer: “It’s a number [as in a pre-established routine] — it’s not what I said.”
Next to step into the lions’ den is Lai Pei-Hsia — a shorthaired Taiwanese woman wearing faded blue jeans who said she’s a Taipei TV host, singer, self-help teacher and magazine publisher visiting L.A. for Gaulier’s class — shouting in a Sid Caesar-type faux dialect.
The whole class
Following a lunch break, the class reconvenes for a game of musical chairs, with the students dancing and prancing about in a circus-like atmosphere. The player caught without a seat has to make the trumpeting sound of a pachyderm before he or she leaves the floor, chair in hand. Gaulier rebukes one woman for always sounding “like the Virgin Mary on a mountaintop.” He dismisses another for her movements while attempting to imitate an elephant’s noise, declaring, “I said no mime.”
After a Caucasian man jokingly tries to pull a chair out from under an Asian woman’s derriere when the music stops, Gaulier makes a reference’s to France’s far-right racist party, stating: “It’s horrible how you treat foreigners, like you are the National Front or something. You get a zero.”
As those still standing dwindle down to 10 females, Gaulier’s strongest reaction is directed toward another Taiwanese participant, whose dance movements he derides as “an international catastrophe! The two most horrible things in the world are Hiroshima and your moving.” Clown-mates explain the A-bombing reference to the unseated woman. Upon departing the floor, chair in tow, she briefly leaves the studio.
The day’s final exercise calls for pupils to behave like children watching classical ballet who then, believing they know how to dance in this manner, attempt to execute pas de deux, Baryshnikov-like leaps and bounds and the like. In groups of five, the dancers amusingly move to the strains of The Nutcracker Suite with herky-jerky choreography so daffy one could imagine Beethoven rolling over and telling Tchaikovsky the news.
Their merry movements are intercut with Gaulier’s admonitions: “You are too close! Move back! I think you need to have a distance between the artist and audience. Do you want to kiss us?” he asks a fair-haired woman named Ros, who speaks with what sounds like an Australian accent. To another student Gaulier asserts, “You are not charming! I have the feeling you practice the dance of the frog. They call French people ‘frogs.’”
Gaulier’s impish sense of humor extends to intimacy. As class winds down the maestro takes questions. Regarding her performance an attractive female would-be clown asks, “How do I show pleasure?” The Frenchman replied: “You make love all night and when you come back, we’ll see tomorrow.”
Lisa Marie DiLiberto and David Bridel
“He provokes using culturally sensitive jokes,” explains Canadian Lisa Marie DiLiberto, Fixt Point’s artistic director, who had studied under Gaulier. Another former Gaulier scholar, David Bridel of LA’s Clown School, calls the Frenchman “a phenomenal teacher, very idiosyncratic. very iconoclastic — he upsets the notions of what it means to be a teacher and how a teacher disseminates information. He uses lots of mischief and parody in how he interacts with students… He’s not provocative for the sake of exploding situations or people. He’s a very caring man and very clear about what he’s seeking: A creative, imaginative breakthrough in the lives of his students. He’s definitely an agent provocateur, using his knowledge, heritage and style to get under the skin of his students in a fascinating way… to open up a whole Pandora’s Box of imaginative, playful reactions, which lots of performing students don’t come into contact with.” Perhaps there’s a pedagogical method to Gaulier’s madness, which goes from the ridiculous to the sublime.
Reflections on La-La-Land, Buster and Charlie
Gaulier has been to New York, Chicago and both Las Vegas and Orlando to teach at Cirque du Soleil, but this is his first time in Los Angeles. His initial impressions are: “We are in car and we are on a motorway and we change the motorway and we find another motorway… Sometimes we leave the motorway and we start to see some very good area, life — but the motorway is very boring.” During his LA sojourn the Parisian went Hollywood when he dined one night with his ex-pupil, Baron Cohen, at a seafood restaurant near the teacher’s hotel. “We had a good fun,” Gaulier remarks.
And as for who is the greatest Hollywood harlequin, Gaulier opines: “Buster Keaton is the best; better than Chaplin, as a clown, I think so. Because Charlie Chaplin is beautiful but he tells a miserable story, he has many things to say about politics, the misery of people. But Buster Keaton is an idiot who wants to get married or wants to drive a train or wants to be a cameraman. He’s just that; he’s nothing else. He has this idea, ‘I want to drive a train,’ and he burns the train, because he wants to drive the train. I think it’s absolutely fantastic.”
Phillipe Gaulier
Gaulier’s master class is being co-presented by L.A.’s Clown School and Fixt Point, a Toronto-based media and theater company which derives its name from “one of the main tenets of Philippe’s teaching,” explains DiLiberto, a young new mother who exudes joie de vivre. “Fixed Point means to stop and have a moment with the audience, so to make a connection with the audience is to have a Fixed Point.” After DiLiberto studied with Gaulier in Canada in 2002 and France in 2005, Fixt Point came to set up Gaulier’s summer workshops in North America in conjunction with local partners. The venue rented for presenting the L.A. workshops is at the Inner-City Arts Center, an urban oasis of aesthetics providing arts instruction to children from Los Angeles’ poorest neighborhoods.
Fixt Point’s partner on the ground in LA is the Clown School, located in a Hollywood studio near Theater Row. London-born David Bridel studied under Gaulier when his school was based in England and is the co-founder and artistic director of the Clown School, which he defines as “as a five-year-old organization with international partners in China and Brazil that promotes laughter and joy in the life of its participants, who are primarily performers training as clowns and to create extraordinary theatrical events.”
Four Clowns, a theater company affiliated with the Clown School and with the Hollywood Fringe Festival, is presenting Bridel’s one-man show about British poet Samuel Coleridge, Sublimity, at 7 pm September 22 and 29 at the Lyric-Hyperion Theatre & Café, 2106 Hyperion Ave., L.A. and at New York’s United Solo Theatre Festival at Theatre Row October 5 and 9.
After he departs LA, the globetrotting Gaulier teaches his brand of foolishness at workshops in Berlin. But first, LA’s ladies, gentlemen and children of all ages can experience and observe what just might be the second greatest show on earth: Gaulier’s harlequin handiwork at an open class co-presented by Fixt Point and the Clown School and performed by his “graduate” clowns.
Open Class with Philippe Gaulier, Rosenthal Theater in the Inner-City Arts Center, 720 Kohler Street, downtown LA, CA 90021. Fri Sep 6, 2 pm. Tickets: $20. www.gaulieropenclassla.eventbrite.com.
**Photos of the master class by Charles Ketchabaw.