Fireflies / Week Four: Delivery

Dear Friends,
This installment, coming to you from New York, is best accompanied by a cafe au lait and Juliette Greco's rendition of "Sous Le Ciel de Paris" played on low volume (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XybsC829dsM).

Love,
Erik


Monday, July 23

Ate my spiritual Wheaties (and an anise petit macaron) this morning.  On my way to school, classmates (who liken me to Freddie Mercury) ask what theatre company I belong to. I explain to confused expressions that we work on a job-to-job basis in the US - whereas in the EU, actors are company-based and government-subsidized. Whatever customs divide us, however, are bridged by Gaulier's austerity, which has rendered us an indefatigable ensemble.

We present clown cowboys today, then samurais, discovering the distinction between imitation and parody. Then half the class presents imitations of other students' clowns. In nearly every instance, imitators embody their subjects better than their originators! When you're your own clown, it seems, you don't sell your idiocy as well as somebody who's got the map of your clown - but none of your pride. When students finally encounter success as they do in this exercise, Gaulier advises them: If we love you once, don't come back for more; better to leave with success in your heart than flop on your mind!

After class, a chance meeting with my first Parisian paramour leads to a midnight tour of Montmartre. Doused in kir (an apértif of blackcurrant liqueur topped with white wine) and sated with French delicacies I'll neither repeat nor likely revisit, we scour Sacré Coeur and the sites where Amelie was filmed. In this moonlit bohemia, Mondrian and Modigliani found inspiration - and I find truth in the cliché Paris is for lovers.

For sure we kill you... but how?
Fantastique humor - or not an asshair of humor?
Understanding is for the intellect. We want to see your face when you don't understand! 


Tuesday, July 24

I think seriously of skipping class, or better yet, jumping out a window - a running joke among students. Instead, we jump rope to Verdi, then the remaining half of us appear as a classmate's clown. I play Jacob's inept terrorist and the class laughs! Then pairs of us must present Macbeth with neither clown knowing the plot, still insistent that there is no problem!  I flop and the day's massacre begins - only this time, something inside me just. lets. go. No tears, no struggle. It is time to accept that I am not a clown - at least not in Étampes - and that it is okay. I am still a good man and actor. I remove my red nose.

And then, like a summer rain dousing parched earth, a miracle occurs.

Put back your nose, says Gaulier.

Who is worse, Erik... or Claude? he asks the class. Claude, a student who has had equal difficulty and whose clown persona is an irascible Popeye, argues with Gaulier - then brings the argument onstage. While Claude barks, I think: Painful as it is, everything Philippe does is deliberate. Why does he compare me with Claude?  It dawns on me that "the nice guy" persona I've essayed here - the "social director" who smiles like a dope with every entrance - maybe he's the one that doesn't exist onstage. The tumult around me spins and enters me and, without warning, combustion: Firefly is born!

Firefly curses in broken French, singing, strutting, a peacocking Parisian who takes himself very seriously!  The rant goes on for what feels like 25 minutes (but may have been five). When clown comes round your body, time disappears!  At its conclusion, Gaulier plays the sound of a cheering audience and the class gives me a standing ovation. See you tomorrow, keedz! 

I can think of nothing more to do than scrub the floors I have scuffed during the exercise. For the next 20 minutes I clean, feeling relieved, wobbly, grateful - through the looking glass.

I share the news with Claudia, my father's former wife, who studied with Philippe 25 years ago and urged me to take his class in the first place. I buy my first French scarf secondhand, hop the Metro and observe a young man reading Sur La Route by Kerouac and a woman channeling Magnani, hair piled high atop her stormy head. Everything is alive again in me. 


Wednesday, July 25

Paris, you sparkle today. Thank you for reminding me of a deeper truth than this body consciously knew!

Today we explore the clown savant (think Harpo playing the harp) and clown paranoia - and everyone is encouraged to have tantrums to uncover the auguste clowns among us. We return to the Jacques Deval exercise - this time with the addition of a taxi waiting outside to take us to the train station, a chicken cooking backstage that we must check on, and 400 deaf audience members. The more problems, the happier the clown! 

Before we begin, Gaulier critiques my work from yesterday:

This one... he always rushes!  Why you always rush?
You rush because you fear. Your fear eats your love for the audience - and our love for you.
Theatre cannot heal your fear; go away and heal it, then come back and let us love you!

I decide not to do the Deval exercise, but to marinate in yesterday's opening and today's offering. After class, Gaulier finds me with Linda, his teaching associate, and says: The clown found your body yesterday... Not bad... not bad at all!  You're very good as a wanker!  Feels like I've been knighted.

I meet a director, Clémence, for drinks, noticing it's become increasingly difficult to impart the impact of the class without stuttering.


Thursday, July 26

Morning shoot with Sophie, the photographer who scouted me in The Hague for her moustache series - then a tour of the exquisite Paris Opera and Ballet. 77 year-old Marc Chagall crowned this jewel box of a theatre, silencing anti-Semitic critics with his ceiling painting: I wanted to reflect, like a mirror in a bouquet, the dreams and creations of the singers and musicians, to recall the movement of the colorfully attired audience below, and to honor the great opera and ballet composers... Now I offer this work as a gift of gratitude to France, without which there would be no color and no freedom. I feel the same.

Lunch at A Priori The, a 19th century tea room hidden beneath the glass-paneled passages of Galerie Vivienne, before dancing to a juke box of genres with students who are to be denounced if their eyes resemble those of a fish dead 40 years!  I am asked to play Monsieur Loyale before the next exercise, in which clowns must portray the President of British Petroleum and his or her assistant. It is fascinating that clowns who have otherwise remained inert now spring to life in the presence of a particular partner - yes, there is clown chemistry, folks, and for the first time, scenes truly soar in class! Once again, I am complimented for my role as Ringmaster, and notice that I am even able to coach other clowns when they ask for it.


Friday, July 27

Dreamt I flew to school on a red balloon.  It's our last day and I realize that, next to cinema, teaching is the most eternal of arts.  Teach well and the benefits are limitless. 36 of us met in a tiny pocket of France, never to return to our countries - or ourselves - the same.  As we jump rope to Puccini (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpxXlhTP8os), tears come to my eyes. I'll miss the faces of everyone whose beauty was so clear to me, even when their clowns were not. We play the game of the cursing student, and Gaulier takes most of us down a peg or ten, just to tenderize us for the show (hopefully). His son Samuel is with us, inspiration for our daily game of Samuel Says, and I wonder how he survived growing up Gaulier.

The bouffon class prepares their presentations, and Philippe asks me to assist him with the show. I'm in awe of their work; the bouffon are social outcasts - punks, cripples, transvestites, psychiatric patients, the homeless, diseased and degenerate - delivering diatribes that denigrate outcasts whom they believe to be beneath them. The hitch is, these diatribes are direct quotes from existing Presidents, politicians, and preachers (or as they call them, bastards). Imagine an Otto Dix or George Grosz painting come alive and you get the picture. Now I understand how Sasha Baron Cohen's Ali G. and Borat sprang from the loins of this work and Gaulier's tutelage.

We're backstage, gathered for a group prayer before the final show, and Gaulier pokes his head in: Erik, I need for you to be Monsieur Loyale today.  I actually had a dream this would happen. For the next two or so hours, I emcee the show and improv before and after each pair of clown doctors attempt their first surgery. When asked if I'm upset not to have performed as Firefly, I smile: No. I'm grateful he came round my body, but this is where I am needed now, and I am happy to serve!

During our post-mortem, Gaulier confers with his wife and declares this one of the best shows they've had. In a way, Erik had the whole show on his shoulders, and he did very well!  Gaulier's final advice for us is issued: Always to have pleasure in what you do!  I speak on our behalf to thank him. We choke up; his wet cough surges and he simply says, About this, I can say nothing.

We take group photos and pack our belongings: noses, cigars, guns and suits. I take a deep breath and survey this pristine white building, psychic scars (and insistent clown music) dissipating as the walking wounded meet a new world. But first we meet at the pub with tumbling words, unable say goodbye. Together we have eaten glass, tasted light, been tickled by the clown and, perhaps through this extraordinary compression, borne diamonds.

Intelligence is easier than naïveté!


Saturday, July 28

It has come to my attention during the past 12 hours that my passport is missing.  After retracing my steps and turning the flat upside down, I conclude it is Paris asking me to stay. She gets her wish; I stay for the weekend to gather necessary documents, disappointed to miss a road trip to Loire Valley but grateful to have time for proper goodbyes - and a spot-check of the sweet spots of the city I've missed! Later that evening, fueled by the best falafel I've ever had and a poppy seed hamantaschen from the Jewish quarter, I meet classmates beneath the Montmartre carousel for a final round.


Sunday, July 29

It is worth noting that, if your conversation with a Parisian shopkeeper begins, "How much is this?" they will simply press "Reset" on the conversation and say, "Bon jour," smiling. If you're keen enough to pick up your cue by acknowledging the gift of the day and that there is a human - and not just a shopkeeper - before you, then the conversation really begins. (Pardon, in such cases, becomes an invaluable catch-all for the jams we Americans traffic in.)

I visit the Mosquée's hammam and perform cultural research on the bobos (bourgeois bohemians) of the 17th arrondissement. What marks this day as truly different, however, is the emergence of three, mark me, three women, any of whom could become my wife!  One gives me directions - one sells me a half-mask at the novelty shop - and one joins me for espresso and dreamscaping on the butte of Montmartre. Could this be the Gena Rowlands to my John Cassavettes? 

Final installment round the bend.