Philippe Gaulier
Philippe Gaulier (born in Paris, 4 March 1943) is a French comedian and founder of École Philippe Gaulier, a French comedy workshop located in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine. He collaborated with Jacques Lecoq in the mid 1960s and was an instructor at École Jacques Lecoq in the late 1970s. As well as performing as a clown, He is also a playwright and director. He has published The Tormentor (Le Gégèneur), a book discussing his thoughts on the theatre and also contains exercises designed to advance the development of an actors skill.
Gaulier is known for performing both clown and bouffon comic genres and is generally recognized by some to be the world's leading authority on the Bouffon, a comic genre he holds as a sort of inverted Clown, where a balance is struck between grotesqueness and charm.
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[edit] Bouffon
According to Gaulier, Bouffon is an genre which originated with the 'Ugly People' of France during the French Renaissance. Gaulier said excessively ugly people, lepers, and those with disfiguring scars or deformities were "banished to the swamp." The exception was during festivals, when the bouffon (or ugly people) were expected to entertain the 'beautiful people'.
During these performances, the bouffon's goal was to get away with insulting or disgusting the beautiful people as much as possible. Typically, the bouffon would target their attack on the leaders within the mainstream of society, such as the Government or the Church.
The ideal performance for a bouffon would be one where the audience is wildly entertained, go home, realize that their lives are meaningless and commit suicide. This of course is an theoretic fantasy rather than a plausible outcome.
His teachings, similar to Lecoq, work on a 'Via Negativa' approach wherein he encourages students to find the most successful performance outcome for themselves, by harshly rejecting their technique or creative ideas with insults if he considers the concept to be 'rubbish'.
[edit] École Philippe Gaulier
Founded in 1980, the École Philippe Gaulier is a theatre workshop based around play or 'Le Jeu' being the core of making and performing theatre and promotes the theory that acting is a child's game played with great pleasure and dexterity that forms a rapport with the audience by speaking to their imagination.
In 1991, The Arts Council England persuaded Gaulier to relocate the École Philippe Gaulier to the UK where it as based for eleven years until 2002. In 2005 it reopened back in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine until 2011 when it relocated again, this time to Étampes which opened there in summer 2011. Former students at the school include the theatre director Simon McBurney, whose company Theatre de Complicite has been influenced by Gaulier's work, and the actors Emma Thompson, Marcello Magni, Kathryn Hunter, Cal McCrystal and Sacha Baron Cohen.
[edit] See also
- Comedic genres
- Clown
- Clown College
- Circus Clowns
- Rodeo clown
- The ICP
- Mime
- Flatulist
- Physical theatre
- Slapstick
- Jacques Lecoq
- Le Pétomane
- Jerry Lewis
