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BOUFFONS AND THE ECSTASY OF MOCKING

23 January, 2017  → 27 January, 2017 - Melbourne - AUSTRALIA


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Bouffons have been watching the news
coming from Planet Earth lately

Their eyes are shimmering with jubilation
and they have decided to come for a ride.

 

IT'S TIME FOR BOUFFON PLAY !

The word Bouffon comes from a latin verb: buffare, to puff, to fill the cheeks with air, to deform oneself, to swell in  order to provoke laughter. It seems to be a very old human practice. In  fact, bouffons are direct descendants of the satyrs from Ancient Greek  Satyric Drama.
The actual word "Bouffons" comes from French and it entered English theatrical language through the work of Jacques Lecoq.


The essence of the Bouffon is in the dynamic of MOCKING.

The MOCKER is a specific role, existing in all human societies. Bouffons represent elements of their society in an amplified, distorted or exaggerated way, thereby provoking laughter and outrage.

Their Mockery doesn't have an agenda in itself, because the Bouffons don’t have opinions, and they don’t protect any side from their mocking. They just mock everything and everybody. Their purpose is to have fun mocking humans and therefore they use everything they find, with  ferocious ecstasy and jubilation. This is their power: they see and play with everything, they feed on human dynamics in order to play with it.

Bouffons never touch on individual or private themes, instead they take on big collective movements –  involving the social complexity and  the very essence of society and culture. Politics, religion, economy, power, money and finances, morality, war and the military, science,  gender and race, ecology, family, education and school, cultural  institutions…

 

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For Bouffon work to be possible, we need to be very well and precisely informed about  the situation or themes that we are mocking,  in order to see and then reveal what is hidden, what lies underneath –  on the other side, in the shadow or the unspeakable. Nothing can be invented – all the movements and dynamics are documented and are based  in authentic behaviors.

The actors need to collect facts, not opinions. Bouffons have no opinions or values. Actors, directors, writers and members of the audience do. That's why, as a theatre genre, Bouffon is often very  provocative, because its very nature is to bring hidden things to the  surface and to unmask the collective games lying behind events. This often includes the fact that the role of oppressor and victim are always intertwined.


Everybody in the audience gets scrambled by a bouffon piece, which can be often a bit difficult and or even unbearable. It’s not the  Bouffons who are unbearable but the truth that they reveal about  humanity, what is hidden, what lies underneath, on the other side, the grotesque of human society (grotesque comes from greek cryptos =  hidden).

 

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THE PROGRAM

 

THE BOUFFON FOLLY

- Play, action/reaction and fun
- Collective complicity
- Engaged madness
- From children playing to Bouffon games
- The Bouffon “state” and the mocking eyes
- The grotesque body: amplification, deformation, swelling and puffing
- The white bodies

THE DYNAMIC OF MOCKING
- The state of play: bands of Bouffons, rhythm, rituals
- The shapeshifting chorus
- How the Bouffons see the world: themes of play
- The Bouffons mocking the great themes of humanity
- How Bouffon relates to Tragedy, Melodrama and Clown
- Writing in the Grotesque Mode.
- Staging and Devising for Bouffons.

 

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PRACTICALITIES

SCHEDULE

The workshop is devised as an intensive five-day training,
from Monday January 23 to Friday January 27
Every day from 9:00am to 5:30pm

LOCATION

Clifton Hall
Richmond Uniting Church
304 – 314 Church Street Richmond 3121,
Melbourne, Australia.


ENROLLMENT

Early Bird registration: AUS$ 680 if full payment is sent by January 2nd, 2017.

Full Price: AUS$ 750

Please note that tuition does not include accommodation: participants will be responsible for organizing their staying in Melbourne.

To apply to the workshop please send Giovanni a brief letter of motivation by e-mail, sharing something about why you wish to attend this training. Once the application is accepted, applicants can confirm their enrollment by sending a AUSD 250 non-refundable deposit.

Once accepted, places will be given in order of arrival.

Please note that the number of participants is limited to 18.

Please note the worshop is a learning continuum, so it is not possible to attend the class only in parts, or to miss any session of the work.

For further information about the content of the workshop, and for applications
please contact Giovanni Fusetti

 

 

For enrolment and practical enquiries please contact KIMBERLEY TWINER

 

ktwiner @ gmail.com

 

Tel: 04 68664466

 

Design & programming : DomRadisson.net