It’s the love scene in “All’s Well That Ends Well” by Shakespeare:

I’m play­ing the boy. My part­ner is play­ing the girl. And, we’re both bouf­fons. The pro­duc­tion is en Fran­cais and we’re hav­ing a ball mock­ing this scene, as bouf­fons do. Ce n’est qu’un plaisir!

I come off stage for my next change, back into a “nor­mal” char­ac­ter and real­ize how free I feel. I also real­ize that my dev­il­ish inner voice that taunts me, tells me I’m not good enough, has been flushed into the outer world. Nowhere near me.

“This has got to be good,” I think to myself.

Con­sid­er­ing my wonky start with the bouf­fon train­ing with my men­tor, Marc Doré who stud­ied with LeCoq in Paris, I was sud­denly wooed over. A great big fat AHA! moment.

“I wasn’t over-​thinking my per­for­mance, my opin­ions were clear, and I had fun play­ing with my partner.”

“Tout Est Bien Qui Finit Bien” love scene in bouffons

It was every­thing you strive for as an actor.

20 years later, I decided it was time to bring this gem I had in my act­ing tool­box to the fore­front. I holed up in my apart­ment in Van­cou­ver, played my favourite music, and spent two weeks design­ing my first offi­cial “Buf­foon­ery Act­ing Work­shop”. I was lost in the joy I felt as I cre­ated a path for oth­ers to dis­cover, with all the wacky gifts along the way.
March 2007 was the offi­cial launch­ing of the work­shop and 5 eager par­tic­i­pants showed up. Brave bouf­fon war­riors.
Almost six years, and approx­i­mately 700 plus bouf­fons later, Buf­foon­ery Work­shops is grad­u­ally becom­ing “Buf­foon Cul­ture”. It has become not only good for actors, but also for the non-​actor.

Here we will only peek at the actor experience.

“What do you do for a liv­ing, Trilby?”

In social set­tings where I answer what my main focus is in life, “Buf­foon­ery Work­shops”, there is always a dou­ble take. And, I don’t blame them. I repeat, and then give a gen­eral idea what it is I do. Or more impor­tantly, what peo­ple do in my workshop.

When a group of actors begin my course, whether it be a 6 week pro­gram, or a 2 day inten­sive, or even a mini-​coaching, there needs to be a safe place estab­lished. Safety is para­mount, in my opin­ion, in order to reap the full ben­e­fits of the journey.

Obsta­cles…

We talk about each person’s expe­ri­ences, obsta­cles, and goals for their act­ing. Some of the obsta­cles I hear are: “I think too much”, “I don’t trust myself”, “I’m too aware of my body”, “I’m afraid of for­get­ting my lines”, “I want to be more truth­ful”, “ner­vous”, “wor­ried about what oth­ers think”, “want to be more con­nected”… and so on.

I assure every­one that they will be so involved with what they are doing as a bouf­fon that most of those “voices” will dis­ap­pear. For the time being.

When peo­ple ask me what is a bouf­fon, I start by sug­gest­ing it is sim­i­lar to a clown, but not really. Then I com­pare the two enti­ties: the clown gen­er­ally seeks approval from its audi­ence; the bouf­fon doesn’t give a s…t! Hence, being in a bouf­fon state is very freeing.

Because the bouf­fon loves to mock us, the human world, he/​she has a very clear opin­ion of the sit­u­a­tion and the char­ac­ter it is ridi­cul­ing. This is very help­ful for the act­ing world.

As an actor, your job is to dis­cover what is hid­den under­neath the obvi­ous text, para­graphs, scenes, and story. Sub­text. As in life, what we say can’t always be lit­er­ally trans­lated. How many times have you said “fine” when you meant the oppo­site? And that is just one word!

I have dug around, myself, in many plays, scenes, lines to find out what is really being said. This sleuthing will inform me in how I deliver a line.

But, some­times, sit­ting on our butt, script in hand, pen­cil in mouth is not the best way to dis­cover the answers. We also need to move. And, some­times we need to move BIG.

That’s where I come in.

“Imag­ine you are down­town dri­ving a Porsche. Yeah… so what? It’s a Porsche, yeah, but you can only drive it 50 km an hour. You can see that the car can go fast by the speedome­ter, but, that’s all you know.”

“One day, you take your Porsche out to the desert where it’s really safe, and the road is straight. You start to drive it. Really drive it. FAST. You grasp the wheel tighter, you sit up, and you pay attention!”

“Holy crap! This car can GO!” It’s a rush.

You go back to the city, still dri­ving the same car, back to 50 km an hour, but now you are dif­fer­ent. You under­stand the power beneath you. You hold the wheel with a dif­fer­ent, know­ing grip. Your pos­ture is dif­fer­ent. There is a glint in your eyes that wasn’t there before.

This is what we do in Buf­foon­ery Workshops.

I take you to your extreme, bring you back, and leave you with a know­ing, a con­fi­dence that wasn’t there before. The par­tic­i­pants will buf­foon a mono­logue or a scene just as I did in my Shake­speare play.

Oh, and, that glint? It’s got a sense of humour.

But, let’s back up for a moment. You still might be won­der­ing, “Yeah, but, what is the bouf­fon, and where the heck does it originate.”

Good ques­tion.

We need to go far back, way back to the time of “Le Renais­sance” and Philippe Gaulier one of the great men­tors of LeBouffon.

Some expla­na­tions about Le Bouffon:

“Bouf­fon is an art form, 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 Roman Catholic Church.”

“The ideal per­for­mance for a bouf­fon would be one where the audi­ence is wildly enter­tained, and then go home, real­ize their lives are mean­ing­less, and com­mit sui­cide. This of course is a the­o­ret­i­cal ideal instead of an antic­i­pated out­come.”
Jacques LeCoq, another wise bouf­fon men­tor, from which my school­ing orig­i­nated, com­pares the clown and the bouf­fon as such: “The dif­fer­ence between the clown and the bouf­fon is that while the clown is alone, the bouf­fon is part of a gang; while we make fun of the clown, the bouf­fon makes fun of us.”

Orig­i­nally, when LeCoq encour­aged his stu­dents to mock one another in the spirit of le bouf­fon, the exer­cise failed. The “moc­kee” felt insulted, and not com­fort­able. LeCoq real­ized that the bouf­fon had to have some dis­tor­tions (much like the “ugly peo­ple of the renais­sance”) in order for the mock­ery to be effec­tive. Bumps and lumps appeared, and that worked!

The “moc­kee” was able to laugh at him/​herself, and became more enlightened.

So.

The ben­e­fits from work­ing with le bouf­fon include work­ing well with your col­leagues (the hier­ar­chy is accepted in the bouf­fon gang and there is no con­flict), and releas­ing a self-​consciousness about your phys­i­cal self, thereby free­ing your­self to play honestly.

To play. Jouer. En Fran­cais, we always describe “act­ing” as “entrain de jouer”: playing.

Le Bouf­fon helps us reunite with what is already in us from our early years. And, as audi­ence mem­bers, we know that when the actor is hav­ing plea­sure in play­ing the story, we are relaxed, and involved.

Vive le the­atre! Vive le bouf­fon! Vive le jeu!

Please have a browse the Greater Van­cou­ver Pro­fes­sional The­atre Alliance web­site where this arti­cle had it’s debut.