Intensive workshop with Giovanni Fusetti (world-renowned movement theater teacher)

BOUFFONS and the Ecstasy of Mocking - 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 language and entered English theatrical language through the work of Jacques Lecoq.

The essence of the Bouffon is in the dyanamic 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…

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).

Schedule:

JUNE Saturday 26th – 2:00 – 10:00 pm, with public introductory lecture/open class, by Giovanni Fusetti in the evening
General Schedule: 4 – 10 pm (6 hours per day), except for:
-Sun, June 27th,  4th & 18th : 1 pm – 7 pm
-Thu, July 8th: 11 am – 5 pm
-Tue, July 13th: 10 am – 4 pm
-Thu, July 15th: 11 am – 5 pm
-Mon, July 19th: 10 am – 1 pm & 3 pm – 10 pm