[post 458]
Like his mentor, Jacques Lecoq, Gaulier was famous as a teacher, not as a performer, but that wasn't always the case. In the early 70s, he toured a highly successful clown show with fellow Lecoq teacher, the Swiss-Romande clown, actor, and musician Pierre Byland, who also became and remains a prominent clown teacher. In fact, I first heard about Gaulier from my original circus mentors, Hovey Burgess and Judy Finelli, when they returned from the 1974 International Mime Festival in Viterbo, Wisconsin. (I had wanted to go, but did not have the money, alas!) Hovey and Judy loved an act, Les Assiettes (The Plates), performed by Gaulier and Byland, in which they broke 200 plates a night. The act even got a brief mention in my book Clowns (1976) in a section on Mimes and Eccentrics:
Franz Josef-Bogner, Pierre Byland, and Philippe Gaulier —all former students of Lecoq— have already achieved some recognition as clown-mimes: Byland and Gaulier work together, performing a plate-smashing act in the tradition of Bagessen.
Earlier in the same chapter, I had written this about Bagessen:
Carl Bagessen, 1868?–1931, developed an entire act around his inability to hold onto dinner plates, while an entire roll of flypaper experienced no difficulty at all sticking to all parts of his body.
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| Carl Bagessen |
The little we know of the Gaulier-Byland act mostly comes from the 1972 video clip below. But first this....
TECHNICAL NOTE: People younger than me (there are a few) sometimes ask to see video of work done by my generation in the 70s and 80s, as if video technology always existed and would have been in use by us. In fact, consumer-level video cameras were not even available until the early 80s and cost $1,000 and up, which would be about $5,000 in today's money. The quality was poor and the physical tape deteriorated fairly quickly. Most of the videos you see of performers from pre-1985 are from movies or, more likely, television shows.
AND now back to our main story, already in progress: While performing Les Assiettes at the Théâtre de Carouge just outside of Geneva, Gaulier and Byland did a short excerpt from the piece as part of an interview with Radio Télévision Suisse to promote their run at the Théâtre de Carouge just outside of Geneva.
TECHNICAL NOTE: People younger than me (there are a few) sometimes ask to see video of work done by my generation in the 70s and 80s, as if video technology always existed and would have been in use by us. In fact, consumer-level video cameras were not even available until the early 80s and cost $1,000 and up, which would be about $5,000 in today's money. The quality was poor and the physical tape deteriorated fairly quickly. Most of the videos you see of performers from pre-1985 are from movies or, more likely, television shows.
AND now back to our main story, already in progress: While performing Les Assiettes at the Théâtre de Carouge just outside of Geneva, Gaulier and Byland did a short excerpt from the piece as part of an interview with Radio Télévision Suisse to promote their run at the Théâtre de Carouge just outside of Geneva.
But is this the whole story? Clearly not. Les Assiettes grew into a 90-minute piece, so what we are seeing above is a mere snapshot. In an interview with Christian Hendriksen, Gaulier explained the origins of the piece:
"Pierre was my acrobatic teacher. I had a good reputation at Lecoq’s school as a clown, and he asked me if I wanted to do a show with him for Berlin. Me, I was the guy who makes the decisions and my friend Byland, he was the idiot who follows me. And we went to a catastrophe every time. But it's always like this, a couple of clowns, one thinks he's intelligent and the other, he discovers the hot water, so it gives a good complicity for having fun. We wanted to make people laugh. Breaking plates or kicking ass. And, so at the end we decided to break plates.. [How did you pick?] I dunno, rock paper, scissors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."
"But the audience told you if you were a good couple. Yes, we were a very good couple, and it's difficult to find. It was a miracle. It's not easy. In the beginning, because we were teachers at Lecoq’s school, we tried the show in front of our students, so it was good. If they laugh or if they don't laugh, we can see if it's funny or not, and the, the students are not very nice with the teacher!"
Both Stanley Allan Sherman and Avner Eisenberg were students at the school that year, and they shared their memories of that first draft with me.
Stanley: "The first test show was at Lecoq’s and was hysterical. The video does not begin to capture how hysterically funny the show was. The timing, the tease, playing off one another, was beyond belief. And it really was 200 plates... it was hard to find quantities of plates that were cheap! Every plate trick/manipulation that you know was in the show. The tease went on for 5 or 10 minutes, slow, then boom boom boom. Then a shitload. Others wanted to do things with meaning but they said, 'No, we’re just breaking plates, the joy of breaking plates... What’s the stupidest thing we could possibly do that was totally worthless? This is what we came up with, how stupid of a show can we create?' Entire show, no other bits for an hour. That’s the type of gall these guys had."
Avner: "Philippe was a teacher at Lecoq when I was there. He and Pierre Byland, another teacher at the school, had a show called, Les Assiettes in which they broke over 200 plates at every performance. In my second year at Lecoq’s I was one of the few at the school who juggled. Gaulier and Byland asked me to work with them to create two juggling numbers in the show, one sitting side by side, and the other to pass 6 plates. We mocked up plates out of plywood and rehearsed intensively for a couple of weeks. They finally arrived at passing 5 plates competently, always to the surprise of the audience. Pierre caught all the plates, grinned out at the audience, and smashed them on the ground. In the course of this I went from student to teacher to friend; friendships I still treasure. Neither of them knew how at the time of the clip. I wish there was a video of the whole show as it evolved. It was marvelous."
Berlin was a triumph. Gaulier continues: "So the opening day and after newspapers, we could stay two or three months in Berlin. It was surprising that there were so many people who wanted to invite the show. So we needed a director to come to look at us. Roger Blin was a French actor and director. He directed many things, including the first performances of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Happy Days and Endgame."
The show was said to have run for a year at Le Petit Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris.
"But the audience told you if you were a good couple. Yes, we were a very good couple, and it's difficult to find. It was a miracle. It's not easy. In the beginning, because we were teachers at Lecoq’s school, we tried the show in front of our students, so it was good. If they laugh or if they don't laugh, we can see if it's funny or not, and the, the students are not very nice with the teacher!"
Both Stanley Allan Sherman and Avner Eisenberg were students at the school that year, and they shared their memories of that first draft with me.
Stanley: "The first test show was at Lecoq’s and was hysterical. The video does not begin to capture how hysterically funny the show was. The timing, the tease, playing off one another, was beyond belief. And it really was 200 plates... it was hard to find quantities of plates that were cheap! Every plate trick/manipulation that you know was in the show. The tease went on for 5 or 10 minutes, slow, then boom boom boom. Then a shitload. Others wanted to do things with meaning but they said, 'No, we’re just breaking plates, the joy of breaking plates... What’s the stupidest thing we could possibly do that was totally worthless? This is what we came up with, how stupid of a show can we create?' Entire show, no other bits for an hour. That’s the type of gall these guys had."
Avner: "Philippe was a teacher at Lecoq when I was there. He and Pierre Byland, another teacher at the school, had a show called, Les Assiettes in which they broke over 200 plates at every performance. In my second year at Lecoq’s I was one of the few at the school who juggled. Gaulier and Byland asked me to work with them to create two juggling numbers in the show, one sitting side by side, and the other to pass 6 plates. We mocked up plates out of plywood and rehearsed intensively for a couple of weeks. They finally arrived at passing 5 plates competently, always to the surprise of the audience. Pierre caught all the plates, grinned out at the audience, and smashed them on the ground. In the course of this I went from student to teacher to friend; friendships I still treasure. Neither of them knew how at the time of the clip. I wish there was a video of the whole show as it evolved. It was marvelous."
Berlin was a triumph. Gaulier continues: "So the opening day and after newspapers, we could stay two or three months in Berlin. It was surprising that there were so many people who wanted to invite the show. So we needed a director to come to look at us. Roger Blin was a French actor and director. He directed many things, including the first performances of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Happy Days and Endgame."
The show was said to have run for a year at Le Petit Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris.
"The success of it led to a further 10 years off and on performing it all around the world. We played three or four months in Berlin, Steinham Theater, and after we were invited to Czechoslovakia. I think in our life about 10 years, but three months here after we teach in local school after three months."
"And you, you stay one hour and a half looking at these two idiots. It's possible. Yeah. It's a long time. It is a rhythm problem. Everybody laughs... you can be more subtle and you have to, like a symphony, you have to play with a different rhythm. You cannot stay on the same rhythm one hour and half, so you change your rhythm, but you have to, to start strong and to finish strong."
Asked in the interview if the broken plates are a symbol for anything, the response was "No. For us, it’s a joke. If people want afterward to imagine things —many people discover symbols, even messages in it— that’s fine. But for us, at the beginning, it’s a gag. Of course a plate can correspond to many things…"
I am sure there is more to be found in the physical archives of the Paris newspapers, in the Odéon archives, and by interviewing Pierre Byland, but I will leave that to some young Ph.D. student searching for a dissertation topic! But I kinda doubt more video exists.
"And you, you stay one hour and a half looking at these two idiots. It's possible. Yeah. It's a long time. It is a rhythm problem. Everybody laughs... you can be more subtle and you have to, like a symphony, you have to play with a different rhythm. You cannot stay on the same rhythm one hour and half, so you change your rhythm, but you have to, to start strong and to finish strong."
Asked in the interview if the broken plates are a symbol for anything, the response was "No. For us, it’s a joke. If people want afterward to imagine things —many people discover symbols, even messages in it— that’s fine. But for us, at the beginning, it’s a gag. Of course a plate can correspond to many things…"
I am sure there is more to be found in the physical archives of the Paris newspapers, in the Odéon archives, and by interviewing Pierre Byland, but I will leave that to some young Ph.D. student searching for a dissertation topic! But I kinda doubt more video exists.
___________________________
• The third person in the video is André Chameau, who wrote the music for the show.
• Byland is still active at his Burlesk Center in Cavigliano, Switzerland.
• In The Moving Body, Lecoq gives Byland credit for introducing the red nose to his school's curriculum: “It was Pierre Byland, a student at the school before he returned to teach here, who introduced the famous red nose, the smallest mask in the world, which would help people to expose their naiveté and their fragility.”
• Thank you to Drew Richardson for first alerting me to the video footage.
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