YEAR COURSE - Autumn term / Oct-Dec

The Autumn Course is made up of two different subjects which follow the stream of Philippe Gaulier’s pedagogy. The programme is organised so that the student visits different types of theatre so they can  arrive at their own way.

Le Jeu– means GAME, and is the most important lesson from Philippe Gaulier’s teaching method. A course to learn the basics(secrets) of theatre.Everyone needs to pass through this. Comedy, tragedy, it doesn’t matter theatre starts here.

Neutral Mask  and Greek Tragedy– with Neutral Mask you travel everywhere with the imagination. It is a great journey to discover your aura.  Neutral masks are expressionless masks, but as soon as the actor gives them rhythm and movement, they start to come alive and bring the audience somewhere mysterious. This class is also a very important basic lesson.

Greek Tragedy makes you discover how you could be tall and strong .
“A Hero receives destiny on his head !” Neutral Mask helps actor to discover pleasure to be  tall as a tragic actor.

Classes will be hold Monday to Friday.

Movement class 90 min  +  Improvisation class: 120 min

Students may choose to do one course, a number of courses or to do the whole year – it is up to the student to decide.

You can take any combination of courses, it is not necessary to do a full term or a full year.

The discount price was set up for students doing a full term or seasonal courses.

This class has a capacity of 35 people. Classes may be canceled if the number of applicants is less than the specified minimum (20 people).

The discounted price is exclusively available to students enrolled in a full Autumn course.

Philippe turned 80 years old this year, and he will no longer teach regularly. He will instruct when his health allows, so we appreciate your understanding. The remaining classes will be led by his assistants, who have collaborated for many years. All our teachers have inherited Philippe Gaulier’s teachings and are active artists internationally

Discovering the law of theatre is grammar through children’s game. The words used most often during the workshop: pleasure, complicity, humour, impulse, fixed point, beauty. A child who is playing feels pleasure. His or her imagination is turned towards imagined countries where life unfolds without feelings breaking in. Free games lead to the theatre. Unfortunately, the opposite is not true. Too often, theatre leads to rather miserable theorising.

Above all, not making theatre with theatre, but with the pleasure of life, playing, its impulses.

Theatre needs people who bring colossal and unexpected pleasures to acting, not the others, who copy it slavishly.

The questions asked most often during the workshop, Has the child played his role in major or minor? Has he shown us the pleasures which correspond to these situations? Has he entertained us?

The student, having learnt during LE JEU workshop that pleasure leads the dance, goes off into an amagined nature, armed with his Neutral Mask.

No wrinkles. No past. And let me revel to you; earth, sea, air, water, rivers, mountains, animals, matter: from gelatine to steel, the coloues, the light. The Neutral Mask will move them, without the slightest restraint.The Neutral Mask is freer than the person wearing it. It takes him everywhere. It shows him those rythms he knows how to reproduce and those he can’t.

The Neutral Mask gives its freedom to the person wearing it.

Time for Greek Tragedy to make her or his thunderous entrance.  Are not her heroes shrouded in an aura unlike any other?  Does not their destiny, their perpendicular destiny written above their heads by unjust gods, force them to walk upright and to be big, always big?  Because if through inadvertence a god should happen to see a hero lose his stature,  he would go straight off and tell the other gods about it.  And every god in Olympus would burst out laughing.  And the hero would be Fallen for ever. 

Being big,  walking without losing one’s marvellous aura,  displaying a tremendous charm, being happy to have been singled out by the gods and to have had inscribed above one’s head a unique and iniquitous destiny; is not all this the source of extreme pleasure for the hero?  And extreme pleasure for the actor?

Greek Tragedy, which is a phenomenal poem, it’s teach us the essential:Beauty. Aura. Fixed Point.