At a clown school near Paris, failure is the lesson

ÉTAMPES, France — The person in management tonight is called Carlo Jacucci. You are on the stage. He is the viewers. And there is virtually no likelihood you are going to please him — which, someway, is precisely why you are right here.

“The video games start,” Jacucci, a matter-of-fact Franco-Italian, tells his college students, then faucets a drum between his legs.

The stage lights go shiny. The music begins. A bunch of red-nosed clowns in numerous costumes begins a ritual that has been the heartbeat of this place for greater than 40 years.

That is the École Philippe Gaulier, a college named after its founder, a instructor who believed comedy and clowning start not with jokes, however with the pleasure of being ridiculous. Or, as Gaulier calls it, discovering “your fool.”

Medical doctors, monks, actors — they arrive from all around the world to check this philosophy within the in any other case sleepy village of Étampes, about an hour’s practice trip south of Paris. The loudest noises after sunset come from a room filled with English audio system studying to fall on their faces.

A stroke in 2023 compelled Gaulier, now in his early 80s, to retire from instructing full time. However the college nonetheless runs on the system he constructed — carried on by the academics he skilled — shaping each train, each critique and nervous pupil hoping for fun.

College students like Brazilian actress Gabriela Flarys. She’s standing on the stage in an oversize frilly orange-and-white flamenco costume, prompting Jacucci to nickname her “orange broccoli.”

Flarys’ act isn’t going nicely. Her stage companions are a person dressed as a Roman warrior and one other as a mariachi with an oversize sombrero. The premise entails a love triangle.

“Welcome everybody to the worst second of the category,” Jacucci says flatly. “We reached it.”

The trio stares again at him. They’re confused. Ashamed.

The worst second has a reputation right here — le flop. It is the half everybody dreads, when you’ll be able to really feel your pink nostril start to droop because the useless air fills the room. Nevertheless it’s additionally the place the actual work begins.

Jacucci singles out Flarys. She wants extra emotion. He tells her to get indignant at him. What occurs subsequent feels virtually like an exorcism.

“Carlo!” she shrieks, shouting Jacucci’s first identify. “I am pissed off!”

She will get louder. And louder. Till one thing breaks free. Then she calms down.

“Wait,” she tells the gang, then picks up a shaving cream pie and throws it on the mariachi’s face.

The room laughs together with her. Even Jacucci seems to be shocked.

“Me, I’m shocked,” he says. “I did not know you possibly can change.”

Painful but additionally refreshing

Instructing is Jacucci’s second act.

A longtime performer, he first got here to Gaulier as a pupil a long time in the past. He says he discovered the expertise painful — but additionally refreshing.

“[Gaulier] had no drawback telling me the reality of what he noticed,” he says.

“I felt instantly that it is a work that means that you can progress, since you face your limitations.”

Gaulier’s technique has produced an unlikely record of alumni: together with actors Rachel Weisz and Emma Thompson, each Oscar winners, and Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen.

A brand new era can be rising.

A decade in the past, Zach Zucker was working for Baron Cohen’s manufacturing firm in Los Angeles when Gaulier got here to city to do a workshop. Zucker signed up.

“And 5 minutes in, I noticed Philippe work his magic, and I simply couldn’t imagine what I used to be watching,” Zucker says.

Zucker had skilled in American improv colleges, together with Second Metropolis and Upright Residents Brigade. However this felt completely different. Different locations educate you the best way to succeed. Gaulier, he says, was instructing individuals the best way to fail.

“Everybody’s good at being good,” Zucker says. “However should you could be good at being dangerous, then nothing is dangerous — and it is really extra pleasant.”

Zucker finally moved to Étampes, the place he studied beneath Gaulier for 2 years.

At the moment he’s the ringmaster of Stamptown, a touring vaudeville present that leans closely into the Gaulier philosophy. His alter ego, Jack Tucker, repeatedly bombs on stage — and folds the failure into part of the act.

It is a schtick that is catching on — the present will air its first Netflix particular later this yr.

Julia Masli signed up for the varsity a decade in the past after studying there was no audition course of.

“So immediately I signed up and that was mainly my solely training,” she says.

In her one-woman present, Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!, Masli invitations the viewers to share their issues, which she then helps remedy in actual time. The present grew to become a breakout hit on the Edinburgh Fringe pageant.

Regardless of her success, Masli admits she spent years struggling to get fun. Gaulier’s brutal coaching helped her put together for that.

She remembers telling him she was from Estonia.

“He saved saying it is a very grey nation, and there is not any one humorous there,” she remembers.

Masli shortly realized her instructor would by no means accept something lower than good.

The pleasure to be ridiculous

Gaulier was born in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1943. He skilled to be a critical actor, however seen that each time he appeared on stage, audiences laughed.

Gaulier went on to check and later work with the mime instructor Jacques Lecoq. In 1980, Gaulier based his personal college, which has had stints in Paris, London, and for the previous 15 years, in Étampes.

That does not imply everyone seems to be made for this work.

“This pleasure to be ridiculous … to have a particular humor … it is given to some individuals,” Gaulier advised the BBC in 2015. “However not many.”

Michiko Miyazaki Gaulier, his spouse and former pupil, now runs the varsity’s day-to-day operations, retaining the schedule — and the Gaulier technique — on observe. She guarantees everybody leaves with one thing.

“Individuals come right here to vary,” she says. “Possibly they do not know what — however they need to change.”

Again inside Jacucci’s classroom, college students are nonetheless determining what that change seems to be like.

After class, Frank Benson, the Roman warrior, continues to be catching his breath.

“It was powerful at the moment,” says Benson, who got here from Australia to check right here. “Typically you go on the market and it flops actually exhausting, and it is not so enjoyable.”

However, he says, he is getting used to it. The frustration passes quicker now.

In one other nook of the room, Flarys, aka orange broccoli, is wiping the sweat off her face.

She has a confession: That is really her third stint on the college. Even with over 15 years of expertise performing, there’s one thing that retains her coming again right here.

What has she realized?

She says, “Nothing is a mistake should you play with it.”