‘New Zealanders are inventive by necessity’: how the master clown Philippe Gaulier shaped NZ theatre

Master clown and French theatre guru Philippe Gaulier has passed away aged 82, but his influence will live on around the world – particularly in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The performance style inspired by Gaulier can be traced throughout New Zealand theatre since the 1970s, often centring around Toi Whakaari New Zealand Drama School.

Nola Millar, the first director of Toi Whakaari in 1970, said École Jacques Lecoq – where Gaulier trained and taught, before starting his own school – was one of the best theatre schools she had ever seen.

The influence of Gaulier is significant: several of his graduates went on to teach at Toi Whakaari, including Tom McCrory (Head of Movement, 1998–2013), Christian Penny (Director, 2011–18) and award-winning director Nina Nawalowalo.

In 2002, Nawalowalo and McCrory co-founded The Conch, a theatre company focused on Pasifika stories using visual and physical theatre forms. McCory said Gaulier’s style builds resilience and independence and has been so popular in Aotearoa because “New Zealanders are inventive by necessity”.

Training the clown

Gaulier was trained by Jacques Lecoq (1921–99) at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, founded in 1956. Lecoq’s training focused on using masks, mime and clown. Many of his students went on to develop their own styles and training schools, and Gaulier would become one of the most well-known graduates.

After being his student, Gaulier taught with Lecoq in the 1970s before opening his own school in London in 1991, which relocated to France in 2002.

Here he created a block module style of teaching that was incredibly accessible to international actors.

Like Lecoq, Gaulier also focused on clown, bouffon, neutral mask and melodrama. But his first focus was teaching Le Jeu (the game), complicité and encouraging actors to play. Complicité in this context is best understood as the tangible sense of the performers all being complicit, or colluding, in order to present a show to the audience.

Theatre director, actor and academic David O’Donnell writes in Acting in Aotearoa:

The emphasis on complicité teaches the actor to be completely connected with other actors onstage. The training works against self-indulgence because it requires that the actor be fully engaged with the audience response, that they earn audience engagement and sustain that for every moment of the performance. The work rigorously develops the imagination, the control of rhythm and teaches the actor to become more relaxed onstage.

Playing games in New Zealand

Gaulier’s list of students includes a vast array of famous actors and a surprisingly large number of New Zealanders. New Zealand Theatre company Theatre Action (1971–77) was founded by several Lecoq graduates solidifying the French Clown influence in New Zealand early on.

There are several theatre companies in New Zealand that still consistently use Gaulier’s methods and style, especially Le Jeu and playing games.

In 1991 Samantha Scott founded Maidment Youth Theatre, later renamed Massive Theatre Company. There is a huge community of actors surrounding Massive, many graduates of both Toi Whakaari and Gaulier, including Miriama McDowell, Madeline Sami and Kura Forrester.

Scott went back and studied with Gaulier again in 2012–14 and would often sit beside Gaulier and observe him as a teacher.

Scott recalls Gaulier asking her, “Why do you think so many New Zealanders come over to the school?” She told him that it’s because so many actors have worked with Gaulier graduates and want to experience it for themselves.

Scott said, “I think fundamentally he really likes New Zealanders, he likes our gutsiness”.

A key Gaulier concept Massive Theatre Company emphasises is the complicité between actors, the joy and pleasure of playing and performing to an audience. It is the foundation of their ensemble-based company.

A Slightly Isolated Dog, a theatre company formed in 2005, extends this Gaulier idea of complicité to their audience.

Director Leo Gene Peters has not trained with Gaulier, but was taught by and often collaborates with those who have. Jonathan Price, a core member of the devising company, studied with Gaulier in 2016.

Since 2015, A Slightly Isolated Dog have been creating performance works inspired by classic stories where they take on the personas of a French theatre troupe. Their shows Don Juan, Jekyll & Hyde and The Trojan War see the actors take on these larger-than-life French clowns, easing the audience into the games as they tell these famous stories with the audience.

Theatre works like this invite everyone into the spirit of complicité, the atmosphere of fun where we can all play, and a place where, Gaulier wrote, “in the grip of pleasure and freedom, everyone is beautiful”.

Hannah Joyce Banks interviewed Nina Nawalowalo for her PhD in 2016, and worked with A Slightly Isolated Dog as an actor in 2009 and 2011.