Bell Brings Bouffan to Carnegie Mellon

by Chad Pentler

            Mark Bell is a clown.  He does not wear humongous pants or have a big red nose.  He is also a visiting instructor at the School of Drama.  Bell, hails from LAMDA in London, and in class, he works to help the senior actors find their inner clowns.  Bell describes the process as “finding your own idiot . . . or how to be an idiot . . . Comedy comes from your failure, so clown is someone who fails, someone who gets it wrong.  It’s Buster Keaton; it’s Laurel and Hardy.”  Bell teaches Bouffan, which he describes as medieval grotesque satire.  It incorporates creating characters that do not exist anywhere in nature, out of the deformed body.  This is a way to satirize what humans do. 

Bell was trained at the Lecoq School in Paris, which teaches neutral mask, a process that aims towards finding the neutral state that can function as a starting point for an actor, allowing for an open body, ready to create.  In class, Bell guides the students toward a unique story telling style that combines sound effects with creating character.  The students discover the scene for themselves.  There is no script.  They craft a story, and then apply that story to hone their comedic timing skills.  Bell describes three essentials to actor training: training the voice, the body, and the imagination.  Bell notes, “Everything follows the first two.”  Bell explains that in class, students discover that clown is all about improvisation.  “They have to also stand and tell a joke again and again and again and again until it’s not funny anymore, and what you begin to laugh at then is the idiot telling the joke rather than the joke itself . . . Sometimes a mistake ends up being more interesting than what you were consciously trying to do.  It’s about using the mistakes and learning to devise or create work from that.”  Bell points out that rehearsal is fertile ground for finding mistakes as well.  “The comedy of something going wrong ends up funnier than what you were trying to do in the first place . . . the trick is to be able to make that mistake happen again on stage, do it intentionally, and make the audience believe that that is happening for the first time.” 

Bell will be returning to the School of Drama in the spring to direct two Comedia pieces, Scapino! by Moliere and Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni.  The two shows will be “performed outdoors at various venues around Pittsburgh” by junior and senior actors.  Those actors will of course be further striving toward discovering their inner clown.  Bell explains, “It’s your comic persona . . . You find it by practical work, doing scenes, improvising . . . sometimes it’s an exaggerated version of yourself.”  Bell believes Ricky Gervais can be considered a modern clown.  “His David Brent in The Office is a clown . . . He’s an idiot; he doesn’t see himself as other people see him . . . David Brent does not understand why people don’t like him . . . Samuel Beckett said that  ‘Clown is the most essential expression of what it is to be a human being.”     

In addition to teaching at LAMDA, Bell is co-artistic director along with Matthew Peober of Liquid Theatre in London.  The theatre company is five years old, and they typically do one show a year.  Liquid Theatre is currently under commission from the Arts Council to do a new play, a modern Jacobean tragedy penned by up and coming British writer, Fin Kennedy. 
Bell has enjoyed his stay at Carnegie Mellon, especially his experience with his students in class.  “When given a chance to create the scene, they’ve really gone flat out to do it.”  Bell has also enjoyed the food compared to Britain.  “I’ve put on so much weight since I’ve been here . . . the portions are absolutely enormous.”