Boooorrriinng!!!

There is a point in Gaulier's course when you take what you have learned about complicity -- about finding your fixed point -- and you put it to work on something larger. " Melodrama demands a person to be big, to be grand," Gaulier tells his students. " How big do you have to be in order to reach your audience? Most people don't come close to being the right size. Most people are nice. Or small. Or self-constrained. They're so boooorrriinng that nobody sees them." The actor who takes on melodrama must " perform for the gods," says Gaulier.

Gaulier takes us back to the origins of melodrama to show us why actors had to become bigger than life to command their audience's attention. " It was always dark onstage, and the 'gods' -- the peasants sitting way up in the balcony -- couldn't see the actors," he says. " What did the audience members have in their stomachs? Two bottles of wine if they were on a diet, three or four if they weren't. It's the same response that we confront today, with people being distracted by a thousand things: In the old days of theater, everything swam in front of the audience's eyes. Move your body, and you would confuse the audience.

" To play melodrama in that setting," Gaulier continues, " one's actions had to be big. Melodrama is theater for poor people. Actors and leaders don't naturally use gestures large enough to be seen by an audience that is far away -- either physically, sitting in the balcony, or far away in the sense that audience members are removed from your message by uncertainty or cynicism. They must learn to offer a flower with panache. They must learn to play to the crowd."

Gaulier teaches his students that melodrama is not exaggeration. It is relying on a script of emotions, suffering, and sympathy. He asks a young woman to stand before the group and say, " My sister sold her body to buy me this chair." He tells her that she must break our hearts when she says it. If she doesn't, then she will have failed in taking command of us. Try as she might, she can't touch us. At first, she overacts: " My sister sold her body to buy me this chair," she says, pretending to sob and then hanging her head. Gaulier knows that no hearts have been broken. Melodrama is in the small gestures, he tells her. She must win her audience's sympathy before doing anything else. She must win it before she even says the line.

" Look up, but lower your head," Gaulier says. That simple gesture melts us. It is the perfect gesture of complicity (not to mention the fetching look of Princess Diana). But the student still can't get the line to work for her. Gaulier asks two young men to stand close behind her. Just as she starts to speak the line, they are instructed to lean in and gently kiss her neck. They perform this bizarre exercise, and she zings the line home. Her voice opens. It's soft yet clear. Gaulier has given her a cattle prod of pleasure. Being kissed -- twice! -- is enough to stimulate her physically so that she brings pleasure into the line. She connects us to her emotions. She fills the stage. We are with her. The ridiculousness of the line disappears. We feel the music, the swell of her emotions.

The kissers disappear; they are no longer needed. " Once you have that language of complicity in the body," says Gaulier, " you carry it with you. You can then use it easily, as needed."

Gaulier believes that once you hear or feel the power of melodrama in your delivery, it stays in your body. You don't forget it. You remember how to capture the audience, how to catch its sympathy. Awareness of the body is intrinsic to assuming the full size of your humanity.

Getting in Touch with the Leadership Body

Gaulier says that the body can be the most convincing instrument of leadership. He preaches an awareness of the physical and an appreciation for it. " Sometimes you feel so light and strong that you want to fall in love -- or buy a good sandwich," he says. " It's a beautiful day, and you want to bring that physical awareness into your work."

Not all leaders achieve their full size, what Gaulier calls " aura." " There is a kind of permission that you feel around certain people," he says. " Charisma extends the body's reach a foot in all directions. We are bigger when we have charisma."

Over dinner at the end of the day's workshop, Gaulier explains himself by pointing out two sets of diners: At one end of the room are two white men wearing shirts as pale as their skin. They are eating, moving only their hands and mouths. Their bodies and faces are otherwise almost immobile. At another table, a black family is smiling and sharing food. " Which group do you think dreams more?" Gaulier asks me. I say, without hesitation, the black diners. They are looser, spirited, communicating with their bodies. The white men look static and entombed. " When you look at some people, your imagination is ready to work," says Gaulier. " They give you more of an opening. Those are the leaders whom people want to follow. Those are the leaders who stimulate the imagination."