Boooorrriinng!!!

"So does one need to go to drama school to learn how to do all this?" I ask Gaulier. No, he says: "Life is a school. Experience teaches you many things. But often, we learn the wrong things from our experiences.

"A lot of events make us contract," he continues. "We learn how to play smaller and smaller roles. A woman may come to think that she is stupid because she has made a few bad decisions. Her voice grows quieter, and she becomes less trusting. Her effectiveness diminishes without her knowing why. Others see that she is performing the role of the frightened creature, but she doesn't see that.

"Or a man may feel that he has no right to display his emotions because he doesn't trust them. And so he, too, performs without pleasure. He cannot dedicate himself to larger purposes. When experiences threaten us and make us small, we have to knock back the limiting gestures that we've learned. That's when the craft of theater is so useful. We can learn to become larger characters by becoming more like our true selves."

Harriet Rubin (hrubin@aol.com) is the author of The Princessa: Machiavelli For Women (Doubleday, 1997) and Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambitions (HarperCollins, 1999), as well as the director of Working Diva (www.ivillage.com/workingdiva). Contact Philippe Gaulier (gaulier@dircon.co.uk) or Isabelle Anderson (isaon@aol.com) by email, or visit l'ecole Philippe Gaulier on the web (http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/lane/kba31/index.htm).