Wow. What a week it has been: This week we continued to play with being different elements and substances through the neutral mask. In the last ten days I have been: Glue, oil (trucker), oil (boiling chip fat), vinegar, hydrochloric acid, glass, steel, elastic, paper, silk and a tree. To say it has been tiring would be an understatement.

Oftentimes Philippe will take you through a microcosm of creation in minutes (no slow exploration in this school) - you start as the element in neutral mask, and if he feels you are grasping the element well he will remove the mask, if you are still coping, he will command you to speak text, and then, if you are finding character from the element he will ask you to do a cabaret number (a song, speech) as that character. One of my favourite elements to expore was Oil - the thick black oil from a trucker's engine: it is thick and slow and lazy but it also has deep impulses which radiate from the centre out to all its volume. It was delicious. With Oil, I found a nice character - she was slumped and perhaps a little retarted, and she sang "I feel pretty" from West Side Story with a very lazy mouth. Everyone laughed and Philippe said afterwards "Bon, so we love your humour."

Vinegar I found very difficult - it is a light fluid, but also acidic - but the next rung on the ladder was Hydrochloric acid, which was madly exciting: It is frantic and thrives on consumption and destruction, so we had a lot of wild movement and energy. Philippe explained that the energy of Hydrochloric acid is an excellent one for Bouffon. When he had a group of good Hydrochlorics he asked them to move upstage whilst looking at the audience and laughing - the energy of all these maniac laughters was like watching a pack of hyena or cackling witches - it was lovely. Philippe then commanded that the group act as chorus and choryphae (the chorus leader who speaks a text, and commands the others) It was a wonderful insight into the menacing joy of the bouffon.

On Friday morning we were doing yoga in our morning movement class with our wonderful new teacher Juan. Juan is a graduate (and favourite) of the school and he has been trying to prepare our voices and bodies for Greek Tragedy which will be our demanding next module. We have been aclimatising ourselves to speaking at full pitch whilst running and jumping and moving etc, in order to strengthen our vocal resevoir. It was a great pleasure for me to move away from the ridiculous handstands and cartwheels and back to lovely voicework, and I trust Juan immensely. He is very passionate about his craft and takes time to work with individual needs. Towards the end of the class, I pulled a muscle in my neck: it didn't feel like a regular pulled muscle, it felt more as if I had 'pulled a bone.' It wasn't that painful, but I just started crying. I couldn't control it - I tried, but each time I managed to stop the tears, they began to well up again. It was bizarre. The pain ran from the base of my skull at the back of my neck, down through the centre of my throat to my voice box. Juan spent twenty minutes after the class stretching out the vertabrae in my neck, trying to shake the tension from the muscles out through my arms and legs - but still the shooting pain was there. I tried to show him where the pain was in my neck and he said "have you ever had an infection?" "Yes," I said "three years ago, and I worked through it and did great damage to my voice." He could feel the emotional block still in the glands of my throat. "If you have a friend here, you should go and cry for maybe two hours - but you must get it out." Bloody hell, I thought, how peculiar and amazing that the body should hold a physical memory of emotion like that. When I damaged my voice in 2004, it was the most terrifying period of my career, and I have carried that emotion around with me in my throat: since then I have thought about protecting my voice continuously and also taken great pains to conceal my worries by rolling them into a tight little ball somewhere between my throat and my sternum. And it's still there! It has grown strong! It is a knotted cyst of tears! Hopefully this is the beginning of my recovery. I think for most people their crisis will come in Philippe's class with how to be beautiful on stage, but for me it is the opposite (and, lest I forget, the reason I came to Paris) I have encountered my first crisis in the body that stands between me and complete expressive liberty. Sorry mummy, but 'fucking hell;' what a week.

Our homework this weekend was to find an animal and study it, to present on monday to the class. Yesterday I went to the Paris zoo to commune with the animals. Firstly, because of the strikes here it took about three hours to get there, which was a pain, and then when we arrived it was pretty depressing - poor conditions for the animals, and it has been so cold in Paris this week that all the creatures seemed really sad. Anyway, I managed to find great affinity with a group of little penguins. They are so fool-hardy and cocky, but really very silly and ungainly. i love them! So for the rest of the day I will be waddling around my little room trying to connect with my inner penguin. Last night I went to the Marais, and I have decided that this is definately my favourite area of Paris. Oh the tiny bookshop/bars and windy streets and even (Lo and behold!) vegetarian bistros! It is beautiful there and it feels like my ideal of Paris that I have carried around for so long.