The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq

Mark Evans, Rick Kemp, Mark Evans, Rick Kemp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317594628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq presents a thorough overview and analysis of Jacques Lecoq's life, work and philosophy of theatre. Through an exemplary collection of specially commissioned chapters from leading writers, specialists and practitioners, it draws together writings and reflections on his pedagogy, his practice, and his influence on the wider theatrical environment. It is a comprehensive guide to the work and legacy of one of the major figures of Western theatre in the second half of the twentieth century. In a four-part structure over fifty chapters, the book examines:

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• The historical, artistic and social context out of which Lecoq's work and pedagogy arose, and its relation to such figures as Jacques Copeau, Antonin Artaud, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Dario Fo.

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• Core themes of Lecoq's International School of Theatre, such as movement, play, improvisation, masks, language, comedy, and tragedy, investigated by former teachers and graduates of the School.

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• The significance and value of his pedagogical approaches in the context of contemporary theatre practices.

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• The diaspora of performance practice from the School, from the perspective of many of the most prominent artists themselves.

This is an important and authoritative guide for anyone interested in Lecoq's work.

Part I

Influences and antecedents

Introduction

Mark Evans

The aim of Lecoq’s School has always been ‘to produce a young theatre of new work, generating performance languages which emphasise the physical playing of the actor’ (Lecoq, 2000: 16); however, despite the School’s emphasis on the theatre of the future, it also recognizes important historical roots for its work that ground the students’ experiences within fundamental aspects of the relationship between our bodies, what we express with them, and how we express it.

The chapters within this section seek to explore the historical context surrounding and supporting the evolution of Lecoq’s teaching. They explore the ways in which Lecoq drew on the intellectual and philosophical environments within which he lived.

Born in Montmartre in 1921, Lecoq’s childhood spanned the years between the two great cataclysmic events of European history, the two World Wars. Paris was, at this time, one of the intellectual and artistic hubs of European culture. Lecoq’s early interest in sport echoes the general interest in fitness, dance and the liberation of the expressive body that took place over the early decades of the twentieth century. This was the period of Georges Hébert’s natural gymnastics, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze’s eurhythmics, Laban’s tanztheater, Isadora Duncan’s focus on natural movement, as well as the revival of interest in Greek dance and in the movement work of Francois Delsarte.¹ For Lecoq, sport provided an early model of a form of physical poetry, his own response to the ways that both sport and dance were emerging not just as techniques but as ways of engaging with the much wider challenges and possibilities of what it means to be a body in the twentieth-century world.

Lecoq’s interest in sport would lead him to become involved in a couple of groups whose work enabled him to make this crossover between sport and performance – L’Education par le Jeu Dramatique and L’Association Travail et Culture. These groups also brought him into closer contact with the theatrical avant-garde of the time. He would have become increasingly aware of the work of Jacques Copeau, Antonin Artaud, Jean-Louis Barrault and Charles Dullin. In The Moving Body, he describes in detail the journey that finally led him to work with Jean Dasté (Copeau’s son-in-law) and then to travel to Italy, where he worked and taught at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan² and then collaborated with the young actor Dario Fo on a number of satirical shows.

The chapters in Part I explore the aspects of theatre history that help to throw light on the context in which Lecoq was working as well as discussing the intellectual climate in which Lecoq was working.

Nigel Ward’s chapter looks at the development of the theatrical avant-garde in France. The spirit of innovation, experimentation and rejuvenation that swept through European theatre during the first half of the twentieth century provides a fascinating backdrop against which to understand Lecoq’s teaching. Lecoq himself acknowledged the influence of Copeau and Artaud on his work, and Ward’s chapter gives a general overview of this context, enabling the reader to get a sense of the theatrical milieu of the time. Vivian Appler and Gillian Arrighi’s chapters then look more specifically at the emergence of mime and maskwork as theatrical forms during the first half of the century. Mime drew together the pantomime blanche of the French Pierrot tradition (see Evans, 2015), with the Modernist fascination with form, abstraction and technique. Appler discusses the relationships between the work of Etienne Decroux, Jean-Louis Barrault and Lecoq, and examines Michel Carné’s film Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) as an example of the significance of the development of French mime during the period of German occupation. Although Lecoq was always much more than a mime teacher, it is important to recognize his importance within this field and within the role of Paris as a centre for mime teaching during the twentieth century. Arrighi describes how Copeau’s early work with masks helped to rejuvenate the mask not just as a symbolic object, but also as a tool for the actor. She indicates the importance of Edward Gordon Craig and Antonin Artaud in the promotion of the power of the mask. The significance of oriental masks, such as those of the Japanese Noh Theatre, is also highlighted – Lecoq had a lifelong interest in the masks of the Noh Theatre and, like Copeau, recognized their combination of tranquility and theatrical power.

Lecoq’s School can also be understood in the context of a tradition of theatre studios. Tom Cornford’s chapter draws comparisons between Lecoq’s School and the early twentieth-century studios of Stanislavski and Meyerhold, as well as Copeau’s creation of spaces and groups within which he could experiment and explore. The notion of the studio links to the work of Lecoq’s contemporaries, Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook, two other very important figures in the history of twentieth-century theatre training and practice. Though formally a school rather than a studio, L’École Jacques Lecoq in Paris is comparable in its emphasis on constant learning through experience (and sometimes failure) and on the role of the students in creating and sustaining their own learning through the auto-cours.

Bruce McConachie places Lecoq’s work within the broader and overarching context of twentieth-century Modernism and the philosophical positions that underpin it. In particular, he explores the relationship between text and performance, and the extent to which Modernism was torn between the possibilities of language and the possibilities of the body in performance.

The following four chapters throw light on the philosophical, cultural and literary ideas that were part of the intellectual climate in France before and during Lecoq’s life – ideas that he was aware of and that informed the development of his ideas and practices. Claudia Sachs and Jon Foley Sherman examine, in their respective chapters, the ways in which a reading of the work of the anthropologist Marcel Jousse, of the philosophers Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and of the critic and sociologist Roger Caillois, can contribute to an understanding of elements of Lecoq’s pedagogy. In particular, Sherman and Sachs demonstrate how Jousse’s ideas on what he called mimisme (or the reception, playing and replaying of experience through movement) were very influential on the development of Lecoq’s teaching, and how Bachelard’s theories of the relationship between human imagination and the four elements inform some key aspects of Lecoq’s pedagogy. Clare Brennan’s chapter offers an insight into the relationship between early attempts to capture and analyse movement, such as the work of Etienne Marey, and Lecoq’s own analysis of movement and its qualities. Lecoq’s teaching is often mistakenly viewed as anti-intellectual; however, these chapters illustrate the ways in which his work was grounded in a profound understanding of the work of key thinkers of his time. Pardis Dabashi, in the last of this sequence of chapters, examines the relationship between Lecoq’s notions of neutrality/the neutral mask and the ideas underpinning the literary movement that became known as the noveau roman. By comparing Lecoq’s ideas with those of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Dabashi (Chapter 9) seeks to explore the significance of an aesthetic position that sought to ‘respect the autonomy of the object independent of human systems of reference’.

Part I finishes with Gloria Pastorino’s chapter on Lecoq’s years in Italy, a profoundly formative period for Lecoq that led directly to his return to Paris to found his school in December 1956. In particular, Pastorino examines Lecoq’s work with the Italian actor and writer Dario Fo, and his participation in a number of satirical revue companies operating in Italy at this time. The chapter gives some context to Lecoq’s fascination with Commedia dell’arte and with theatre of satire and parody, both styles or forms of theatre that he would go on to explore further in his School, and sets his early theatrical career within the context of post-war European cultural and political developments.

In order to provide a rich and general context for the reader’s understanding of Lecoq’s work, this part has included chapters by authors with a wide range of subject knowledges. There are chapters written by former students of Lecoq, as well as by theatre academics from other backgrounds. We hope that the chapters provide you with material that enriches your appreciation of the ways in which Lecoq drew together a remarkable variety of ideas and influences in his quest to create a space for his students to explore the theatre of the future.

Notes

1Francois Delsarte (1811–1871) became famous as the inventor and teacher of a codified system of expression through voice and movement. Based on a theory of the connection between gesture and emotion, his system became very popular in several countries, including the US. His work influenced a number of early twentieth-century dance practitioners, but it has now faded to near obscurity.

2The Piccolo Teatro was established by Giorgio Strehler, Paolo Grassi and Nina Vinchi in 1947. It was the first public Italian theatre to be built in Italy. One of its most famous productions was Strehler’s revival of Goldoni’s Harlequin Servant of Two Masters, which generated a significant revival of interest in Commedia dell’arte as a theatrical form.

References

Evans, Mark (2015) ‘The Myth of Pierrot’, in Chaffee, J. & Crick, O. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte, London & New York: Routledge.

Lecoq, J. (2000) The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre, London & New York: Routledge.

1
The French theatrical avant-garde

Nigel Ward

Revolutions in the arts rarely begin at a precise moment. They are the gradual consequence of a series of events, the influence of new ideas, the shifting of opinions, the arrival on the scene of new generations of artists with new ideas. But if the theatrical avant-garde in France could be said to have begun at a single instant, it would be the 10th of December, 1896, at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre in Paris, at the opening night of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi.

More precisely, it could be said to have happened with the speaking of a single word.

That night, the actor Fermin Gémier tottered onto the stage in the person of Père Ubu, a bloated figure based on Jarry’s own drawings for a puppet. With movements and voice modelled on those of the playwright himself, Gémier uttered a single word. The word was an obscenity – lightly transformed by Jarry’s linguistic playfulness. Merdre.

The outrage produced by this single word brought the performance to a temporary halt as the audience erupted into mayhem. Something was happening on stage that caused offence and confusion. It was the birth of a new way of making theatre.

This was not simply a case of polite society being offended at the use of bad language. ‘Merdre’ was the opening word for a theatre which would transgress and shock. It was matched by the absurd and disturbing sight of the bloated, vulgar figure of Ubu himself. This was a theatre in which the old conventions were not simply to be challenged, but to be openly and deliberately violated. On the brink of a new century, Paris was witnessing the first stirrings of an artistic revolution, preparing itself to become the capital of that revolution. And everything on stage that night spoke of this change.

The set had been designed by artists Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and Toulouse-Lautrec. They jumbled images whose effect was crude and confusing, depicting a strange mixture of locations as though drawn by a child. The actors moved and spoke awkwardly – the play had been written for puppets, and Jarry wanted the actors to be masked. The narrative was crude and fragmented. The writing deliberately snubbed conventional notions of decorum and of the beautiful.

Two years later, Stanislavsky’s production of The Seagull would usher in a new theatre based on Realism. But Jarry was already looking beyond that to a theatre freed from the limitations of psychology and mimesis. This would be a theatre of the imagination, offering to take its audience to worlds beyond their experience.

W. B. Yeats gave the most famous description of the evening. He had been a vocal supporter of Jarry on the night, but this experience nevertheless troubled him as he recorded the experience afterwards:

I go to the first performance of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, at the Théatre de L’Œuvre … Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say, ‘After … our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm … what more is possible? After us the Savage God’.

(Yeats, 1922: 222)

Overnight, a polite, decorous theatre of civilized values and elevating principles had been replaced. This new theatre would be less predictable, less rational. It would appeal to the senses as much as to the mind, focus on the body as much as on language, and challenge convention rather than reinforcing the status quo.

Jarry himself was to be remembered long after his premature death; his influence was the spark that lit the fuse for a new generation of theatre makers. In the audience of Ubu was the young Jacques Copeau, who would be central to the revival of mime and commedia in French theatre. Another passionate advocate of Jarry would be Antonin Artaud, who named his company Théâtre Alfred Jarry and who would dedicate his life to the idea of a theatre in which visual language was primary. The body of the actor, rather than the words of a playwright, were to be central to this new kind of theatre. Artaud’s passionate disciple, Jean-Louis Barrault, would translate these ideas into his own explorations of the body in performance.

A new tradition was being born. This was the tradition that made possible the work of Jacques Lecoq.

When he wrote that ‘I came to theatre by way of sports’ (Lecoq, 2000: 3), he was describing a theatre made possible by Ubu. His first inspiration, physical trainer Jean-Marie Conty, had been friends with Artaud and Barrault, and was interested in the connection between physical training for sport and its possible implications for theatre. Lat...