Etienne Decroux

Thomas Leabhart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429939372
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Etienne Decroux is the primary creator of Corporeal Mime and one of modern theatre's most charismatic innovators, known for his ground-breaking use of the body as the principal means of expression on stage. This second edition combines:

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• an overview of Decroux's life and work

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• an analysis of Decroux's Words on Mime, the first book to be written about this art

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• a series of practical exercises offering an introduction to Corporeal Mime technique.

As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners are unbeatable value for today's student.

1

A PROMETHEAN LIFE

INTRODUCTION

From my daily work with him over a four-year period, and subsequent visits during more than a decade, I know first-hand of Etienne Decroux’s deep and abiding belief in what he called the Cathedral of Corporeal Mime, a project he imagined would consume, like the great cathedrals of France, the lifetimes of many workers. I know too that he pursued his mission single-mindedly with what some saw as a religious fervor. As one who believed his sincerity, admired his genius, and apprenticed in his atelier (not as an impartial observer, if such a thing could exist), I have tried to tell, in the measure possible, Decroux’s story as I imagine he would have wanted it told. With the same information, arranged differently, another writer could depict a misfit and sometimes a buffoon, a megalomaniac, a man with pre-feminist French views of women, and one who wittingly and unwittingly alienated many while reveling in his outsider status.

Having known Decroux and his penchants – his strongly pronounced tastes and his volatile temperament – I surmise he would have chosen tragedy as the genre for recounting his life, rather than melodrama, farce, or Theatre of the Absurd. And yet, in this story of a Promethean “man who preferred to stand,” as he identified himself, we might glimpse an agile, masked, and cavorting Commedia dell’arte actor (though never a pantomime!) skittering around the edges of these otherwise serious pages. See Plate 4.3.

His appearance in the Performance Practitioners Series places Decroux accurately in a line of influential twentieth-century theatre reformers, helping to rescue him from years of oblivion and benign neglect.

When I mentioned to Italian theatre historian Nicola Savarese that Decroux had died in 1991, he replied with astonishment: “In theatre history terms, the body is not yet cold in the grave!” Truly one might say that the body of Decroux’s work lives on vibrantly today through his students and their students in schools including those in London, Paris, Toulouse, Rome, Naples, Madrid, Barcelona, Montreal, Vancouver, Spring Green, WI, and Claremont, CA, to name a few. Graduate students in Italy, France, and Spain regularly select areas of Decroux’s work as thesis or dissertation topics, several important publications in French and in English have appeared in recent years, and Decroux’s book Paroles sur le mime has been translated into five languages. These encouraging indicators suggest that Decroux will not remain an idiosyncratically colorful footnote to twentieth-century theatre history, but will increasingly take his place among his better-known colleagues.

THE LIFE OF ETIENNE DECROUX

CHILDHOOD

Etienne Decroux’s father, Marie-Edouard, a mason, walked 400 miles (644 kilometers) from his native Haute Savoie (eastern France, bordering Switzerland and Italy) to Paris, where he married the cook in a household which had employed him as maître d’hôtel (Benhaïm 2003: 241). Decroux, born July 19, 1898, spoke affectionately of both parents, yet saw his father as the decisive figure in his early life. He not only built houses but also cooked meals, bathed his son, nursed him through illnesses, cut his hair, took him every Monday to the café-concert, a kind of music hall, where he discovered musicians, singers, comedians and pantomimes. His father’s voice “caress[ed] the heart” of his disappointed son, found secretly crying after the departure of the first circus he had ever seen (Leabhart and Chamberlain: 49). Father and son visited a family of Italian sculptors, where, joining art with ethics and political commitment, they held “prolonged conversations on justice and injustice. In our neighborhood, he was the only person thinking as he did”; he “read verse to me in a restrained manner . . . I looked at my father as one looks at a moving statue” (Decroux 1950: 2). Later he wrote: “Thanks to him, for me, there is nothing higher than a political sense. I have . . . remained impressed with what one could call political lyricism” (Decroux 2003: 57). Thus, in his early life, the strands of familial love interweave with politics and art.

An apprentice butcher at thirteen, Decroux later worked as a dishwasher, painter, plumber, mason, roofer, day laborer, dockworker, farmer, and in a factory repairing wagons; he placed hermetic seals on iceboxes; he was a nurse (Decroux 1985: ii); and served in the military for three years. In 1920, Georges Carpentier became the boxing champion of the world, combining a strength and grace that would influence Decroux’s subsequent endeavors: “In sport I saw the origin of dramatic art. I had for it an almost dazed admiration” (Decroux 1950: 3). He later explained, “These things, seen and experienced first hand, gradually moved into the back of my mind, down the back of my arms, and finally down to my fingertips where they modified the fingerprints” (Decroux 1985: ii).

In the first years of Decroux’s life, themes appear that he developed throughout his career. In his love of the circus, we see his later preference for energetic and highly trained actors on an empty stage. Decroux’s early reverence for sculpture and his vision of his father as a “moving statue” adumbrate Mobile Statuary, one of the primary categories of Decroux’s Corporeal Mime technique.

At the café-concert, Decroux saw the last gasps of nineteenth-century pantomime, the only art he frankly “detested,” and from which his Corporeal Mime technique radically departed. Recent scholarship (see Martinez 2008) depicts a complex and variegated landscape of nineteenth-century French pantomime, reminding us that Decroux knew and responded negatively to only some of its many aspects: charming and entertaining vignettes presented primarily through facial expressions and use of the hands. Corporeal Mime as he conceived it began in the deepest parts of the body (inside the biceps and the buttocks, and from the abdomen below the navel), and did not primarily aim at entertainment (see Table 1.1 and Plates 1.1 and 1.2).

Table 1.1 A comparison of Corporeal Mime and pantomime

While, in later years, Decroux perceived a clear dichotomy between nineteenth-century pantomime and twentieth-century Corporeal Mime, the situation in theatres and music halls throughout Paris at that time was more nuanced. In fact, he did not mark a clear distinction before working with his early collaborator Jean-Louis Barrault on the film The Children of Paradise. Until then he often used the words “pantomime” and “mime” interchangeably to describe his art (Martinez 2008: 265). And, as an examination of his creations reveals, not all were modernist. In New York, for example, in the late 1950s, he performed a variation of the Pygmalion myth in which the sculpture comes to life and strangles her sculptor. In later years, however, he rarely created anecdotal entertainment, for reasons that we will discover.

How did Decroux, a young, working-class, politically engaged idealist, transform himself into one of twentieth-century theatre’s most original thinkers and doers? Decroux’s first consequential professional encounter – with the visionary Jacques Copeau – changed the course of his life.

CHEZ COPEAU: THE CHAPEL, THE LABORATORY, THE SCHOOL

At age twenty-five, having spent a decade as a manual laborer, Decroux had saved enough money to live for a year without working. Desiring a less physically exhausting life, he imagined that an acting career would allow him the time and energy to pursue political interests. However, in politics as in theatre, his pronounced working-class accent needed correcting; and, in an age without electronic amplification, he had to master articulation and projection. Decroux, entering Jacques Copeau’s school to study voice, discovered instead the expressive body. Copeau and his associate Suzanne Bing cultivated in Decroux a spark that would, over the course of his career, burst into the flame of Corporeal Mime.

Plate 1.1 Etienne Decroux, 1953. Photograph: E. B. Weill

Plate 1.2 Charles Deburau, acrobatic pantomime, son of Jean-Gaspard Deburau, 1853. Photograph: Nadar

“GIVE ME A BARE STAGE!”

Jacques Copeau (1879–1949), born to a family of manufacturers and salespeople, worked, before founding a theatre, as a writer, editor, and critic. In 1913, at age thirty-three, without previous practical experience and with only his intuition to guide him, Copeau founded (with actors Charles Dullin, Blanche Albane, Suzanne Bing, and Louis Jouvet) the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier.

Copeau modeled his theatre’s stage after those historical spaces he admired: the Greek theatre, the Noh stage, the Commedia dell’arte platform, the Elizabethan “Wooden O,” and the circus ring. All had open, uncluttered performing areas, practically unknown when Copeau leased and renovated what would become the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier prior to World War I.

Finding actors who could fill such spaces proved more difficult than merely implementing architectural changes. Copeau wrote: “On an empty stage I see how important the actor becomes. His stature, his acting, his quality” (Copeau 2000: 182). Although Copeau recognized the need for a school to help actors develop this quality, administrative responsibilities initially kept him from founding one.

With most of his actors conscripted during World War I, Copeau closed the theatre. Unable to serve because of illness, and in order to focus his thought on actor training, he visited Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966), Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950), and Adolphe Appia (1862–1928). These encounters confirmed Copeau’s initial intuitions that movement and improvisation must predominate in the training of new actors.

Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966), the son of actress Ellen Terry and architect Edward William Godwin, acted (with his mother) in Henry Irving’s company at the Lyceum Theatre in London from 1885 to 1897. In the early 1900s he renounced acting, developing instead his career as a stage and costume designer, theoretician, and printmaker. Devising his own revolutionary approach to moveable architectural staging, he published On the Art of the Theatre in 1911.

Editor of The Mask (1908–1929), in which he published his famous essay on the Übermarionette, Craig sought to abolish the Victorian trappings of realism and sentimentality and to replace them with a more open and symbolic space (influenced by Greek theatre and the Commedia dell’arte stage). Copeau and Decroux learned important lessons from Craig, who admired Asian performance and advocated total theatre incorporating symbolist set designs, masks, verse, and dance.

Craig’s influence moved Copeau to include theatre crafts, Commedia dell’arte, and Asian theatre concepts in his plans for a school. Seeing Craig’s masks, for example, led Copeau to experiment with covering the face in actor training exercises and, to a more limited degree, in performance (Leigh 1979: 12).

At first, guardedly enthusiastic about Dalcroze’s rhythmic gymnastics, called Eurhythmics, Copeau imagined incorporating modified versions into his curriculum. Later he found the gymnastics of Lt. Hébert more appropriate: rather than Eurhythmics, in which one responds to musical accompaniment, Copeau preferred Hébert’s lifting real weights, traversing real obstacles, and relating to the material world.

Navy Lieutenant Georges Hébert (1875–1957), as captain of the last sailing ship in the French navy, observed harmonious human bodies working and playing outdoors. Throwing, running, jumping, carrying, and swimming were essential activities for people in the less industrialized ports of call, as well as for sailors in the masts and rigging of the ship he commanded. Hébert advocated following one’s own work rhythms according to individual abilities while as lightly clothed as possible; overcoming natural obstacles (rocks, logs, uneven terrain); using natural and useful gestures (carrying, pushing, pulling); balancing on one foot, walking on hands and feet; sustained effort to develop endurance and breath, but with an alternation of contrasting efforts. He opposed competitive athletics, practiced in stadiums to entertain and to break records, as contrasted with his more natural and organic method of physical education.

More lasting influences on Copeau came from Dalcroze’s exercises in which students evolved from silence and immobility to movement, sound, and finally words. This progression, adopted by Copeau, later permeated Decroux’s work (Leigh 1979: 13). Suzanne Bing, Copeau’s most important collaborator, also noticed that Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics with its predilection for a conditioned response to external music, impeded improvisers’ attempts to listen to internal “music” or impulses (Copeau 2000: 114). The ability to perceive and respond to these internal impulses, essential to Copeau, would later constitute the basis of Decroux’s work in improvisation and creation.

An observation in Copeau’s notebook reveals the basis of Decroux’s teaching:

I have already noticed, especially with Dalcroze, that the student, as soon as you call upon an emotion (fatigue, joy, sadness, etc.) to provoke a movement, . . . right away, and perhaps unconsciously, out of necessity, he allows the intellectual element to predominate in his action, facial expression. This is an open door to literature and to ham acting.

(Copeau 2000: 101)

Copeau’s nephew and assistant Michel Saint-Denis remembers how Copeau closed this “open door” at the Vieux Colombier Theatre when a young actress prevented a rehearsal from moving forward because of her inability to overcome self-consciousness. Weary from waiting for her to relax, Copeau spontaneously “threw a handkerchief over her face and made her repeat the scene.” This impromptu mask improved her performance while furthering Copeau’s influential actor-training experiments that involved covering the face (Saint-Denis 1982: 169–70).

Copeau’s erasure of facial expression in favor of larger physical movement, especially in the trunk, became a significant plank in Decroux’s theatrical platform and a primary concept in the creation of Corporeal Mime.

After these decisive visits, Copeau spent the remainder of the war years in New York, where, with a troupe of French actors...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 A Promethean Life
• 2 Summary and Analysis of Words on Mime
• 3 Decroux as Director/Creator: How did Decroux Make a Performance?
• 4 Corporeal Mime Technique: Practical Exercises with Immediate Applications
• Bibliography
• Index