Jacques Lecoq

Simon Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351335492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This volume offers a concise guide to the teaching and philosophy of one of the most significant figures in twentieth century actor training. Jacques Lecoq's influence on the theatre of the latter half of the twentieth century cannot be overestimated.

Now reissued Jacques Lecoq is the first book to combine:

• an historical introduction to his life and the context in which he worked
• an analysis of his teaching methods and principles of body work, movement, creativity, and contemporary theatre
• detailed studies of the work of Theatre de Complicite and Mummenschanz
• practical exercises demonstrating Lecoq's distinctive approach to actor training.

1
The Life of Jacques Lecoq

A theatre school should not always journey in the wake of existing theatre forms. On the contrary, it should have a visionary aspect, developing new languages of the stage and thus assisting in the renewal of theatre itself.

(Lecoq 2000: 162)

Jacques Lecoq (1921–99)

When Jacques Lecoq died in 1999, world theatre lost one of its most imaginative, influential and pioneering thinkers and teachers. Compared to many of the figures featured in this series, little has yet been written about Jacques Lecoq. While this can be partly explained by that phenomenon common to many great artistic and cultural innovators of not being fully recognised until after their death, it is also because Lecoq is celebrated almost exclusively as a teacher and thinker, rather than for plays he might have written or for the productions he directed and choreographed.

Jacques Lecoq’s real influence lies embodied within thousands of performers, writers, movement choreographers and theatre directors across the world who were once his students in Paris – and elsewhere – during a period of forty-two years. To a greater or lesser extent, his signature rests inscribed in the theatre these ‘students’ have constructed, in the performances they have made and in the plays they have written or directed. This book attempts to bring that signature into sharper focus by offering responses to the following sorts of questions. Who was Jacques Lecoq? What did he do? Why was his work important? How did his thinking and practice connect to other significant figures of twentieth-century theatre? Why is his legacy still important for contemporary theatre?

The first part of this chapter attempts to paint a picture of Lecoq’s life in France and Italy from the end of the Second World War, tracing his development as actor, director, movement choreographer and theatre teacher. Following this early history, I examine the foundations of the Paris school and consider its organisation and structure. The rest of this chapter considers the broader historical and cultural context into which Lecoq’s life and work may helpfully be placed and understood. Conventional wisdom suggests that, historically, Lecoq’s legacy from Jacques Copeau (1879–1949) was the definitive influence that most shaped and framed his work. However, in so far as Lecoq ever chose to invoke other twentieth-century theatre practitioners as sources of authority, the figure of Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) should be equally acknowledged. Here, I focus on Copeau, while arguing that what primarily drove Lecoq was not some kind of self-conscious attempt to place himself within any particular tradition of European theatre, but an overriding curiosity with the body and how it moved. Having speculated about historical influences, I then consider the recent dramatic rise – in Britain and parts of Europe – of theatre forms which foreground the performer’s body and its movement in space, and reflect on Lecoq’s role in these developments. Finally, in continuing an attempt to locate his work upon a bigger cultural canvas, a brief account is offered of the ways in which the human body has become a central concern in other disciplines apparently unconnected to theatre and performance. This whole chapter provides a framework which the subsequent three parts of the book will flesh out and substantiate through:

• 1 a detailed, but selective analysis of Lecoq’s writing;
• 2 analytical and discursive case studies of the work of two companies which acknowledge the importance of his training for their creative work; and
• 3 a sequence of practical exercises designed to capture and illustrate some essential principles and characteristics of Lecoq’s teaching at the Paris school.

To think about the life and work of Lecoq; to understand the how, what and why of fifty years of pedagogy; to consider his theorising on how things, materials, humans … animals move; to reflect upon his ideas on how performance communicates itself; to debate his views on theatre’s stake in the politics of place, identity and internationalism is to engage with issues utterly germane to the problems and challenges of contemporary theatre practice. This is a book about how one of Western Europe’s great teachers of theatre, working in the second half of the twentieth century, implicitly and explicitly presented a challenge to much of the received wisdom on actor training and – hence – the making of contemporary performance.

To put it another way, Lecoq is important to our understanding of contemporary Western drama because he was a central figure in a loose movement of practitioners, teachers and theorists who proposed that it is the actor’s body – rather than simply the spoken text – which is the crucial generator of meaning(s) in theatre. Lecoq’s school in Paris thrived (and, at the time of writing, continues to flourish) during a period when many young European theatre-makers were creating work which they – or the publicity departments of theatres and arts centres – wished to describe as physical theatre, movement theatre, body-based theatre, visual performance, or even occasionally modern mime. Whether these labels help us to understand a particular theatrical form is debatable. Nonetheless, there can be little doubt – especially within Britain – that, from the 1970s, there was a significant increase in the amount of devised performance which emphasised movement, gesture and mime as the main expressive tools of theatre. That this development was particularly marked in Britain reflects a reaction against a dominant tradition which has given an almost deferential authority to the playwright in the construction of theatre – a tradition that has placed the spoken word at the centre of the theatrical experience, and one that, arguably, has been more pronounced in Britain than in other countries of Europe. Translated into actual live performance this has been a theatre culture that applauded and celebrated actors with a rich vocal range and virtuosity which often, however, far exceeded their talent or aptitude for expressive movement and gesture. Many British drama schools offering training for the aspiring professional actor have consciously reinforced this perspective by prioritising vocal expertise at the expense of other physical skills within their curricula.

The reasons for the upsurge in forms of theatre which have privileged the expressive potential of the actor’s body are complex, and cannot simply and unproblematically be reduced to the influence of those theatre practitioners and teachers who also chose to explore the power of movement and gesture as tools of communication on stage. While Jacques Lecoq and his contemporaries, such as Jerzy Grotowski (1933–99), Eugenio Barba (1936–), Peter Brook (1925–) and Étienne Decroux (1898–1991), have all had a major impact on the shape and direction of what one might wish to call ‘body-based’ theatre in the West since the 1950s, to understand their work fully it is necessary to consider the wider cultural movements within which their own specific practice existed.

The significance of the body in late twentieth-century Western culture goes well beyond the performing arts and permeates the discourses of – for example – cultural studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology and feminist theory. It is not the place of this book to examine those wider cultural forces that provide a framework for theatre movements celebrating movement and physicality, although much of what follows implicitly engages with these broader issues.

So, if Jacques Lecoq is but a single player in a larger pattern of cultural circumstances all concerned with the significance of the body, he is nonetheless a very considerable one within the field of contemporary theatre and performance. His influence on a wider debate about actor training and the meaning of movement and physical expression within theatre has been substantial. However, his impact on the actual production of theatre and approaches to performing in Western cultures over the last thirty years has been equally significant, though perhaps less straightforward to detect. The roll-call of directors, writers and actors who at one time trained with Lecoq is extensive. Among the better known we may identify: Philippe Avron, Luc Bondy, Michel Azama, Yasmina Réza, Steven Berkoff, Ariane Mnouchkine (1939–), Geoffrey Rush and Julie Taymor (1952–). Of the companies which have acknowledged a collective debt to Lecoq, the most significant include: Théâtre de Complicité, Mummenschanz, Footsbarn, Théâtre du Soleil, Moving Picture Mime Show, Els Joglars and Els Comediants.

The issues with which any investigation into the work of Jacques Lecoq must engage, and which this book attempts to examine and analyse, may be summarised as follows:

• Play and the creative actor
• The performer’s body and the generation of meaning(s)
• Bodies: culturally inscribed or universally constructed?
• The subversive clown, bouffon or grotesque
• Matter: texture, movement, sound and taste
• Rapport and complicité in the creation of ensemble
• Preparing the body for theatre
• Mime and nature: mime and theatre
• Internationalism, humanism and theatre
• Connecting two centuries: the legacy of the modernist avant-garde
• Against interpretation: the practitioner as art form
• Space, architecture, mobility and stillness
• Releasing mime from the closet
• Mask and anti-mask: from neutrality to the red nose.

Lecoq, Grotowski and Other Bodies

Jacques Lecoq died on 19 January 1999. By one of those strange coincidences of timing which invite us to reflect on the cultural forces that frame and shape artistic innovation and development, the Polish teacher and theorist of actor training, Jerzy Grotowski, had died only five days earlier. Although their approaches to the training of actors differed in many significant respects – and there seems little evidence that either invoked the other in his writing or teaching – these major figures of twentieth-century European theatre are connected in at least two significant ways. First, they were both deeply influenced by a way of looking at actor training initiated through the radical experiments of the French theatre director, Jacques Copeau. For Grotowski, the link was through Copeau’s nephew, Michel Saint-Denis (1897–1971), whom he called ‘my spiritual father’. For Lecoq, the connection is by virtue of his ‘apprenticeship’ to Jean Dasté (1904–94), Copeau’s sonin-law. Second – and crucially – is their joint insistence that the creative ‘pulse’ at the heart of theatre is the actor’s body, its movement and its stillness. For Copeau, Grotowski and Lecoq – but in varying ways – it is the actor’s body that is both starting and finishing point of all live performance. Such an apparently unexceptional observation – shared by other significant theatre practitioners – however, disguises often contesting assumptions about what the body actually is, and whether through theatre training it can be stripped of all its cultural habits and dispositions acquired through socialisation. Arguably, the body of the performer and its ability to generate ‘presence’ and/or to ‘represent’ authentically has been the most significant challenge for Western theatre-makers over the last three decades. At the same time, this issue – how the performing body is constructed and communicates itself – has perhaps been the central problematic facing academics of theatre and performance studies. As this book attempts to illustrate, the work and thinking of Jacques Lecoq lie at the heart of such debates.

Although he was a prolific movement choreographer and director of plays between 1948 and 1956, while working and living in Italy, Lecoq’s impact on world theatre, from the inauguration of his Paris school in 1956 until his death forty-three years later, can only really be measured directly through his teaching, research and occasional forays into writing. Almost all the other key figures of European (and American) modernism whose work has interrogated the theory and practice of acting – from Stanislavsky (1863–1938), Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874– 1940), Copeau, Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) and Michael Chekhov (1891–1955), through to Grotowski, Joseph Chaikin (1935–), Brook and Barba – have also directed, devised or choreographed work for the stage.

Modernism is a complex historical and cultural phenomenon that embraces a wide – and often contradictory – range of ways of thinking about and explaining the world. Linked historically, but elastically, to a period from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, modernism embraces a wide variety of political, cultural and artistic movements which shared little other than a belief that nothing is as it seems, and that appearance and meaning have an awkward relationship with each other.

Mise-en-scène means literally – from the French – the ‘action of putting on the play’. It refers to all elements of the staging of a piece of theatre – lighting, design, props and costumes – and their relationship to each other and to spectators.

Dramaturgy is the process of thinking about – and realising in practice – the appropriate theatrical vocabularies and languages for carrying the meanings of the piece to spectators. Dramaturgy or ‘looking with knowledge’ (Keefe 1995: 12) engages with the process of considering all the possible texts for a work of theatre and how these will fit together to shape the structure of the piece in question. ‘The specific link between form and content’ (Pavis 1998: 125).

For practitioners such as these, teaching and research existed alongside directing and making professional theatre. For them, explorations into the nature of acting have been partly realised through the theatre productions for which they have been responsible. To the extent that such work has been documented – and within the considerable limitations which any documentation of live performance, however sensitive and sophisticated, places on the suspect notion of a single ‘accurate record’ – we can at least see or read about what apparently happened on stage. Here, it is theoretically possible to unravel the connections between pedagogy, dramaturgy, mise-en-scène and performance.

For Lecoq, given that his experience of directing theatre in Italy chronologically predates forty-three years of theorising, research and practice-through-teaching at the Paris school, we have no such opportunity. What we do have instead is a shadowy legacy of the traces left by those companies and actors who trained with Lecoq and who will readily invoke his influence when their work is described, analysed and assessed. Chapter 3 of this book is devoted to considering the work of two companies – Mummenschanz and Théâtre de Complicité – many of whose actors trained at the Paris school. By focusing on these companies we are presented with the opportunity of tracing where and how Lecoq’s influence is manifest through, for example, approaches to acting, deployment of dramatic space, manipulation of props and other objects and – above all – in a conscious devotion to the power of movement and gesture.

Jacques Lecoq: Actor, Director and Teacher

Early Career: Foundations in France and Italy (1940–56)

Jacques Lecoq was born in Paris in 1921. He was active in a variety of sports at school and throughout his life retained an interest in the way athletes effectively organise and use their bodies. At the age of twenty ...