Copeau/Decroux, Irving/Craig

A Search for 20th Century Mime, Mask & Marionette

Thomas Leabhart, Thomas G Leabhart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032071817
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000544497
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

In this series of essays, Thomas Leabhart presents a thorough overview and analysis of Etienne Decroux's artistic genealogy.

After four years' apprenticeship with Decroux, Thomas Leabhart began to research and discover how forebears and contemporaries might have influenced Decroux's project. Decades of digging revealed striking correspondences that often led to adjacent fields—art history, philosophy, and anthropology—forays wherein Leabhart's appreciation of Decroux and his "kinsfolk," who themselves transgressed traditional frontiers, increased. The following essays, composed over a 30-year period, find a common source in a darkened Prague cinema where people gasped at a wooden doll's sudden reversal of fortune. These essays: investigate the source of that astonishment; continue Leabhart's examination of Decroux's "family tree"; consider how Copeau's and Decroux's keen observation of animal movement influenced their actor training; record the challenging and paradoxical improvisations chez Decroux; and recall Decroux's debt to sculpture, poster art, sport and masks.

These essays will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners in theatre and performance studies.

1IntroductionLessons from Prague

DOI: 10.4324/9781003205852-1

The title of this volume serves the reader well in identifying which artists will figure among its pages. Yet the original working title for these collected essays nonetheless hangs in the air: The Wooden Actor and Other Paradoxes of Theatrical Organicity. Břetislav Pojar's doll animation, created with rudimentary means and before today's transforming technical advances, raises questions that endure: What is presence? How can a wooden puppet or a wooden mask convey emotion? How could Czech puppeteers and Japanese noh actors arrive at similar techniques without one having appropriated the other's secret teaching? In both cases, they “gave one the impression that the puppet hid more than it showed, and its heart of wood stored even more” (Prague).

An intriguing encounter

In 1975, an International Research and Exchanges Board grant supported our five-month visit to Poland and the former Czechoslovakia, two theatre centers then behind the Iron Curtain. In Poland, Cracow's legendary Stary Theatre and Jerzy Grotowski's Teatr Laboratorium in Wroclaw left profound impressions, whereas Henryk Tomaszewski's glittering and often glitzy Wroclaw Pantomime Theatre failed to capture our imagination even as it dazzled others’. Later, in addition to attending darkly hilarious performances by Czech mime-clowns Boris Hybner, Boleslav Polívka and Ctibor Turba, we happened upon a screening of a 15-minute doll animation film entitled Jabloňová panna (The Apple Maiden) by the celebrated animator Břetislav Pojar (1923–2012).

This charming story features a prince who sets off on horseback in search of a wife. His perfect match appears miraculously before our eyes from inside an apple fallen from a magical tree. The prince lifts this maiden onto his horse and gallops off. As they proceed along a path suspended over a deep and murky canyon, a flying jealous witch appears from behind and, with lightning speed, pierces the betrothed's heart, appropriates her engagement ring, casts her head first into the abyss and usurps her place behind the unsuspecting prince. At first sight of this hideous interloper, the terror-stricken audience, strangers in the darkened theatre, responded collectively with a sharp gasp. I imagined classical Greek and commedia dell'arte spectators reacting in unison with similar fervor.

That Czech public's impassioned response has become a focus for reflection over the decades: How did these wooden dolls, from the first moments of the film, induce our suspended disbelief? Why, at the moment of greatest danger to these objectively lifeless characters, did the audience feel viscerally engaged and impelled to respond?

Pojar's inspiration

The film's director wrote of his mentor, the legendary filmmaker Jiří Trnka (1912–1969):

He always gave his [doll's] eyes a look indefinable. With the simple turn of their heads, or with a change of lighting, rose smiling expressions, or unhappy, or dreamers. This gave one the impression that the puppet hid more than it showed, and its heart of wood stored even more.

(Prague)

Analogous effects from distant forms

Pojar clearly strove for similar effects, as his characters in The Apple Maiden had immobile faces and only rudimentarily articulated bodies. By turning and inclining the head, by approaching the light or pulling away from it, the dolls’ expressions transformed. Japanese taiko drummer/scholar Kunio Komparu (1926–1983) noted equivalent dynamics at work in the world's oldest continuously performed theatre, the noh, founded by Zeami in the fourteenth century.

[W]hen the [noh] mask is moved and the light changes or when it is seen from a different angle, it can mystically take on an infinite variety of expressions. It has a profound quality that leads to a comparison with the puzzling expression of the Mona Lisa or the intimate yet mystical “archaic smile” of classical Greek sculpture. The basic quality of the Noh mask's expression should be interpreted not as a passive “neutral” but rather as an active “infinite.”

(Komparu 229)

Komparu explains the mechanism inherent in this “active infinite”: by eliminating the performer's expressively mobile face, “denying raw expression” and by “covering the at best unruly facial expressions of the actor,” the mask freely communicates “an unlimited number of expressions in the mind of the viewer. . . ” (Komparu 224).

Body and soul

This technique recalls experiments developed by French theatre revolutionary Jacques Copeau (1879–1949) and his collaborator Suzanne Bing (1885–1967). They covered the actor's face to see what the body alone could express, an exercise which would serve as the inspiration for the corporeal mime that Copeau's student Etienne Decroux (1898–1991) would elaborate over his lifetime. While developing his vast technical repertoire for the whole body, Decroux eventually dropped his early experiments with masks and transformed the face itself into a mask, echoing certain noh plays that also eschew them:

In such plays [performed without masks] the idea is to fix a still expression like a mask on the “bare wood” of the actor's face—the hitamen is a mask that is not a mask. The face is strictly required to function as a mask, so of course makeup is never used and the facial muscles must not be used to make expressions.

(Komparu 230)

Etienne Decroux extolled the sublimely expressive faces of stone Buddha statues at Angkor Wat, citing them as ideal for corporeal mime. Drawing further inspiration from the English designer/theoretician Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966), Decroux told his students that some human actors developed puppet-like qualities (he especially admired Louis Jouvet in this regard) in order to create the articulation and artifice required of art. I hear Decroux's voice, and perhaps also Artaud's, behind that of French actor and mime Jean-Louis Barrault (1910–1994) in the following quotation:

Let us not hesitate to say it: there should be, deep in every actor, an element of the robot. The function of art is to lead this robot toward the natural; to proceed by artificial means toward an imitation of nature. It is because the violin is a hollow box, like a dead body, that it is so satisfying to furnish it with a soul.

(Barrault 29)

Great events in theatre occur when one possesses the “hollow box” and subsequently finds the soul to furnish it, or when the wandering soul at last finds a body-box in which to live. American stage director Anne Bogart (b. 1951) writes about kata:

The Japanese use the word kata to describe a prescribed set of movements that are repeatable. Katas can be found in acting, in cooking, in martial arts as well as in flower arranging. The translation for the word kata in English is “stamp,” “pattern” or “mould.” In executing a kata, it is essential never to question its meaning but through the endless repetition the meaning starts to vibrate and acquire substance. . . . If it is true that creativity occurs in the heat of spontaneous interacting with set forms, perhaps what is interesting is the quality of the heat you put under inherited containers, codes and patterns of behavior. . . . Therefore I believe that it is better to set the exterior (the form, the action) and allow the interior (the quality of being, the ever-altering emotional landscape) freedom to move and change in every repetition. . . . To allow for emotional freedom, you pay attention to form. If you embrace the notion of containers or katas, then your task is to set a fire, a human fire, inside these containers and start to burn.

(Bogart 101–3)

Ma: the essential ingredient

How to define this “human fire” which enlivens traditional forms? American kyogen specialist Jonah Salz (b. 1956) identifies a quality in Japanese art called ma, which Komparu translates into English as “space, spacing, interval, gap, blank, room, pause, rest time, timing or opening” (Komparu 70), and which quality, Salz explains, “keeps kata from becoming robotic” (Salz). This individual “timing” can manifest in phrasing of set movements in a kata, or in complete immobility, as in the i-guse,

an important scene that is often the high point in a play. In an i-guse, the performer sits at center stage, as still as a rock. To the flow of the choral chanting of the story and the instrumental music he dances only with his heart, going beyond the visual to attain infinite expression.

(Komparu 73)

Wooden: for better or worse?

Barrault, Bogart and Komparu seem to argue for a “wooden actor,” words which remind us of Edward Gordon Craig's polemical search for the ideal performer as Übermarionette, one of the most salient arguments in twentieth-century theatre.

The words “wooden actor” also contain a double entendre: for most people, “wooden acting” equals stilted, clumsy, non-naturalistic performance. However, Craig and other twentieth-century revolutionaries sought supernatural or “artistic” (artificial, de-familiarized, articulated, marionettized) acting. Therein the absence of “naturalness” and verisimilitude became a virtue, but only when guided by ma, or “timing.”

Italian director and author Eugenio Barba's (b. 1936) works in the same field, and the research conducted by ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology) scientific staff, reveal shared principles illuminating Asian and contemporary European theatre practice. This work reminds us how, in the hands of traditional and contemporary artists, “organicity” (as ISTA scholars call it), or ma as Komparu defines it, might eradicate mechanical rigidity, allowing art to thrive on artifice and articulation rather than being hampered by it. Hence the paradox: the performance of a wooden puppet (or a human actor with puppet-like articulations) might move an audience to tears.

The artistic body

That Prague audience's con-spiring (“breathing together”) in 1975 provided the incentive for a re-reading of my years of study with Decroux and guided me to a more detailed exploration of Decroux's family tree—Copeau, Bing, Craig, Artaud, Jouvet and Dullin. Seen together, for all their differences, they foster an aesthetic that resonates in that animated film audience's decisive intake of air. Beyond the practice and theory of these French theatre practitioners, I have found distant and disparate performances impelled by a similar artistic vision. Indeed, the transfixing power of the wooden actor, who “calls up a wealth of images deep within the heart and mind of the viewer and makes the internal drama possible” (Komparu 230), operates as a unifying principle among various performance modalities. This connective thread reveals techniques developed over generations as in the noh, or ones necessarily created from hard work and persistance over the course of one lifetime, as in the case of British tragedian Henry Irving (1938–1905) or of Etienne Decroux.

In all these forms, ancient or contemporary, the actor's transformed body becomes a meeting place for the artifice (kata) of the puppet and the organicity and truth of the rhythms of work and of thought (ma). If playing the articulation ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Lessons from Prague
• 2 Blowing up the palace and hanging up on the Opéra: Dramaturgy in and of the body
• 3 Monkey business and Robin revelations: Animal observation in actor training
• 4 Friday night pearls of wisdom
• 5 E.G. Craig's Übermarionette and E. Decroux's “actor made of wood”
• 6 Triptych: Three aspects/one figure
• 7 Everything weighs: Wrestling with an invisible angel
• 8 From Copeau to Decroux: the mask in actor training: Sculpting new bodies for ancient heads
• 9 The face in corporeal mime: From plaster death mask to living actor's visage
• 10 L'Homme de sport: Sport and statuary in Etienne Decroux's corporeal mime
• Index