Laura Purcell Gates Dissertation

Tout Bouge [Everything Moves]: The (Re)Construction of the Body in Lecoq‐based Pedagogy A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Laura Purcell Gates IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Sonja Kuftinec Advisor September 2011 © Laura Purcell Gates 2011 Acknowledgements My research at École Philippe Gaulier was generously funded in part by the University of Minnesota Graduate School International Thesis Research Grant. I was also fortunate to receive funding during my time at the University of Minnesota through Department of Theatre Arts and Dance travel awards, the University of Minnesota Graduate and Professional Student Assembly Travel Grant, the University of Minnesota Graduate Research Partnership Program Grant, University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts Graduate Student Support Awards, and a University of Minnesota Graduate School Fellowship. This dissertation would not have been possible without the support, advice and encouragement of my dissertation committee: Sonja Kuftinec, Margaret Werry, Cindy Garcia and Timothy Lensmire. I am particularly grateful to my advisor Sonja for her incisive advice and enthusiastic guidance. Finally, thank you to Tobi for rearranging home life around my writing, to my mother Victoria for seeing me through the defense, to my father Bill for reliable humor, and to all my friends and family for unending emotional support. i Table of Contents List of Figures iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Disorientation and the Haptic: Devising The Master and Margarita 32 Chapter 2: Ventre and Cerveau: Contamination Anxieties in Late Nineteenth‐Century French Mime 63 Chapter 3: Puppets and Bodies: Mechanical versus Natural in French Neutral Mask Training 124 Chapter 4: Locating the Self: Narratives and Practices of Authenticity in French Clown Training 187 Conclusion 243 Works Cited 253 ii List of Figures Figure 1: The Hanlon‐Lees 86 Figure 2: Le bras noir 112 Figure 3: Traditional Venetian bauta mask 142 Figure 4: Students working with the Neutral Mask in Gaulier’s workshop 144 Figure 5: Students waiting to receive feedback 167 Figure 6: Gaulier ready to hit the drum 223 iii Introduction You: crouched in the grass while the devil screeched up in a car and cavorted to deranged techno music; jogged to a set of stairs and watched a wind‐up band playing demented vaudeville; squinted through the gloom and watched a real‐life silent movie playing out in the near distance; leaned against a wall while a huge student cast sang a song of heartache and near‐redemption; held your breath while you walked through the dark with characters hissing sour nothings in your ear. ‐Quinton Skinner, Review of The Master and Margarita1 In this review, Quinton Skinner captures the imagistic rather than narrative framework that shaped the devising of The Master and Margarita, an outdoor, site‐ specific collaboration mounted by University of Minnesota theatre undergraduates in September‐October 2006. Performers translated potent images from the novel into embodied theatrical events which loosely follow Mikhail Bulgakov’s story in his novel of the same name. In his novel, Bulgakov tells the story of the devil’s visit to the Moscow of Stalinist Russia and involvement in the love affair between the Master, a writer who has been vilified in literary circles for his novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate, and Margarita, the woman who strikes a deal with the devil to be reunited with her lover. The adaptation was co‐directed by Michael Sommers and Luverne Seifert, two local theatre artists who also teach at the university. Sommers teaches puppetry and co‐runs Open Eye Figure Theatre, a Minneapolis‐based puppetry company. Seifert teaches acting at the university and is a professional actor in the Twin Cities; he and Sommers have both worked extensively with the now‐defunct Théâtre de la Jeune Lune, a theatre founded by graduates of École Jacques Lecoq. Rehearsals for The Master and Margarita 1 Skinner, Quinton. "Curtain Call." Citypages 27 Dec 2006, sec. Arts: 1. 1 were therefore strongly informed by Lecoq’s methodology, including clown and le jeu [the play or the game].2 During rehearsals for The Master and Margarita I observed a number of pedagogical effects including increased agency among performers, the ability to access embodied knowledge, and the development of collaborative working relationships. As I explored the strategies for creating a space within which these effects were facilitated, I arrived at a conception of the uses of disorientation to create a different type of space, a space that allowed new patterns of thought and behavior to occur. This idea became the lens through which I approached a later practice‐based study of the Neutral Mask and Clown workshops at École Philippe Gaulier, in which I examined the ways in which students and teachers engaged with ideas and practices that have been a part of the French mime tradition from the late nineteenth century, including the natural body, the artificial or mechanical body, and the “authentic self”.3 These practices are considered 2 Le jeu is a form of improvisation central to Jacques Lecoq’s concept of theatrical creation. Lecoq defines le jeu as “lorsque, conscient de la dimension théâtrale, l’acteur donne un rythme, une mesure, une durée, un espace, une forme à son improvisation, pour un public” [when, conscious of the theatrical dimension, the actor gives a rhythm, a measure, a space, a form to his improvisation for spectators] (Corps 41; unless indicated otherwise, all translations in this chapter are mine). Mask work includes Neutral Mask in which movement without expression is explored, Larval Mask in which shapes suggest expressivity, and Character Mask in which strong personality must be embodied. Clown is a type of character and a performance technique that also operates within le jeu. This figure is related to circus and Commedia clown traditions, but is also highly specific to a style developed by Lecoq with his students at the school over several decades. The central feature of the Lecoq clown is openness—a vulnerability that allows for spontaneity in the rehearsal process. 3 I use “authentic self” to mean the idea of a pre‐socialized identity that lies “behind” socialized habits of thought and behavior, or movement. Much actor training in the twentieth century has been geared toward stripping away these habits; this includes movement training (see Evans 2009), voice training, for example Kristen Linklater’s system of “Freeing the Natural 2 part of Lecoq‐based pedagogy, a pedagogy that I have chosen to analyze utilizing both historiographic and practice‐based methodologies for its approach to the performer’s body. This expands on current research (including Murray 2002 and 2003 and Evans 2009) that focuses on and theorizes the key ideas that Lecoq espoused but which lacks current practice‐based data, as these existing studies rely on memories of students rather than observations in the actual classroom. Additionally, my research links Lecoq‐ based practice to twentieth‐century mime beginning with Jacques Copeau in contrast to studies that do not look further back to French mime practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which I propose significantly informed later twentieth‐century developments. In Chapter 2, therefore, I analyze late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐ century French mime practitioners and theorists as they encountered, produced and struggled with these themes of mechanization and authenticity; in Chapters 3 and 4 I turn my attention to Gaulier’s classroom to study the ways in which students and teachers within a tradition drawn from French mime continue to engage with these themes, interrogating, rupturing and reinscribing conventional notions of the body and self. I return to the site of The Master and Margarita in Chapter 1, digging more deeply into my concept of a “pedagogy of disorientation” and situating this and other key Lecoq ideas within a larger scholarly conversation, which sets the stage for my analysis Voice”(1976), and Lecoq‐based clown training in which students are encouraged to “discover” their personal clown, generally identified in the classroom and in writings (including Lecoq 1997, Fusetti 1999 and Gaulier 2007) as the student’s “true” self. I explore and challenge this idea of the “true” or “authentic” self in more detail in Chapter 4. 3 of Gaulier’s classroom. This introduction lays out the larger questions of my research, and details my methodology and existing literature in the field. In this dissertation I explore the question of how the body has been historically constructed as a performing agent in Lecoq‐based performance pedagogy through investigating the ways in which the body has been and continues to be a site of contestation—revealing underlying ideas about the “natural”, the mechanical, and the “authentic” self—within the French mime tradition. This interest began with my personal experience of Lecoq‐based pedagogy, in which I observed intersections between contemporary Euro‐American pedagogical approaches to the body, which position it as an object to be controlled by the mind, and Lecoq‐based pedagogical practice, which positions the body as a thinking agent. I chose to study the ways in which the body has been constructed and mobilized within the Lecoq pedagogical tradition by analyzing specific classroom practices at the Lecoq‐based École Philippe Gaulier, and tracing themes that emerged—including the idea of the “natural” versus the “mechanical” body and concurrent themes of emotion and the “authentic” self— back through the shifting French mime tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I have undertaken this research, therefore, in order to understand how the body is both constructed and mobilized, in dialogue and in tension with normative constructions of the body, within a specific pedagogical context.

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