PART ONE. "Where is Lecoq's school?" "It's here." "Are there any other students?" "N0, you are the first." And then I gave a lesson. He put on his tights and I gave him a lesson in movement. (Jacques Lecoq, in Leabhart 1989:93) 1 CHAPTER ONE GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 2 Jacques Lecoq has been called 'one of the finest teachers of acting in our time' (Esslin 1999). He has given workshops, seminars and lectures in Japan, New York, Australia, and in many European countries. He participated in the six mime festivals mounted in Europe between 1962 and 1971. He represented France at several international colloquies on actor training under the auspices of the International Theatre Institute. Since 1969 he taught students of architecture at the University of Paris. He collaborated with Jean Vilar, director of the Theatre Nationale Populaire, the Comedie Fran~aise, the Schiller Theater in Berlin. He has produced and directed a series of twenty-six silent comic films and has written a number of texts on theatre (Rolfe 1972:34). Born in Paris in 1921, Lecoq began his career at the age of nineteen teaching physical education and physical therapy. In 1945 he joined the Comediens de Grenoble, a troupe established by Jean Daste and his wife, Marie-Helene Copeau. Working with Daste and Leon Chancerel, both former students of Copeau, Lecoq was introduced to Copeau' s work and the principles of the Vieux Colombier School (Frost & Yarrow 1990:84). In 1947 he returned to Paris and began teaching at the Education par Ie J eu Dramatique, an acting school established by Jean-Louis Barrault, Roger Blin and Jean Daste, among others. In 1948 he was invited to Italy to teach movement at the Teatro dell'Universita di Padova. Here he founded the University of Padua Theatre School and directed his first plays. In 1952 he went to Milan where he founded the Theatre School of the Piccolo Teatro with Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler. During his time at the Piccolo, Lecoq developed his mime techniques and his abilities in dramatic choreography. He gained expertise as teacher, director and movement director/choreographer working on numerous productions. He encountered a variety of theatrical styles, working as assistant to Strehler on early productions of Brecht and premiere productions of some of Ionesco' s plays (Frost & Yarrow 1990:62; Rudlin 1994:200). Following Lecoq's success at the Piccolo Teatro, theatre companies throughout Italy invited him to choreograph their productions. Between 1954 and 1956 Lecoq worked as director-choreographer on approximately sixty productions of differing theatrical styles. In 1956 Lecoq returned to Paris and, in December of that year, established his international theatre school in a small studio on the rue d' Amsterdam in Paris. Although he continued to direct productions and make television appearances, the majority of his energies were invested in the school and the continual development of his pedagogy (FeIner 1985:147). As the school grew, Lecoq brought in other teachers, almost all of whom had trained at the school themselves. Lecoq, however, continued to teach the core aspects of the pedagogy himself. The school has been under his direction since its inception until his death on the 19th January 1999. It continues to operate under the direction of Lecoq' s wife, Madame Fay Lecoq. 3 The Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq currently offers a two year course. Between eighty and one hundred students are accepted each year into the first year course and at the end of the first year approximately thirty students are invited to undertake the second year program. Virtually all of the acting classes are taught through improvisation. The first year begins with silent improvisations, followed by studies in the neutral mask, the expressive masks, character, and dynamic approaches to poetry, painting, music, architecture and objects. Parallel to this work is training in techniques of movement comprising preparation of the body and voice, dramatic acrobatics and analysis of movement. The second year is primarily concerned with the exploration of different performance styles. It begins with a preparatory phase of study that covers different gestural languages, consisting of pantomime, figurative mime, bande mimee and story­ telling through word and image. This is followed by exploration of different dramatic territories: melodrama, commedia dell'arte, bouffon, tragedy, clown and different comic styles including burlesque, the absurd, and the eccentric (Lecoq 1997: 153). The second year continues training in techniques of movement but here they are specifically applied to the different performance styles. A major component of both the first and second year programs is the auto-cours or self-directed study in which students work alone or in groups on a given theme to create performance material which is then presented to the staff and students of the school. Students attend classes for four hours per day, typically divided into one hour of study in the techniques of movement, an hour and a half of acting taught through improvisation, and an hour and a half of auto-cours (Frost & Yarrow 1990:64). For students who complete the first and second years there is also an optional third year course. This is designed for those wishing to become performance trainers. Students undertaking the third year attend all of the first and second year sessions as observers and assistants to the instructors. They are also required to attend the Laboratory of Movement (LEM) which is an adjunct to the Lecoq school. The LEM is a department of experimental scenography designed for the dynamic study of space and rhythm through plastic representation. Studies in the LEM are for one year and are open to students at the Lecoq school and other interested parties from outside the school such as set designers, choreographers, decorators, dancers, actors, visual artists, architects and theatre directors (Lecoq 1997:163-164). Since the Lecoq school began in 1956, it has attracted over five thousand students from more than seventy countries around the world (Popenhagen, L. 1999). The subsequent work of these students extends across a broad range of the performing arts, embracing areas of dance, theatre, circus, film, television, music and opera. Many Lecoq alumni have received international acclaim as performers, directors, dancers, writers and teachers of 4 theatre. Among them are actor Philippe Avron, writer Michel Azama, Steven Berkoff, director Luc Bondy, Antonio Fava, Dario Fo, teachers Philippe Gaulier and Serge Martin, Ariane Mnouchkine, playwright Yasmina Reza, director and puppeteer Julie Taymor, and the theatre troupes Barrabbas (Ireland), Cirque du Soleil, De La Guarda (Argentina), Els Comediants, Footsbarn Travelling Theatre, I Gelati (Britain), The Moving Picture Mime Show, Mummenschanz, Theatre de Complicite, Theatre de la J eune Lune and Theatre Spirale (Switzerland). Through the work of these and many other former students, the Lecoq school has had a profound influence on theatre training and practice in many parts of the world. This influence is contextualised within a major paradigm shift in Western theatre, occurring during a period marked by significant ruptures in existing theatrical modes. As Phillip Zarrilli and others have noted, late nineteenth and twentieth century Western theatre found its ideological basis in Cartesian body/mind dualism. Many practitioners operated from assumptions of objectivity and absolutism, while others founded their theatres on subjectivity and personal 'truth'. As Zarrilli observes, however, 'Objectivism and subjectivism remain two sides of the same problematic, dualistic coin' (1995: 10). Dominating mainstream theatre training and practice have been approaches variously designated as 'psychological realism' and 'naturalism'. These have taken a particularly strong hold on American theatre training, but have been equally manifest in British and Australian approaches. And while these approaches vary within particular socio-cultural contexts, they are characteristically underwritten by the exigencies of the body/mind split, manifesting as suppression of the body and supremacy of the mind so that physicality becomes an adjunct in the theatrical equation. The Cartesian paradigm cut across multiple facets of the theatrical project. As Zarrilli notes, it manifested as 'an assumed polarity between internal and external and between realism and style' (1995:223). It also manifested in the dominance of the written text and the spoken word and consequently the privileging of interpretation over and above the creation of original material, with 'interpretation' relying on the supremacy of the mind, on the 'rational', 'scientific' analysis of a text. Interpretation was concomitant with the rise of the director in 20th century theatre and with it the privileging of hierarchical processes. The ascendancy of naturalism and the written playscript also necessarily meant the suppression of other theatre forms and other theatrical approaches and processes. In many instances, the dominance of this paradigm has been enacted by training institutions and government bodies. The following comments by Nigel Jamieson give a personal impression of how this process manifested in Britain: 5 In the English traditions the text and the writers' theatre came to really pre-dominate in the 1940s. When they fonned the Arts Council they asked: 'What is art?', and their answer was: 'Well it's Shakespeare. It's what's written down'. So popular theatre traditions just disappeared and they were the things that had entertained people for thousands of years. So circus was given no support, vaudeville was given no support, the commedia traditions and the Pierrot traditions and all those other fonns of theatre going right back to the Mummer plays and the York Mystery Cycles and all those sorts of theatre that came up from the people and weren't a literary fonn, all those things got completely neglected [ ... ]. So then they fonned RADA and LAMDA and the Central School of Speech and Drama and about ten drama schools, all of which were about training the actor to put on plays under the direction of a director and the pen of an author.