He believed that everyone had something to say, and that when we found this our work would be good. Jacques Lecoq's influence on the theatre of the latter half of the twentieth century cannot be overestimated. I use the present tense as here is surely an example of someone who will go on living in the lives, work and hearts of those whose paths crossed with his. At the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the movement training course is based on the work of several experts. We plan to do it in his studios in Montagny in 1995. For this special feature in memory of Jacques Lecoq, who died in January, Total Theatre asked a selection of his ex-students, colleagues and friends to share some personal reminiscences of the master. This is the case because mask is intended to be a visual form of theatre, communication is made through the physicality of the body, over that of spoken words. He is a physical theater performer, who . document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. Moving beyond habitual response into play and free movement, highlighting imagination and creativity, is where Lecoq gets the most interesting and helpful, particularly when it comes to devising new work. Lecoq strove to reawaken our basic physical, emotional and imaginative values. First stand with your left foot forward on a diagonal, and raise your left arm in front of you to shoulder height. This is the first book to combine an historical introduction to his life, and the context . - Jacques Lecoq In La Grande Salle, where once sweating men came fist to boxing fist, I am flat-out flopped over a tall stool, arms and legs flying in space. Tap-tap it raps out a rhythm tap-tap-tap. Jacques Lecoq. Whilst working on the techniques of practitioner Jacques Lecoq, paying particular focus to working with mask, it is clear that something can come from almost nothing. For him, the process is the journey, is the arrival', the trophy. I remember him trying exercises, then stepping away saying, Non, c'est pas a. Then, finding the dynamic he was looking for, he would cry, Ah, a c'est mieux. His gift was for choosing exercises which brought wonderful moments of play and discovery. Video encyclopedia . He arrives with Grikor and Fay, his wife, and we nervously walk to the space the studios of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Lecoq, in contrast, emphasised the social context as the main source of inspiration and enlightenment. To actors he showed how the great movements of nature correspond to the most intimate movements of human emotion. It was nice to think that you would never dare to sit at his table in Chez Jeannette to have a drink with him. Jacques Lecoq. He beams with pleasure: Tu vois mon espace! We looked at the communal kitchen and were already dreaming of a workshop, which would devote equal attention to eating and to working. I am only there to place obstacles in your path, so you can find your own way round them.' Through exploring every possibility of a situation a level of play can be reached, which can engage the audience. We must then play with different variations of these two games, using the likes of rhythm, tempo, tension and clocking, and a performance will emerge, which may engage the audiences interest more than the sitution itself. For him, there were no vanishing points, only clarity, diversity and supremely co-existence. [6] Lecoq classifies gestures into three major groups: gestures of action, expression, and demonstration.[6]. He provoked and teased the creative doors of his students open, allowing them to find a theatrical world and language unique to them. Allow opportunities to react and respond to the elements around you to drive movement. It is a mask sitting on the face of a person, a character, who has idiosyncrasies and characteristics that make them a unique individual. He also taught us humanity. It is the same with touching the mask, or eating and drinking, the ability for a mask to eat and drink doesnt exist. The objects can do a lot for us, she reminded, highlighting the fact that a huge budget may not be necessary for carrying off a new work. Really try not to self-police dont beat yourself up! We visited him at his school in Rue du Faubourg, St Denis, during our run of Quatre Mains in Paris. He also believed that masks could help actors connect with their audience and create a sense of magic and wonder on stage. Franco Cordelli writes: If you look at two parallel stories Lecoq's and his contemporary Marcel Marceaus it is striking how their different approaches were in fact responses to the same question. The big anxiety was: would he approve of the working spaces we had chosen for him? Like a gardener, he read not only the seasonal changes of his pupils, but seeded new ideas. Jacques Lecoq, a French actor and movement coach who was trained in commedia dell'arte, helped establish the style of physical theater. If everyone onstage is moving, but one person is still, the still person would most likely take focus. For example, if the game is paused while two students are having a conversation, they must immediately start moving and sounding like the same animal (e.g. Practitioner Jacques Lecoq and His Influence. My gesture was simple enough pointing insistently at the open fly. Toute Bouge' (Everything Moves), the title of Lecoq's lecture demonstration, is an obvious statement, yet from his point of view all phenomena provided an endless source of material and inspiration. And again your friends there are impressed and amazed by your transformation. Lecoq's emphasis on developing the imagination, shared working languages and the communicative power of space, image and body are central to the preparation work for every Complicit process. Jacques Lecoq (15 December 1921 19 January 1999) was a French stage actor and acting movement coach. David Glass writes: Lecoq's death marks the passing of one of our greatest theatre teachers. Your arms should be just below your shoulders with the palms facing outwards and elbows relaxed. The mask is essentially a blank slate, amorphous shape, with no specific characterizations necessarily implied. Whether it was the liberation of France or the student protests of 1968, the expressive clowning of Jacques Lecoq has been an expansive force of expression and cultural renewal against cultural stagnation and defeat. The idea of not seeing him again is not that painful because his spirit, his way of understanding life, has permanently stayed with us. But Lecoq was no period purist. With a wide variety of ingredients such as tension states, rhythm, de-construction, major and minor, le jeu/the game, and clocking/sharing with the audience, even the simplest and mundane of scenarios can become interesting to watch. Major and minor is very much about the level of complicite an ensemble has with one another onstage, and how the dynamics of the space and focus are played with between them. The actor's training is similar to that of a musician, practising with an instrument to gain the best possible skills. He strived for sincerity and authenticity in acting and performance. Jacques Lecoq View on Animal Exercises Jacques Lecoq was a French actor, mime artist, and theatre director. Lecoq's school in Paris attracted an elite of acting students from all parts of the world. Among his many other achievements are the revival of masks in Western theatre, the invention of the Buffoon style (very relevant to contemporary culture) and the revitalisation of a declining popular form clowns. Born in Paris, he began his career as an actor in France. Now let your arm fall gently as you breathe out, simultaneously shifting your weight to your right leg. Then it walks away and Someone takes the offer As you develop your awareness of your own body and movement, it's vital to look at how other people hold themselves. We thought the school was great and it taught us loads. ), "Believing or identifying oneself is not enough, one has to ACT." He became a physical education teacher but was previously also a physiotherapist. He taught us to be artists. Lecoq's Technique and Mask. He was clear, direct and passionate with a, sometimes, disconcerting sense of humour. [6] Lecoq also wrote on the subject of gesture specifically and its philosophical relation to meaning, viewing the art of gesture as a linguistic system of sorts in and of itself. The last mask in the series is the red clown nose which is the last step in the student's process. Think of a cat sitting comfortably on a wall, ready to leap up if a bird comes near. Tension states, are an important device to express the emotion and character of the performer. This text offers a concise guide to the teaching and philosophy of one of the most significant figures in twentieth century actor training. Now let your body slowly open out: your pelvis, your spine, your arms slowly floating outwards so that your spine and ribcage are flexed forwards and your knees are bent. Thus began Lecoq's practice, autocours, which has remained central to his conception of the imaginative development and individual responsibility of the theatre artist. Lecoq's wife Fay decided to take over. The show started, but suddenly what did we see, us and the entire audience? and starts a naughty tap-tapping. While Lecoq still continued to teach physical education for several years, he soon found himself acting as a member of the Comediens de Grenoble. After the class started, we had small research time about Jacques Lecoq. He received teaching degrees in swimming and athletics. [1] He began learning gymnastics at the age of seventeen, and through work on the parallel bars and horizontal bar, he came to see and understand the geometry of movement. Jacques said he saw it as the process of accretion you find in the meander of a river, the slow layering of successive deposits of silt. Let your arms swing behind your legs and then swing back up. But to attain this means taking risks and breaking down habits. For me, he was always a teacher, guiding the 'boat', as he called the school. What is he doing? Founded in 1956 by Jacques Lecoq, the school offers a professional and intensive two-year course emphasizing the body, movement and space as entry points in theatrical performance and prepares its students to create collaboratively. Jacques Lecoq was a French actor and acting coach who developed a unique approach to acting based on movement and physical expression principles. There can of course be as many or as few levels of tension as you like (how long is a piece of string?). f The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre, Jacques Lecoq (2009), 978-1408111468, an autobiography and guide to roots of physical theatre f Why is That So Funny? A key string to the actor's bow is a malleable body, capable of adapting and transforming as the situation requires, says RADA head of movement Jackie Snow, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, RADA foundation class in movement/dance. Bring Lessons to Life through Drama Techniques, Santorini. After a while, allow the momentum of the swing to lift you on to the balls of your feet, so that you are bouncing there. [4] Lecoq emphasizes that his students should respect the old, traditional form of commedia dell'arte. Jacques Lecoq is regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential teachers of the physical art of acting. Start off with some rib stretches. Like a poet, he made us listen to individual words, before we even formed them into sentences, let alone plays. In mask work, it is important to keep work clean and simple. He founded cole Internationale de Thtre Jacques . That is the question. In working with mask it also became very clear that everything is to be expressed externally, rather than internally. He has invited me to stay at his house an hour's travel from Paris. You changed the face of performance in the last half century through a network of students, colleagues, observers and admirers who have spread the work throughout the investigative and creative strata of the performing arts. Its nice to have the opportunity to say thanks to him. He taught us accessible theatre; sometimes he would wonder if his sister would understand the piece, and, if not, it needed to be clearer. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Jacques Lecoq. You know mime is something encoded in nature. We use cookies where essential and to help us improve your experience of our website. flopped over a tall stool, Of all facets of drama training, perhaps the most difficult to teach through the medium of the page is movement. We then bid our farewells and went our separate ways. Bring your right hand up to join it, and then draw it back through your shoulder line and behind you, as if you were pulling the string on a bow. Through his techniques he introduced to us the possibility of magic on the stage and his training and wisdom became the backbone of my own work. He taught us respect and awe for the potential of the actor. Lecoq on Clown 1:10. [1] In 1937 Lecoq began to study sports and physical education at Bagatelle college just outside of Paris. We started by identifying what these peculiarities were, so we could begin to peel them away. Copyright 2023 Invisible Ropes | Powered by Astra WordPress Theme. What we have as our duty and, I hope, our joy is to carry on his work. Keeping details like texture or light quality in mind when responding to an imagined space will affect movement, allowing one actor to convey quite a lot just by moving through a space. Lecoq believed that mastering these movements was essential for developing a strong, expressive, and dynamic performance. Another vital aspect in his approach to the art of acting was the great stress he placed on the use of space the tension created by the proximity and distance between actors, and the lines of force engendered between them. The school was also located on the same street that Jacques Copeau was born. In fact, the experience of losing those habits can be emotionally painful, because postural habits, like all habits, help us to feel safe. In 1956 he started his own school of mime in Paris, which over the next four decades became the nursery of several generations of brilliant mime artists and actors. We also do some dance and stage fighting, which encourages actors to develop their use of space, rhythm and style, as well as giving them some practical tools for the future. He had the ability to see well. This vision was both radical and practical. He taught us to cohere the elements. Andrew Dawson & Jos Houben write: We last saw Jacques Lecoq in December last year. Lecoq's influence on the theatre of the latter half of the twentieth century cannot be overestimated. They can also use physical and vocal techniques to embody the animal in their performance. He saw through their mistakes, and pointed at the essential theme on which they were working 'water', apparently banal and simple. As part of this approach, Lecoq often incorporated animal exercises into his acting classes, which involved mimicking the movements and behaviors of various animals in order to develop a greater range of physical expression. In life I want students to be alive, and on stage I want them to be artists." They include the British teacher Trish Arnold; Rudolph Laban, who devised eukinetics (a theoretical system of movement), and the extremely influential Viennese-born Litz Pisk. [4] Three of the principal skills that he encouraged in his students were le jeu (playfulness), complicit (togetherness) and disponibilit (openness). When working with mask, as with puppetry and most other forms of theatre, there are a number of key rules to consider. Lecoq never thought of the body as in any way separate from the context in which it existed. His concentration on the aspects of acting that transcend language made his teaching truly international. He enters the studio and I swear he sniffs the space. Magically, he could set up an exercise or improvisation in such a way that students invariably seemed to do their best work in his presence. Marceau chose to emphasise the aesthetic form, the 'art for art's sake', and stated that the artist's path was an individual, solitary quest for a perfection of art and style. Once done, you can continue to the main exercises. Every week we prepared work from a theme he chose, which he then watched and responded to on Fridays. The end result should be that you gain control of your body in order to use it in exactly the way you want to. But there we saw the master and the work. Teaching it well, no doubt, but not really following the man himself who would have entered the new millennium with leaps and bounds of the creative and poetic mind to find new challenges with which to confront his students and his admirers. His desk empty, bar the odd piece of paper and the telephone. Everybody said he hadn't understood because my pantomime talent was less than zero. Like an architect, his analysis of how the human body functions in space was linked directly to how we might deconstruct drama itself. By focusing on the natural tensions within your body, falling into the rhythm of the ensemble and paying attention to the space, you can free the body to move more freely and instinctively its all about opening yourself up to play, to see what reactions your body naturally have, freeing up from movements that might seem clich or habitual. Next, another way to play with major and minor, is via the use of movement and stillness. Not only did he show countless actors, directors and teachers how the body could be more articulate; his innovative teaching was the catalyst that helped the world of mime enrich the mainstream of theatre. Learn moreabout how we use cookies including how to remove them. The following week, after working on the exercise again several hours a day, with this "adjustment", you bring the exercise back to the workshop. His training involved an emphasis on masks, starting with the neutral mask. Naturalism, creativity and play become the most important factors, inspiring individual and group creativity! In a time that continually values what is external to the human being. Allison Cologna and Catherine Marmier write: Those of us lucky enough to have trained with this brilliant theatre practitioner and teacher at his school in Paris sense the enormity of this great loss to the theatrical world. Alert or Curious (farce). Jacques Lecoq was a French actor, mime artist, and theatre director. Repeat on the right side and then on the left again. Following many of his exercise sessions, Lecoq found it important to think back on his period of exercise and the various routines that he had performed and felt that doing so bettered his mind and emotions. But acting is not natural, and actors always have to give up some of the habits they have accumulated. Carolina Valdes writes: The loss of Jacques Lecoq is the loss of a Master. He taught at the school he founded in Paris known ascole internationale de thtre Jacques Lecoq, from 1956 until his death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1999. an analysis of his teaching methods and principles of body work, movement . I wish I had. Table of Contents THE LIFE OF JACQUES LECOQ Jacques Lecoq (1921-99) Jacques Lecoq: actor, director and teacher Jacques Lecoq and the Western tradition of actor training Jacques Lecoq: the body and culture Summary and conclusion THE TEXTS OF JACQUES LECOQ As Lecoq trainee and scholar Ismael Scheffler describes, Lecoq's training incorporated "exercises of movements of identification and expression of natural elements and phenomena" (Scheffler, Citation 2016, p. 182) within its idea of mime (the school's original name was L'cole Internationale de Thtre et de Mime -The International . He challenged existing ideas to forge new paths of creativity. The conversation between these two both uncovers more of the possible cognitive processes at work in Lecoq pedagogy and proposes how Lecoq's own practical and philosophical . Later we watched the 'autocours'. Jacques Lecoq said that all the drama of these swings is at the very top of the suspension: when you try them, you'll see what he meant. [1], As a teenager, Lecoq participated in many sports such as running, swimming, and gymnastics. [1] In 1941, Lecoq attended a physical theatre college where he met Jean Marie Conty, a basketball player of international caliber, who was in charge of physical education in all of France. He was much better than me at moving his arms and body around. He was essential. Freeing yourself from right and wrong is essential: By relieving yourself of the inner critic and simply moving in a rhythmic way, ideas around right or wrong movements can fade into the background. Jacques Lecoq, born in Paris, was a French actor, mime and acting . [4], In collaboration with the architect Krikor Belekian he also set up le Laboratoire d'tude du Mouvement (Laboratory for the study of movement; L.E.M. Magically, he could set up an exercise or improvisation in such a way that students invariably seemed to do . To share your actions with the audience, brings and invites them on the journey with you. Working with character masks, different tension states may suit different faces, for example a high state of tension for an angry person, or a low state of tension for a tired or bored person. This was a separate department within the school which looked at architecture, scenography and stage design and its links to movement. The training, the people, the place was all incredibly exciting. Other elements of the course focus on the work of Jacques Lecoq, whose theatre school in Paris remains one of the best in the world; the drama theorist and former director of the Royal Shakespeare . like a beach beneath bare feet. It was amazing to see his enthusiasm and kindness and to listen to his comments. He was interested in creating a site to build on, not a finished edifice. He is survived by his second wife Fay; by their two sons and a daughter; and by a son from his first marriage. It is the fine-tuning of the body - and the voice - that enables the actor to achieve the highest level of expressiveness in their art. He was born 15 December in Paris, France and participated and trained in various sports as a child and as a young man. I had the privilege to attend his classes in the last year that he fully taught and it always amazed me his ability to make you feel completely ignored and then, afterwards, make you discover things about yourself that you never knew were there. Beneath me the warm boards spread out like a beach beneath bare feet. Jacques was a man of extraordinary perspectives. What he taught was niche, complex and extremely inspiring but he always, above all, desperately defended the small, simple things in life. During World War II he began exploring gymnastics, mime, movement and dance with a group who used performance . Whilst working on the techniques of practitioner Jacques Lecoq, paying particular focus to working with mask, it is clear that something can come from almost nothing. In many press reviews and articles concerning Jacques Lecoq he has been described as a clown teacher, a mime teacher, a teacher of improvisation and many other limited representations. Try some swings. [8], The French concept of 'efficace' suggesting at once efficiency and effectiveness of movement was highly emphasized by Lecoq. L'Ecole Jacques Lecoq has had a profound influence on Complicit's approach to theatre making. Monsieur Lecoq was remarkably dedicated to his school until the last minute and was touchingly honest about his illness. Focus can be passed around through eye contact, if the one performer at stage right focused on the ensemble and the ensemble focused their attention outward, then the ensemble would take focus. When Jacques Lecoq started to teach or to explain something it was just impossible to stop him. See more advice for creating new work, or check out more from our Open House. Special thanks to Madame Fay Lecoq for her assistance in compiling this tribute and to H. Scott Helst for providing the photos. I attended two short courses that he gave many years ago. I have always had a dual aim in my work: one part of my interest is directed towards the Theatre, the other towards Life." And it wasn't only about theatre it really was about helping us to be creative and imaginative. (Reproduced from Corriere della Sera with translation from the Italian by Sherdan Bramwell.). Its a Gender An essay on the Performance. When your arm is fully stretched, let it drop, allowing your head to tip over in that direction at the same time. [4] The expressive masks are basically character masks that are depicting a very particular of character with a specific emotion or reaction. The phrase or command which he gave each student at the end of their second year, from which to create a performance, was beautifully chosen. [1] Lecoq chose this location because of the connections he had with his early career in sports. Your feet should be a little further apart: stretch your arm out to the right while taking the weight on your right bent leg, leading your arm upwards through the elbow, hand and then fingers. It was me. He only posed questions.