Jacques Lecoq is regarded as one of the twentieth century's most
influential teachers of the physical art of acting. He was born 15 December in
Paris, France and participated and trained in various sports as a child and as
a young man. During World War II he began exploring gymnastics, mime, movement
and dance with a group who used performance to express their opposition to the
German occupation of France. After the war, Lecoq then studied mime with Jean
Daste, (a former pupil of the acclaimed teacher of mime, Jacques Copeau) who
introduced him to masked performance and Japanese Noh theatre. He left Grenoble
and spent six months teaching mask work in Germany, before accepting another
teaching position at the University of Padua in Italy. He spent eight years in
Italy teaching and working as a creative practitioner and discovered the
traditional and popular Italian theatre style of commedia dell'arte as
well as the tradition of masked chorus work developed in Ancient Greek tragedy.
He returned to Paris in 1956 and opened his own school, the Ecole
Internationale de Mime et de Theatre which has had many homes in Paris over the
years but has continued to attract large numbers of students from all over the
world. Lecoq also toured with demonstrations of his physical art of the actor
and periodically conducted classes in Britain that had an enormous impact on
the development of British theatre. He was awarded the prestigious Legion
d'Honneur in 1982 and continued to take classes at his school right up to the
day before his death on January 19, 1999.
Lecoq's work and
research has mainly been disseminated through the training he has conducted
with the many students who have attended his classes and demonstrations
overseas or his classes at his school in Paris. This may be why a myth is often
circulated that suggests his methods were somehow secretive or reserved only
for his students. However, he has published numerous articles and interviews,
edited a text in French entitled Le Theatre du Geste (1987) and his
book, The Moving Body (Translated and published in English posthumously
in 2000) outlines a number of his philosophies and approaches. The texts he has
produced also indicate why it is so difficult for students to pass on his
teachings. They explain that the training is very practical and very specific
for each student because every actor's body and mind has accumulated different
tensions and conditioned responses. Lecoq's training methods therefore focus on
releasing preconditioned views of acting and bringing an actor's attention back
to ‘playing.' In his last publication he explained that: “There is a huge
difference between actors who express their own lives, and those who can truly
be described as players…They have learned not to play themselves but to
play using themselves. In this lies all the ambiguity of the actor's
work.” (61) The strong emphasis on improvisational activity at the school
reinforces the central significance of play and students are introduced to
physical exercises, masks and popular theatre that reinforce the distinction
between playing and being. Lecoq and those who now direct training at the
school work on the premise that: “A true understanding and knowledge of theatre
inevitably requires a profound experience of play” (97).
Like Konstantin
Stanislavsky, Jerzy
Grotowski and Eugenio
Barba, Lecoq created a place to study and
teach what he believed were important principles of acting. Lecoq, like these
other figures, described his research into the human body and its movement as
his ‘passion' and he pursued this work throughout his life. He saw his teaching
as ‘a path to his own greater knowledge and understanding of movement' and said
that his work with students helped him to discover that ‘the body knows things
about which the mind is ignorant' (9). Masked work had a powerful influence on
Lecoq's approach to performing and he was intrigued with the simple and direct
way masks could amplify the physical aspects of a performer and be used to
communicate with all kinds of audiences. His research and analysis of masks,
movement, body language and gesture has had a huge impact on the development of
contemporary theatre and his work has popularised genres such as the clown,
bouffons, commedia dell'arte, tragedy, and melodrama.
