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. Later we watched the 'autocours'. The mask is essentially a blank slate, amorphous shape, with no specific characterizations necessarily implied. We then bid our farewells and went our separate ways. Lecoq thus placed paramount importance on insuring a thorough understanding of a performance's message on the part of its spectators. Lecoq doesn't just teach theatre, he teaches a philosophy of life, which it is up to us to take or cast aside. Brilliantly-devised improvisational games forced Lecoq's pupils to expand their imagination. His rigourous analysis of movement in humans and their environments formed the foundation for a refined and nuanced repertoire of acting exercises rooted in physical action. Thank you to Sam Hardie for running our Open House session on Lecoq. This vision was both radical and practical. [4] Three of the principal skills that he encouraged in his students were le jeu (playfulness), complicit (togetherness) and disponibilit (openness). His techniques and research are now an essential part of the movement training in almost every British drama school. I met him only once outside the school, when he came to the Edinburgh Festival to see a show I was in with Talking Pictures, and he was a friend pleased to see and support the work. Help us to improve our website by telling us what you think, We appreciate your feedback and helping us to improve Spotlight.com. Thousands of actors have been touched by him without realising it. Many things were said during this nicely informal meeting. Someone takes the offer To share your actions with the audience, brings and invites them on the journey with you. Next, another way to play with major and minor, is via the use of movement and stillness. What is he doing? Lecoq viewed movement as a sort of zen art of making simple, direct, minimal movements that nonetheless carried significant communicative depth. So she stayed in the wings waiting for the moment when he had to come off to get a special mask. Jacques Lecoq was a French actor and acting coach who developed a unique approach to acting based on movement and physical expression principles. As part of this approach, Lecoq often incorporated "animal exercises" into . He believed that to study the clown is to study oneself, thus no two selves are alike. It would be pretentious of us to assume a knowledge of what lay at the heart of his theories on performance, but to hazard a guess, it could be that he saw the actor above all as the creator and not just as an interpreter. In fact, the experience of losing those habits can be emotionally painful, because postural habits, like all habits, help us to feel safe. In mask work, it is important to keep work clean and simple. Lecoq himself believed in the importance of freedom and creativity from his students, giving an actor the confidence to creatively express themselves, rather than being bogged down by stringent rules. I was able to rediscover the world afresh; even the simple action of walking became a meditation on the dynamics of movement. Finally, the use of de-constructing the action makes the visual communication to the audience a lot more simplified, and easier to read, allowing our audience to follow what is taking place on stage. He is a truly great and remarkable man who once accused me of being un touriste dans mon ecole, and for that I warmly thank him. Your head should be in line with your spine, your arms in front of you as if embracing a large ball. Its the whole groups responsibility: if one person falls, the whole group falls. No reaction! 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. Jacques Lecoq developed an approach to acting using seven levels of tension. Its a Gender An essay on the Performance. Last of all, the full body swing starts with a relaxed body, which you just allow to swing forwards, down as far as it will go. Allow opportunities to react and respond to the elements around you to drive movement. Like a gardener, he read not only the seasonal changes of his pupils, but seeded new ideas. Not mimicking it, but in our own way, moving searching, changing as he did to make our performance or our research and training pertinent, relevant, challenging and part of a living, not a stultifyingly nostalgic, culture. What a horror as if it were a fixed and frozen entity. [1] In 1937 Lecoq began to study sports and physical education at Bagatelle college just outside of Paris. To release the imagination. 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. and starts a naughty tap-tapping. (Extract reprinted by permission from The Guardian, Obituaries, January 23 1999. They enable us to observe with great precision a particular detail which then becomes the major theme. (Lecoq, 1997:34) As the performer wearing a mask, we should limit ourselves to a minimal number of games. Every week we prepared work from a theme he chose, which he then watched and responded to on Fridays. Don't try to breathe in the same way you would for a yoga exercise, say. We sat for some time in his office. People can get the idea, from watching naturalistic performances in films and television programmes, that "acting natural" is all that is needed. Fay Lecoq assures me that the school her husband founded and led will continue with a team of Lecoq-trained teachers. In order to convey a genuine naturalness in any role, he believed assurance in voice and physicality could be achieved through simplification of intention and objective. As a young physiotherapist after the second world war, he saw how a man with paralysis could organise his body in order to walk, and taught him to do so. The use of de-construction also enables us to stop at specific points within the action, to share/clock what is being done with the audience. And it wasn't only about theatre it really was about helping us to be creative and imaginative. He taught us respect and awe for the potential of the actor. Similarly to Jerzy Grotowski, Jacques Lecoq heavily focused on "the human body in movement and a commitment to investigating and encouraging the athleticism, agility and physical awareness of the creative actor" (Evan, 2012, 164). I can't thank you, but I see you surviving time, Jacques; longer than the ideas that others have about you. Dressed in his white tracksuit, that he wears to teach in, he greeted us with warmth and good humour. When working with mask, as with puppetry and most other forms of theatre, there are a number of key rules to consider. The big anxiety was: would he approve of the working spaces we had chosen for him? He has invited me to stay at his house an hour's travel from Paris. 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. Practitioner Jacques Lecoq and His Influence. The communicative potential of body, space and gesture. Jacques Lecoq method uses a mix of mime, mask work, and other movement techniques to develop creativity and freedom of expression. I did not know him well. Compiled by John Daniel. [9], Lecoq wrote on the art and philosophy of mimicry and miming. Perhaps Lecoq's greatest legacy is the way he freed the actor he said it was your play and the play is dead without you. You know mime is something encoded in nature. Thus began Lecoq's practice, autocours, which has remained central to his conception of the imaginative development and individual responsibility of the theatre artist. Jacques Lecoq. Lecoq's guiding principle was 'Tout bouge' - everything moves. I'm on my stool, my bottom presented It is the same with touching the mask, or eating and drinking, the ability for a mask to eat and drink doesnt exist. For the high rib stretch, begin with your feet parallel to each other, close together but not touching. When creating/devising work, influence was taken from Lecoqs ideas of play and re-play. He enters the studio and I swear he sniffs the space. You are totally present and aware. Jacques Lecoq's father, or mother (I prefer to think it was the father) had bequeathed to his son a sensational conk of a nose, which got better and better over the years. Warm ups include walking through a space as an ensemble, learning to instinctively stop and start movements together and responding with equal and opposite actions. We're not aiming to turn anyone into Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Chris Hoy; what we are working towards here is eliminating the gap between the thought and the movement, making the body as responsive as any instrument to the player's demands. By putting a red nose on his face, the actor transformed himself into a clown, a basic being expressing the deepest, most infantile layers of his personality, and allowing him to explore those depths. Lee Strasberg's Animal Exercise VS Animal Exercise in Jacques Lecoq. Pierre Byland took over. However, the ensemble may at times require to be in major, and there are other ways to achieve this. practical exercises demonstrating Lecoq's distinctive approach to actor training. Therein he traces mime-like behavior to early childhood development stages, positing that mimicry is a vital behavioral process in which individuals come to know and grasp the world around them. Let out a big breath and, as it goes, let your chest collapse inwards. He was born 15 December in Paris, France and participated and trained in various sports as a child and as a young man. We were all rather baffled by this claim and looked forward to solving the five-year mystery. He strived for sincerity and authenticity in acting and performance. However, before Lecoq came to view the body as a vehicle of artistic expression, he had trained extensively as a sportsman, in particular in athletics and swimming. De-construction simply means to break down your actions, from one single movement to the next. Naturalism, creativity and play become the most important factors, inspiring individual and group creativity! During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris, the pupils asked to teach themselves. What he offered in his school was, in a word, preparation of the body, of the voice, of the art of collaboration (which the theatre is the most extreme artistic representative of), and of the imagination. He was known for his innovative approach to physical theatre, which he developed through a series of exercises and techniques that focused on the use of the body in movement and expression. One game may be a foot tap, another may be an exhale of a breath. So the first priority in a movement session is to release physical tension and free the breath. Keep the physical and psychological aspects of the animal, and transform them to the human counterpart in yourself. Jacques, you may not be with us in body but in every other way you will. His eyes on you were like a searchlight looking for your truths and exposing your fears and weaknesses. [1], As a teenager, Lecoq participated in many sports such as running, swimming, and gymnastics. Like a poet, he made us listen to individual words, before we even formed them into sentences, let alone plays. Observation of real life as the main thrust of drama training is not original but to include all of the natural world was. Please, do not stop writing! This is because the mask is made to seem as if it has no past and no previous knowledge of how the world works. Required fields are marked *. Wherever the students came from and whatever their ambition, on that day they entered 'water'. Lecoq believed that actors should use their bodies to express emotions and ideas, rather than relying on words alone. With play, comes a level of surprise and unpredictability, which is a key source in keeping audience engagement. Look at things. Lecoq had forgotten to do up his flies. He was genuinely thrilled to hear of our show and embarked on all the possibilities of play that could be had only from the hands.