http://www.ecole-jacqueslecoq.com/en/biographies_en-000004_t9.html
Bridel, David. "In the Beginning Was the Body."
American Theatre. 01. Jan. 2011: 44.
eLibrary. Web. 19. November. 2013
http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/staffhome/siryan/academy/theatres/..%5Ctheatres%5Clecoq,%20jacques.htm -- lots of other sources on this link that you should check out!
http://europamagna.org/pageshtml/Pgtheatre/SCOUT/StageIUFM/jlecoqeng.htm
http://books.google.co.kr/books?id=zD1oBFNGp84C&hl=ko&source=gbs_similarbooks --> Get it on Kindle.
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Lecoq's influence has been seen in the work of seminal modern theatre
companies such as Complicité, Theatre de la Jeune Lune and Théâtre du Soleil,
and of such artists as Peter Brook, Julie Taymor, Yasmina Reza and Geoffrey
Rush, to brush just the tip of the iceberg.
·
In training institutions
in the U.S., hundreds (perhaps thousands) of acting teachers continue each day
to explore the "territories of theatre" that Lecoq
popularized for the actor at the famous school in Paris that he ran for almost
SO years. Many such teachers trained with Lecoq
himself; others came to Lecoq's work through collaborations with his previous students.
·
Christopher Bayes, now
head of physical acting at the Yale School of Drama and one of this country's
best-known teachers of the art of clowning, was a member of the now-defunct
Theatre de la Jeune Lune in Minneapolis for five years, where he first came
into contact with Lecoq's legacy.
"I've been hugely influenced by my exposure to Lecoq's work," says Bayes. "How to think about the actor's performance,
the architecture of the space, explorations of style - these are three elements
of theatrical training where Lecoq blazed the trail."
·
Lecoq's investigation of the physical imagination stressed the
importance of external forms - architectural, musical and theatrical. His
criteria for training were based in anthropology, the study of gesture, and the
anatomical study of the body in an aesthetic context.
·
He had a passion for the
regies du jeu théâtral - the rules of the theatrical game. One could say, however
crudely, that Lecoq worked "from the outside." He asked his
actors to meet the rigors and demands of form and trusted that inner truth
would follow; hence his strong emphasis on movement analysis.
·
In Lecoq's seminal work The Moving Body, Lecoq wrote: "People
discover themselves in relation to their grasp of the external world. I do not
search for deep sources of creativity in psychological memories."
·
Consequently, the base
condition for Lecoq's actor is
physical neutrality, a state that is achieved through careful adaptation of the
body to bring about a kind of preternatural openness or availability, leaving
individuality and personality behind.
·
In Lecoq work,
form explicitly precedes content. Moving through Lecoq's program, a student delves into the
study of commedia dell'arte, in which, as Lecoq
states, "fixed external movements and the mask create the internal
character" - again, the form coming first, the inner response in its wake.
Even Lecoq's beloved
clown, the most personal and intimate of his theatrical manifestations (and the
messiest), is an immediately recognizable formal icon, red-nosed and
topsy-turvily attired. The actor's innermost revelations as a clown are
contextualized by the theatrical genre in which they are framed.
·
Lecoq's sophisticated and challenging work takes the student through a
rigorous repertoire of physical and imaginative skills based in the universal
poetic forms that Lecoq believed were timeless.
·
His graduates then carry
with them into their future creative lives "various references recognized
in the body," as Lecoq states - references that include
clowning, commedia, character mask work (as first developed by Jacques Copeau), melodrama, even Greek tragedy. The body of a
Lecoq
student has been exposed to multiple formal, structural and stylistic demands.
It is not by chance, certainly, that many Lecoq
graduates have made remarkably adventurous directors, designers and authors.
·
"Lecoq's work asks actors how
to live in their bodies and communicate physically with an audience,"
suggests Bayes, "not as a private experience to be viewed through a
peephole, but as a public event, to be crafted and given away." This
physical training awakens the imagination through composition, construction and
the studied pursuit of artifice.
·
Joan Schirle, DelPArte's
director, explains that the school continues to be guided by "Lecoq's commitment to a non-psychological
approach to acting, as well as the mask as a metaphor for all actor training,
and a teaching based on the dynamics of movement 'through the re-enactment of everything that moves, whether in life or
on stage' (from The Moving Body)."
·
The impact of Lecoq's extraordinary body of work cannot be overstated. In
his own words, he established for actors and artists "a permanent
reference point that will stay with them for the rest of their creative
lives." Schirle puts it simply: "Like Lecoq's
pedagogy, we create a path of exploration for students to amass a vocabulary
that allows them to make great theatre."
·
SPACE, RHYTHM AND THE USE
OF TIME, INTENSITY, density and flow - all these technical ingrethents, parts
of the language of Lecoq's classroom, were codified and
examined in minute detail by the Hungarian dance theorist Rudolf Laban
(1879-1958), whose body of work constitutes a second major source of movement
training in the U.S.
·
As Lecoq
asserted in his explorations of neutrality, LMA reveals physical idiosyncrasies
to be combinations of a multiplicity of choices; thus, to overcome habit and
develop a creative body, the student must radically expand his or her range of
potential movements.
·
THE PRACTICES OF LECOQ AND LABAN, IN THEIR OWN ways, demand that the actor
travel away from the self - toward the formal, the technical and the overtly
theatrical - to inspire the creative spirit. The third major source of physical
acting and training in the U.S., the legacy of Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999),
takes a different view.
