RI Research thus far

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.

·         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.