Theatre of Movement and Gesture

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theatre of movement and gesture

Jacques Lecoq was probably the most influential theorist and teacher of what is now known as physical theatre. Theatre of Movement and Gesture, published in France in 1987, is the book in which Lecoq first set out his philosophy of human movement, and the way it takes expressive form in a wide range of different performance traditions. Lecoq traces the history of pantomime, sets out his definition of the components of the art of mime, and discusses the explosion of physical theatre in the second half of the twentieth century. This unique volume also contains: • interviews with major theatre practitioners Ariane Mnouchkine and Jean-Louis Barrault • chapters by Jean Perret on Étienne Decroux and Marcel Marceau • a final section by Alain Gautré celebrating the many physical theatre practitioners working in the 1980s • a wealth of illustrations, including previously unpublished photographs from the Jacques Lecoq collection. Lecoq’s poetic, incisive writings form the backbone of this extraordinary text. The pieces gathered here represent a precious testimony to his special vision of the art of acting and of its close relationship with the history of mime and of masked performance. Jacques Lecoq founded l’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in 1956, developing teaching methods that have inspired numerous practitioners of physical theatre, in which gesture is at the basis of the performance. David Bradby is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was the translator of Jacques Lecoq’s The Moving Body (Methuen, 2000).

Figure 1 Jacques Lecoq. Richard Lecoq.

theatre of movement and gesture

Jacques Lecoq edited by david bradby

First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business First published in French as Le Théâtre du Geste © Bordas 1987 English edition © 2006 Routledge This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lecoq, Jacques. [Théâtre du geste. English] The theatre of movement and gesture / Jacques Lecoq. p. cm. Includes index. 1. Movement (Acting) 2. Gesture. I. Title. PN2071.M6L39 2006 792.02′8 – dc22 2006012908 ISBN10 0–415–35943–0 (hbk) ISBN10 0–415–35944–9 (pbk) ISBN10 0–203–00746–8 (ebk) ISBN13 978–0–415–35943–6 (hbk) ISBN13 978–0–415–35944–3 (pbk) ISBN13 978–0–203–00746–4 (ebk)

contents

List of illustrations Translators’ preface Editor’s introduction

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1 Imitation: from mimicry to miming Jacques Lecoq

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2 The gestures of life Jacques Lecoq

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Are gestures universal? Gestures in life Action gestures Walking and gait Professions Situations Expressive gestures Indicative gestures Popular gestures A codified language One gesture, one space Costume: a different body The body as we see it today 3 From pantomime to modern mime Jacques Lecoq The death of Pierrot Deburau-Pierrot The succession of men in white Poor Pierrot! The rediscovery of the moving body Jacques Copeau and the Vieux-Colombier school Links and influences

7 8 9 10 14 15 16 19 19 21 22 24 26 29

30 32 33 34 35 38 40

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4 Has mime become separated from theatre? Jean Perret Étienne Decroux, master of mime Interview with Jean-Louis Barrault A mime: the Marceau phenomenon 5 Mime, the art of movement Jacques Lecoq What is a mime? Silence Absolute mime The obstacles to overcome Pedagogy of the constraint Style The rules of the game Directions of mime Encounter with the temptation to systematise Movement with a capital ‘M’ The fixed point Equilibrium and disequilibrium The body of Artaud Compensation Alternation The preparation movement The accentuation of movement Rhythm Space The dynamics of the passions The dynamics of words 6 The explosion of mime Jean Perret and Jacques Lecoq The pedagogy of movement, interview of Jacques Lecoq by Jean Perret, including seven explanations of key ideas by Lecoq The commedia dell’arte Mask work How does a chorus move? In search of one’s own clown The age of the bouffon

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43 49 58 67

68 70 72 72 76 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 84 84 85 85 87 88 89 91 92 94

95 100 103 109 115 118

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Cartoon mime Performing with portable structures 7 The theatre of gesture and image Introduction by Jacques Lecoq

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121 123 126 126

Interview with Ariane Mnouchkine by Jean Perret

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An actor’s view of a theatre of movement by Alain Gautré

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View from a Frenchman in the stalls The actor face to face with his desire The actor within a company Three case studies Every aspect of the image Mimes? The theatre of silence A theatre that moves Index

137 142 148 150 152 154 156 156 159

list of illustrations picture research by Joel Anderson

Front cover Shahla Tarrant, photograph by Joel Anderson. Inside covers Jacques Lecoq, ‘Le Passeur’. Jacques Lecoq collection. Figure 1 Jacques Lecoq. Richard Lecoq.

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Figure 2 Alberto Giacometti, Swiss painter and sculptor. Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum.

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Figure 3 ‘Linardo is a rogue’ – engraving for a book by Andrea de Jorio: Ancient Mime Rediscovered in Neapolitan Gestures (1832). Jacques Lecoq collection.

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Figure 4 Illustration for Camember the Sapper by Christophe (1898). Jacques Lecoq collection.

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Figure 5 Jacques Lecoq demonstrates techniques, c. 1958. Liliane de Kermadec. Jacques Lecoq collection.

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Figure 6 William Hogarth observing the life of his time with ferocious humour. Jacques Lecoq collection.

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Figures 7 and 8 The mime artist Georges Wague in Hearing and Touching. Jacques Lecoq collection.

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Figure 9 Étienne Decroux performing corporeal mime at his atelier, c. 1950. Etienne Bertrand Weill.

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Figure 10 Jean-Louis Barrault mimes the death of the mother in Autour d’une mère. Etienne Bertrand Weill.

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Figure 11 Etienne Decroux talks to students of his atelier, including Marcel Marceau (striped shirt), 1947. Etienne Bertrand Weill.

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Figures 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 Jacques Lecoq demonstrates ‘The Wall’. Liliane de Kermadec. Jacques Lecoq collection.

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Figure 18 Drawings by Gaston Ledoux, taken from Physiognomy and Gestures by Giraudet (1895). Jacques Lecoq collection.

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Figures 19, 21, 22 and 24 Jacques Lecoq miming ice skating. Liliane de Kermadec. Jacques Lecoq collection.

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Figure 20 Bronze statue of a discus-thrower made for Lecoq. Joel Anderson.

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Figure 23 Lecoq demonstrates miming ‘pulling’. Jacques Lecoq collection.

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Figure 25 Lecoq gives feedback to students. Alain Chambaretaud.

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Figure 26 Acrobatics teacher Christophe Marchand demonstrates stage combat to students. Alain Chambaretaud.

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Figure 27 ‘Arguments’ – scene from Travel Diaries, production by the Jacques Lecoq company in 1959. Liliane de Kermadec. Jacques Lecoq collection.

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Figure 28 Jacques Lecoq with the Dasté ‘noble’ mask, precursor of the neutral mask. Jacques Lecoq collection

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Figure 29 The silence of the neutral mask. Liliane de Kermadec. Jacques Lecoq collection.

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Figure 30 Actor Geoffrey Rush performs in bouffon costume, c. 1977. Dody DiSanto.

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Figure 31 Lecoq dances with a female bouffon, c. 1977. Dody DiSanto.

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Figure 32 Montage of photographs from the L.E.M. Pascale Lecoq.

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Figure 33 Peter Brook and Natasha Parry attend a soirée. Alain Chambaretaud.

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Figure 34 Ariane Mnouchkine and actors rehearsing Richard II at the Cartoucherie de Vincennes. Martine Franck/Magnum.

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Figure 35 Dario Fo with Jacques Lecoq and students from the School. Justin Case.

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Figure 36 Mnemonic, by Complicite, directed by Simon McBurney. Sebastian Hoppe.

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translators’ preface

By publishing Le Théâtre du Geste in 1987 Lecoq broke for the first time with his usual insistence that ideas about acting could only be developed through practice. The book was an edited collection, including essays by a number of different hands, but Lecoq’s work formed the backbone (his written contributions amount to more than a third of the text) and his editorship was visible in the eclecticism of the volume, ranging from the history of acting to the mimetic behaviour of animals, from silent cinema to Japanese Kabuki. Always keenly alive to the visual appeal of the actor, Lecoq chose images that went beyond mere illustration of the text, extending his argument into visual dimensions. The material included here is translated for the first time into English. The choice was made to restrict the English publication to the contributions of Lecoq himself, together with those contextual essays that most centrally explain his place in the history of mime and of acting in Europe, as well as the legacy of his work over the twenty years since this book first appeared. Since he wrote only one other book (Le Corps poétique, published in 1997, and translated as The Moving Body), the writings gathered here represent a precious testimony to his special vision of the art of acting and of its close relationship with the history of mime and of masked performance. His approach in this book is more impressionistic, more centred on the genealogy and aesthetics of his art, less concerned to set out a systematic pedagogy than in the later Moving Body. Lecoq was always acutely conscious of the limitations of language: in his writing one can sense the impatience of a man who had a marvellous physical expressivity at his command, and who feels constrained by the limitations of print. His style is elliptical, poetic, and occasionally difficult to follow, but not because of indulgence in technical jargon: his hallmark is the flash of imaginative insight. He enjoys raising a wealth of interesting ideas, and rather than exhausting any one of them, he leaves it to his readers to pursue them at will. His use of French is always creative, sometimes unorthodox, and he enjoys neologisms, such as ‘le virtuosisme’ (which we have translated by the equally neologistic virtuosoism). Where he uses terms to which he attributes a particular meaning within

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his philosophy of acting, we have tried to preserve the same English translations as occur in The Moving Body (e.g. we have translated le fonds poétique commun as ‘the universal poetic sense’; le bide as ‘the flop’; les bouffons as ‘the bouffons’, etc.). A full glossary of the phrases to which Lecoq attaches a special significance can be found in The Moving Body. The process of changing Jacques Lecoq’s original French work into this English version would not have been possible without the support of Fay Lecoq. We are grateful for her help and encouragement. David Bradby on behalf of the translators: Joel Anderson Luke Kernaghan Dick McCaw David Bradby

editor’s introduction

This actor’s centrality to creative theatre is the subject of this book. First published as Le Théâtre du geste, in Paris in 1987, it came at a significant point in the development of modern theatre. Nineteen sixty-eight had seen a great upsurge of collaborative theatre productions in which actors took centre stage while authors and directors were marginalised. It did not take long for the directors to regain control and the 1970s was the decade in which Patrice Chéreau, Roger Planchon, Antoine Vitez, Peter Stein, Robert Wilson, along with many others, became the new international ‘star’ names. Then in the 1980s there was a swing away from ‘directors’ theatre’ and a general recognition that, without the actor, a director is helpless. This was the decade when many of the most successful companies associated with theatre of movement and gesture were founded: La Compagnie Jérôme Deschamps – Macha Makeieff; Theatre de Complicité; Moving Picture Mime Show. As performers and audiences began to take more interest in the creativity of the actor, the need was felt to explore different training methods and their genealogies. The Stanislavski system seemed unhelpful for actors who were creating their own material rather than starting from a playwright’s text, and so practitioners looked to teachers like Jacques Lecoq for new inspiration. What they discovered was a tradition of mime and of physical expression that drew on a rich heritage going back through the various styles of pantomime to the commedia dell’arte and the Roman mimus. Lecoq’s training methods, developed over the previous thirty years, were unusual in that they encouraged the actor to discover his own style rather than imposing one upon him. So Lecoq was the ideal person to put together this book, charting a wide range of physical theatre styles and practitioners, seeking to trace a particular tradition of actor training and to explore its relationship with pure mime. Theoretical developments in theatre scholarship were favourable to this enterprise: a group of leading theorists, including Bernard Dort and Denis Bablet had set up a new journal in 1970 entitled Travail Théâtral (Theatre Work). Their emphasis was on process rather than product, on the need to understand creative method as much as to assess the outcome.

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They began to redefine the notion of a ‘text’ in the theatre, showing that the old binary opposition between the writer’s text and actor’s performance was untenable, and that the performer also generated a ‘text’, which, properly understood, was extraordinarily rich, combining words, action, movement, gesture, dance, music, etc. Because of this new approach, theatre scholars and critics were able to appreciate, for the first time, the originality of Lecoq’s approach to theatre of movement and gesture. In his practice and his pedagogy, he refuses to allow an academic distinction to be made between text and performance, insisting that the actor ‘writes with his body’ in space, just as the author writes with black lines on white paper. As he explains in the extended interview with Jean Perret (pp. 94–124), he began as an athlete and sportsman, not as an actor, and so his first interest was always in the capacities of the human physique and in the way that every action, every movement that we make, carries meaning, whether we intend it or not. Lecoq’s introduction to the book is an essay on the universal practice of imitation. He points out that it is through mimicking movements that children learn about the world around them, and this copying of gestures and movements seen in others continues into adulthood. Lecoq goes on to ask the question: ‘are gestures universal?’ He points out how many everyday gestures are conditioned by time, place, class and fashion, but he also raises the question of whether there are some aspects of physical expression which might be said to be shared by all humanity. He always wanted to reach down, beneath the idea, beneath the word, to find the physical impulse which, he believed, could be shown to underlie all thinking, all emotion, all expression. Lecoq believed that all human beings share a ‘universal poetic sense’ (my translation of fonds poétique commun, though the word fonds conveys something more real and concrete than a ‘sense’). He believed that the ability to respond creatively, or poetically, depended on the laying down of a series of sediments through the universally shared experiences of being born, nurtured, developing movement and speech, and discovering a world of movement, objects, sounds, colours and other human beings outside ourselves. For an actor to enter into the necessary state of creative openness, he had to be able to relate afresh to these basic discoveries. His approach was not that of a philosopher or anthropologist, however: he did not establish a set of theories which could be explored in discursive form. The exploration of the laws of movement was always practical and could only be experienced in and through the body. But neither was it divorced from the realm of the emotions: on the basis of

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physical experimentation, he was always searching for ways of introducing the imaginative and poetic dimensions. These two aspects, the physical and the poetic, were set side by side in the original title of his second book, published in 1997: Le Corps poétique (translated as The Moving Body). As soon as Lecoq’s interests began to develop from sport towards theatre, he discovered the French tradition of radical experiment, going back to the early years of the twentieth century. In the performers he met, men such as Claude Martin and Jean Dasté, who had worked with Charles Dullin and with Jacques Copeau, he discovered an emphasis on the body, on acrobatics, on mask work, and on a playful approach to performance. In the early 1900s, at a time when great theatre was still equated with great literature, and Parisian stages offered little alternative between respectful productions of the classics and frivolous farce, the reforms of Copeau and his colleagues had brought a welcome emphasis on the creative possibilities of the actor. However, the tradition of mime, too, had congealed into a rigid classicism. Lecoq was at pains to point out that his understanding of mime related to the whole of art of the actor, and was not to be constrained within the limits of purist ‘classical’ mime as embodied in the practice of the two most famous mime artists of the twentieth century: Étienne Decroux and Marcel Marceau. At the same time, Lecoq acknowledged the importance of the contributions of these two great mimes, which is why there are sections devoted to them in the book. But he shared with Jean-Louis Barrault the belief that the art of mime should not be seen as an end in itself; instead it should be made to serve the larger project of revitalising the art of the actor. Like Barrault, he saw the study of mime as part of the development of a complex performance idiom, rich enough to bear comparison with the literary tradition of written plays. Among the people he influenced in this belief, one of the most celebrated is Ariane Mnouchkine, founder of the Théâtre du Soleil in 1964 and its director ever since. Following the upheavals of 1968, the Soleil began by researching traditional clowns (the result was a show entitled simply Les Clowns in 1969) and then went on to develop the working method know as la création collective which was responsible for the three great political shows of the early 1970s: 1789, 1793 and L’Age d’or. This method involved the techniques, learned from Lecoq, of movementbased improvisation, mask work and the strategic developing and unravelling of dramatic situations. Ariane Mnouchkine has often stated that this method of work remains exactly the same, even when she is

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directing a classic text by Shakespeare or Molière. Mnouchkine makes frequent use of masks in rehearsal, even when the final production does not involve masked performances. She also adopts Lecoq’s approach to character, avoiding psychological work derived from Stanislavski, and insisting rather on the physical realities of each situation, in which her actors have to ‘write with the body’. In the interview with Jean Perret in this book, she speaks of how her actors were able to develop a whole language of gesture and she evokes the need for actor-training to ‘free up the physical imagination of the actor’. The achievement of Lecoq’s training method was to do just that: rather than putting actors through prescribed routines, he aimed to help them develop their own special idiom of physical expressivity through opening up their ‘physical imaginations’. The wide range of topics dealt with in this book is evidence of his constant challenge to his students: to look outside the studio, to observe and experience life in all its richness, and to develop a creative, inventive approach to everything they did. He considered the study of movement to be fundamental to a thorough understanding of every aspect of life, and by extension to all the arts. He was convinced that his training was as appropriate for writers, painters and architects as it was for actors: for twenty years he offered courses in the physical exploration of space to trainee architects at the Paris École des Beaux Arts. Although the training pioneered at the Lecoq school initially begins in silent improvisation and ‘neutral’ mask work, it quickly moves on to integrate speech. The students work with a variety of different kinds of text, and the purpose of such work is to get behind verbal means of expression to the underlying creative urge which finds expression through an artist’s creations, in whatever medium. He was proud that, as well as many fine actors such as Geoffrey Rush and Sergi López, he had also trained people who went on to become writers (such as Eduardo Manet, Michel Azama, Yasmina Réza), directors (such as Ariane Mnouchkine, Luc Bondy, Albert Boadella and James Macdonald) and all-round creative theatre artists (such as Dario Fo, Steven Berkoff, Philippe Avron, Joan Font, José Luis Gómez, Simon McBurney, Christoph Marthaler and Paddy Hayter). In 1987, when Le Théâtre du geste first appeared, many of these were just beginning their careers and the final section of the book, entitled ‘An actor’s view of a theatre of movement’, was an attempt by Alain Gautré to catalogue all of the different actors and companies working in this spirit at the time. Gautré’s essay forms a precious record of performers, many of whom were street artists and so were never listed in published records, and some of whom have since disappeared.

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As Simon McBurney wrote in his preface to The Moving Body, Lecoq ‘was a man of vision’; in The Theatre of Movement and Gesture, he set out that vision for the first time in the form of a book. As always, his method was collaborative, and paid homage to other artists working in the same field. And as always, it was highly visual: by juxtaposing text and image, he was able to extend the points made in the different essays and interviews, demonstrating what McBurney calls his ‘ability to see well’. This visionary quality emerges from every page of this book, filled with original insights that remain as relevant today as when they were first published. David Bradby

chapter 1

imitation from mimicry to miming jacques lecoq Lecoq places the art of mime in an anthroplogical perspective, insisting that to imitate is the most universal response of all, since it is the means by which the child learns to understand the world. The reflections on the art of mime and of acting that follow are all grounded in this belief that physical re-enactment is essential to human development, arising from what Lecoq calls ‘the crucible of the imagination’.

Children gain their understanding of the world around them by miming it: they mimic what they see and what they hear. They replay with their whole body those aspects of life in which they will be called on to participate. In this way they learn about life and, little by little, take possession of it. Town squares are the privileged sites in which a secret alchemy reveals itself in the crucible of the imagination. Children play at life in order to prepare themselves for it, after many a shoot-out between cops and robbers, castles built in the sand and stampedes on horseback. Children’s mimicry is a game: they imitate out of pleasure, partly believing themselves to be the object imitated but, like the actor, knowing that it is not altogether true. Children imitate for themselves, actors for an audience whom they will persuade of the truth of his character; but the audience, too, knows that it is not entirely true. As a phenomenon, imitation may be purely voluntary – a deliberate decision to make others believe one is what one is not for one’s own advantage. To deceive an enemy, especially in hunting or in battle, the camouflage of the soldier typically employs foliage: if the forest masks the enemy let us become the forest. And thus history has filled our imaginations with forests on the march, which theatre has then brought to life. Decoy bird-calls allow us to mimic the cry or the song of birds in order to draw them within the range of the hunters. Make believe, deception, creating an illusion, these all belong to the mimicry of the cheat. But he must be skilful. I knew an army doctor who

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Figure 2 Alberto Giacometti, Paris, Galerie Maeght, 1961. Henri Cartier-Bresson.

had a way of detecting people who pretended to be lame to avoid being drafted into the forces: he made them walk backwards. They were at a loss how to do it. Imitation may bring into play characters who are ‘doubles’: a double, chosen for his resemblance to the original, and who practises imitating his behaviour in an attempt to identify himself with him, may be able to deceive the enemy. For example, during the 1939–45 war, General Dwight David Eisenhower was seen in places where he had never been. Imitation is not necessarily a deliberate act: people who live together come to imitate one another without realising it. This can be quite remarkable between long-married couples. Look at how, bit by bit, they have begun to resemble one another, have exchanged gestures, voices, thoughts. Mutual sympathy, love, the habit of being together, of sharing the same ideal, can lead to a resemblance even between people who were quite different to start with.

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In everyday life we can also observe the phenomenon of mimicry: I yawn, you yawn! Why? Are you tired? No, I’m just doing what you’re doing. Why? I don’t know – I can’t help it. When two individuals are having a pleasant conversation they share behaviour: side by side, they walk in step; when they begin to disagree, each one starts to walk at his own pace. If I cross my arms, or my legs, my interlocutor, without realising it, will copy my gesture as he becomes more attentive and all the more so if he finds me hard to understand. I have even taken on the manner of speech of a friend in a situation where he might have got the better of me. We identify with what interests us most strongly. Look at people as they come out of a cinema; on the faces and in the attitudes of the spectators you will see the imprint of one or other of the film’s heroes, according to the preferences of each audience member. At the zoo, the visitors resemble the animals they are looking at and their attitudes will tell us whether they are observing a monkey, and insect or a bear, even if we cannot see the animals themselves. If we look at these spectators’ faces, we find a disturbing reflection of the animal in its smallest movements: mouths that close, noses that extend, eyes that become enlarged. At first the visitors take up position according to their physical and spiritual centre of interest: the swimmers go towards the seals, long-legged people head for the giraffes, corpulent people for the hippopotamus, etc. The second stage is when these identifications reveal themselves as nostalgia for conflicts that have been hard to accept: short people face up to the giraffes, or we see the mocking superiority of thin people in front of the hippopotamus, which makes them laugh because it reminds them of a fat lady. The third stage is one of curiosity: the body leans forward, observes, makes a mimetic effort to enter into the being of the animal, to know it better, to follow it, unconsciously expecting from it something which resembles us and which will never be forthcoming. But if the animal spits a lump of grass in your face, with no warning, you feel upset, disoriented: you failed to read the notice which says: ‘Guanacos, spitting animal.’

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On television, a programme attempted to pose the problem of imitation within a given form. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, seated at a small table, expounded his ideas on structuralism. Immediately afterwards, the actor Pierre Fresnay took his place, giving exactly the same explanation, and identifying himself with the person of LéviStrauss. His imitation was not at the level of physique, nor of the image of the man, nor of his voice, but at that of the rhythm of his thought and the movement of his reflections. It was extraordinary! ‘Better than the original’ was the comment of the model to Fresnay. Miming As we can see, imitation may go beyond the simple physical and vocal resemblance favoured by mimics, moving from the mimicry of outer form to the mimicry of meaning. Here we encounter a whole new area which goes beyond pure imitation, the spontaneous imitation of the child, and develops into human miming, whose laws have been established by Marcel Jousse in his study Anthropologie du geste. It is this mime that the actor must approach at the profoundest level of his art. It is implicit in the phenomenon of human life itself. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote that: ‘man is, of all human animals, the one most drawn to mime and it is through miming that he acquires all his knowledge’ (The Poetics, no. 4). Jousse ascribes to the verb ‘to mime’ its profound value: Miming differs from mimicry in this respect: it is not imitation but a way of grasping the real that is played out in our body. A normal human being is ‘played’ by the reality that reverberates in him. We are the receptacles of interactions that play themselves out spontaneously within us. Human beings think with their whole bodies; they are made up of complexes of gestures and reality is in them, without them, despite them. ‘Human beings must be grasped from the soles of their feet to the tops of their heads. There is no such thing as an intelligent head. There is a whole human composite which knows and mimes through its whole body’ (Marcel Jousse, Anthropologie du geste, Resma, 1969). This composite of human interactions can be located in three phases: agent, acting, acted on. Here we find once again the three modes of physical action which animate us:

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I push or I pull I push or pull myself I am pushed or I am pulled. Jousse noted that the structure of the body is bilateral and that this is a function of the way human beings divide up space: in front and behind; to right and to left; above and below; it also affects the way we organise our thought. Hebrew religion has retained the swinging of the body, from forward to backward and from backward to forward during the recitation of the sacred texts, following the oral tradition shared by ancient religions. Gestures, memorised in this way, retain the true word at their profoundest level. So the pedagogic aspect attributed by Jousse to miming is clear. He denounced the audio-visual methods of teaching that were to come as a pedagogy of the legless. The imitation that is practised by the mime artist may thus draw on both mimicry and on miming. The greatest of mimes can touch the very rhythm of life, which they draw from the universal poetic sense, composed of time, space, tension, thrust, colour, light and matter, like the comic actor, who draws from the raw material of life the characters he represents. But this raw material is also present within him.

chapter 2

the gestures of life jacques lecoq

Lecoq expands on his exploration of the physical gestures that we use in everyday life and catalogues some of the manifestations of meaning in the gestures and movements we often think of as ‘natural’, showing how our physical impulses are rooted in intimate aspects of our emotional lives.

Is there a language of gesture? All of us express ourselves – unconsciously or not, with or without the desire to communicate – by means of gesture. Each emotive state leaves traces within us and these lay down ‘physical circuits’ which stay in our memory. That is where the impulses that will turn into gestures, attitudes and movements are organised. But the same gesture, belonging to one of theses circuits, may call upon very different motivations. The gesture which consists in lifting an arm may serve: to point to the sky; in tragedy, to indicate suffering; or to take a pot of jam from a shelf. Every gesture seen sets off within us the resonance of the corresponding circuit, revealing to us an aspect of the other, as well as a part of ourselves. Thus gesture emerges in the same way as language. A number of our movements are quite involuntary and we frequently express our intimate feelings by means of instinctive gestures: I clench my fist or I tap my foot because I am angry, because I object to something or because I detest it. Through observing the effect produced on others by these uncontrolled gestures, we become aware of them and begin to use them deliberately in order to obtain the desired reactions. Little by little, these gestures acquire clarity. By force of habit, we end up assimilating them into our own being and using them without noticing. They have become second nature. We smile – almost all of us – mechanically without really wanting to, when someone is introduced to us for the first time. This smile is an expression of polite greeting. It is far removed from the reaction of the child who cries when faced with an unknown lady who frightens him. Smiling has become a structured language. Most politicians use it when they attempt to create a fixed image of themselves at their most attractive, for a publicity photograph. In order for gesture to become a genuine language, it must be underpinned by a desire to communicate. However, most of the time our gestures escape us, revealing

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our profound nature to others. Even in words – which lend themselves better to dissimulating – intonation and the manner of expression reveal the true movement of life. Let us examine gestures, which form the first language of human beings, for what they contain that is universal, natural, specific and particular. By doing this, we shall move towards the discovery of bodily movement and of its physical laws. Are gestures universal? Are there natural gestures that are common to all countries and that precede any education? What gestures would be used by a hypothetical child of ten who had never met another human being, and who found himself brutally confronted by another individual? Doubtless a gesture of fear, perhaps of flight? The question is not easily resolved. Only by starting from factual observation can we approach the idea of universal gestures. Whatever the country, fear is manifested by means of the same basic movements, in which only secondary aspects are subject to variation: the body contracts, the shoulders rise, the head is protected, the back is

Figure 3 ‘Linardo is a rogue’ – engraving for a book by Andrea de Jorio: Ancient Mime Rediscovered in Neapolitan Gestures (1832). In popular Neapolitan entertainments, so-called ‘street-readers’ would narrate and sing for an illiterate public the high deeds of a hero. Here a young boy, trying to run away, has just accused Linardo (with matching gesture) of being a thief. In reaction, one man gets out a weapon, another wants to go after the boy and is held back by his neighbour. Standing straight and calm, the Cantadore (holding the book) is saying: ‘Let him be, he’s only a child, he has no understanding of the great deeds that concern us.’ Jacques Lecoq collection.

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bent over. All these gestures work together: they are brought forth by the preservation instinct that we all share. In this way, we see how each passion is contained within a common movement: pride jealousy shame vanity

rises up turns aside and hides bows down turns

When we go to the theatre to see a performance in a foreign language, we understand and recognise this language of gesture consisting of movements, of music and of sounds. We are responding to a language that is universal. It is the same for all physical gestures that tend towards that economy of movement needed for the completion of any given action. The body learns by adapting itself to the effort required by a given gesture. When repeated, any gesture becomes selective, eliminating whatever is superfluous. These dynamics of gesture and movement appear as universal because they are organically inscribed within our bodies and belong to the laws of gravity. Gradually, they are shaped, transposed, deviated, hidden or opposed by education or by tactical or diplomatic considerations which are peculiar to each individual, to each country or to each historical period. Gestures in life It is through observing life that we shall come to understand gestures and their variation on gestures that are universal. The mime actor draws the fundamental elements of his performance from this observation of real life, which enriches him and his style of dramatic expression. Street life remains his chief source: there gestures, attitudes and movements present themselves to him as in an open book. The movements of strangers play out for him the human comedy, the pantomime of life which he will need to reproduce on stage. Let’s observe two drivers swearing at one another through the closed windows of their vehicles. Feeling protected by the carriage work and the closed windows, each one identifies himself with the power and the make of his machine. This is when gestures appear, often vulgar and accompanied by pejorative faces pulled at the adversary. Here they allow themselves to play out a ‘major passion’ accompanied by mimicry, close to pantomime, of a kind they would never allow themselves in normal

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circumstances. A whole ‘gestic’ and highly coloured repertoire is exchanged. If this goes further, the windows are wound down and words are exchanged; more often, however, as soon as one of them looks like taking action by getting out of the car, the other takes fright and lets the altercation drop. Differences are frequently evident from one country to another. In Italy, drivers will often get out their cars very soon, grab one another by the collar and shout; then they get back in and drive off, making gestures that prolong the insults exchanged. In France, such gestures would be a prelude to a fight, but in Italy they often mark the end of an argument. Here we have seen the following, played out to varying degrees: Mimicked gestures (vulgar pantomime) Expressive facial gestures (mimicry) Gestures of passion (anger) Gestures of action (getting out of the car and attacking) Gestures of reaction (fear) One could class them in three major groups of gestures: gestures of action gestures of expression gestures of demonstration In all of these are inscribed the transpositions, inversions or deviations of primary gestures. Any classification simplifies things in order to understand them better, but gestures, like life, are not simple, and resist systematisation. Nevertheless, we can see that: gestures of action tend to involve the whole body gestures of expression involve the emotions and the person’s basic states gestures of demonstration punctuate words, or precede, prolong or replace them. Action gestures The actions of the body and hands bring into play the physical efforts of ‘pushing’ and ‘pulling’ and all that follows from them: taking, turning, rising, carrying, opening. Let us try to read a moving body as it walks down the road. In this

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Figure 4 Illustration for Camember the Sapper by Christophe (1898). The way sapper Camember walks involves throwing the front foot forward: the sapper is keen, he is ready to march, even to do the goose step. Jacques Lecoq collection.

action common to everyone, a person’s walk combines with a form of expression that is different for everyone: their gait. Of course this gait may vary according to particular situations (under rain, blown by wind) or according to certain states (waiting, fatigue, joy). Walking and gait Seated at a café, let us observe the ‘street in motion’. Our first impressions are: silhouettes physical bearing costumes Then we notice states or situations: people in a hurry people on holiday people waiting Such general impressions become gradually more accurate if we concentrate our look on a single person. Who can this elderly person be? Does he live close by, or is it the first time he has walked down this street? What’s his job? My imagination takes off. How does he walk? His feet come down rather flatly on the ground as if he were tired; his head and neck seem very stiff. He swings one arm more freely than the other as if he were holding something back. His steps give a jerky movement to his silhouette as if he were accentuating his wish to move forward.

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This walk becomes a gait which is gradually defined beneath our gaze and which may perhaps reveal to us who he is, what he does, what he feels. It will summon up a trade, a post or a business. But who do we take as our norm when we establish these differences? Where is the ‘someone’ who would swing his arms evenly, who would carry his head neither too high nor too low, whose steps would not be jerky, whose feet would touch the ground neither flatly nor on the heel. This ‘person who walks correctly’ is an idea that we carry within us, the idea of a perfect gait, one that is economical and neutral. In other words it does not exist in reality and each one of us walks with different ‘faults’ which go to make us an individual, different from all others. This is fortunate, for a world in which everyone had an ideal way of walking would probably be unlivable and would be like a universe peopled by perfectly programmed robots. But if the correct gait or the neutral gait do not exist, the idea is nevertheless inscribed in us as an image that serves as a reference point allowing us to undertake a coherent set of observations on ways of walking (gait + way of walking = person) which, in themselves, refer us back to the laws of gesture and of movement. For a better understanding of what characterises a gait, we have to study the mechanics of walking and define the movement that goes to make up a mechanical walk. This walk can be deconstructed into five simple phases, themselves subdivided into several sequences, mainly the contraction (absorbing shock) and the extension (pushing forward). 1 2

Double point of contact: both legs are stretched, the forward foot rests on the heel and the rear foot on the front of the foot. Flexing of both legs absorbing the shock of the step.

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Figure 5 Jacques Lecoq demonstrates technique, c. 1958. Liliane de Kermadec. Jacques Lecoq collection.

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Thrust backwards and upward movement of the body. Movement of the back leg which detaches itself from the ground. Pendulum swing forward of the front leg.

The invisible line of the head through space traces an undulation that marks out the alternation between the phases of rest and effort, like the path of a bird in flight. All animal locomotion traces an undulating path through space, or through the body itself, and these undulations can be traced back to the movements of a fish and to sideways and frontal crawling. The hips move in several ways: they move from front to back and from back to front in a rocking movement. They move from right to left and from left to right in a rising and falling movement. Finally, they move from side to side, according to the leg that supports them. Each step brings combines and brings into play all three movements.

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The spinal column absorbs the shock of each step so that the head does not receive it. Flexibly, it bends, stretches and leans. The arms compensate for the movement of the legs with the left arm moving in the opposite direction from the right leg, and vice-versa. This swing of the arm starts at the shoulder. The walking gait offers alternatively a single point of contact, followed by a double contact with the ground; running, on the other hand, uses for each sequence only one point of contact and a movement of the body through the air. Walking remains attached to the ground. Through a successive series of overbalancing movements, which put us at risk of falling, and for which we compensate each time, we progress forward. We are bound by our skeleton and by our human physical mechanics to the laws of gravity. Whatever we do, we carry within us these inevitable factors like a physical memory; every one of our actions, our passions, our desires refers us back to them. Our gait is the personalised form of mechanical walking: it draws it into the world of sensibilities, of dynamics and of dramatic events in which space comes into play. Let us observe a range of people as they walk along. Some appear to be pushed from behind with no real desire to move forwards; others seem to be pulled forwards as if irresistibly drawn towards a goal; others again walk prudently, holding back their desire to move forward, displaying both fear and audacity. Such gaits constitute a relatively constant element of the personality of each individual before particular circumstances are brought into play. The distance of a walker’s feet, one from the other, forms an angle that is wider or narrower, which conveys the degree of openness of the body. Nevertheless two contradictory attitudes may combine. The attitude of Charlie Chaplin is open with the lower half and closed with the upper half, an attitude emphasised by the large feet below and by the small jacket stretched tight over the shoulders above. This attitude brings generosity (open lower body) into conflict with fear (closed upper body). The legs are more or less bent and spread. Peasants take a broad stance with legs wide apart so as to retain their balance on difficult ground. They retain this attitude even in town and it sometimes passes from generation to generation. If Groucho Marx, on the other hand, bends his legs, it’s a deliberate tactic. He crouches low at times when he begins to walk fast, just like aircraft with variable geometry.

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The hips are tilted forwards or backwards. Harlequin arches his back, with his hips tilted backwards like the child that he is in some ways. The old man reverses this attitude: the flexing muscles are stronger than the extensors. Shoulders and arms: in masculine walks, the arms swing generously. In a gymnastic walk, this movement is amplified as a sign of strength, and the shoulders remain fixed. Military styles of marching pick up this movement: some over-emphasise the swing of one arm, while the other is kept rigid, shouldering a weapon. If the weapon is too heavy, both arms are occupied and remain rigid but the legs kick up exaggeratedly in the goose-step style. In feminine walks the swinging of the arms is replaced by that of the shoulders which, to compensate for the movement of the legs, move forwards and backwards. Transvestites often use this movement to define the feminine aspect that they are seeking to express. The head: the carriage of the head proclaims the psychological character of the gait: the head lowered is protective; the head carried high is dominating; the head leaning to one side is sentimental. We think of the lowered head of the child caught doing something wrong or the high, dominating head of Mussolini. The change of a head from low to high, or from high to low is determined by a reflection that brings either the past or the future into play. Our way of walking is subject to various influences, such as our profession our situation, or the circumstances of our lives; all of these are reflected in our gait. Professions Each profession carries its own imprint and determines the movements made in walking. Take the recognisable gait of the model, for example, placing her feet as if on a tightrope. Even if attitudes vary with fashion, the gait is always a sliding one, intended to show off the clothes rather than the model wearing the clothes. The classical dancer, used to attacking the ground with the front of the foot and not with the heel, pushes against the ground as she rises on the back foot. The body builder, with over-developed muscles of the shoulders and thorax, which prevent any suppleness in articulation, swings his arms with a rolling movement which lifts the shoulders and is typical of those who want to appear ‘hard’.

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Situations Gestures of action may vary still more – modifying the gait and the behaviour of the person walking – so as to take on different meanings in different situations. All of us have, at one time or another, experienced difficulties of behaviour, especially when we have had to walk in front of others who are looking at us and judging us. For example, the child who, when his name is called out, walks up to the stage to receive his prize; or again the insurance agent who must walk right across the room to the desk behind which the Managing Director sits – preferably with the light behind him – and can observe him at his leisure until he reaches the moment of liberation in speech. I remember one day at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, during a session in which each actor introduced himself to the others, the great Harlequin Marcello Moretti suffered from stage fright so much that he lost the coordination of arms and legs: his normally fluent walk became a stammering one. Offstage an actor always appears diminished, having become a prisoner of the image that he presents to the public. Observe, when going through customs, the behaviour of people who have nothing to declare and who, feeling afraid nonetheless, assume the awkward look of those who do have something to declare – or vice versa. It’s a game: believing, making believe, doubting, daring. All these observations are part of playing and performing for the pleasure of the public and for that of the actor as well. In his Théorie de la démarche (Theory of gait), the writer Honoré de Balzac sets us off on the path of direct observation of life. 1 2

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Gait is the physiognomy of the body. The look, the voice, the breathing, the gait are identical, but since it is beyond human power to keep watch at the same time over these diverse and simultaneous expressions of his thought, look for the one that tells the truth: it will allow you to know the whole man. Rest is the silence of the body.

I have often followed someone, at a reasonable distance, imitating his gait without him noticing. In this way I have enjoyed entering

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his ‘walking being’ and I have gathered sensory impressions of him, reading his body through my own, sensing him from within his movement. By observing the gait of passers-by as you sit on a café terrace, you will learn a great deal about yourself. The mime actor, by replaying it, can increase his knowledge of the human comedy. As we have seen in the case of walking and gait, gestures of action are all linked to physical effort. Gestures of expression, on the other hand, manifest the emotional part of human life. Expressive gestures The face, the hands and the body display feelings, passions and dramatic states, presenting to the observer permanent behaviour patterns natural to the person’s character, or occasional behaviour revealed by special situations such as anger or fear. To request money from a miser sets in motion a set of physical reactions and behaviour that reveal his avarice, although this would be impossible to detect if one were simply to observe him watching television. One cannot read other people directly: each person conceals from the world a secret part of himself, out of fear, or pride, or mistrust. This is what gestures of expression can reveal, without our realising it. The things people say and their behaviour while saying them do not always fit together. Only children display their feelings directly. I cannot stick my tongue out at someone I love without causing a scandal, and only very small children get away with this, surrounded by the embarrassed smiles of those around them who make excuses for the liberty they have taken: ‘Oh! Pay no attention, he’s just a child!’ To show one’s feelings is not polite. Society comes along with its rules of conduct and corrects such spontaneous behaviour. Society fights against natural, instinctive gestures which appear vulgar: As a guest in a friend’s house, if I feel like scratching, I must not do so; neither must I stretch out on the carpet. But if scratching and stretching out on the carpet were the norm in this society, I should be obliged to do these things, even if I did not feel like it.

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Figure 6 William Hogarth observed the life of his time with ferocious humour, ridiculing his contemporaries. He drew inspiration from the theatrical mimes of his day and catalogued human expression in all its diversity. Jacques Lecoq collection.

In both these cases, a code of good conduct has been imposed on instinctive behaviour. Such rules of good conduct can transform gestures and movements that are natural and spontaneous into gestures that become second nature. For example, in certain eastern countries, kissing a lady’s hand in greeting is natural and widespread in all parts of society, although it echoes a society long vanished. Here already we can see the gesture that conveys an appearance, one that is presented for others to read.

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If you are too hot, do not show it. If you are too cold do not show it. This display, the opposite of what one is actually feeling, may be a sign of pride: if you are hungry do not show it. It eases relations between people, but it also encourages people to pretend in all kinds of ways. It is not always best to say or to show what is true. One of the rules of polite society is to make the other person believe that he or she is the better, the lovelier, the stronger, etc. When this intention is reciprocated, a competitive game of deference is produced in Japanese style, each person bowing lower than the other. For my part, I have never understood what can bring a stop to this ritual. The scale of actions that make up this bowing ritual begins with: lowering the eyes. One should never look the king full in the eye. In the mimed dances of Australian aborigines that were shown at Peter Brook’s theatre, the Bouffes du Nord, all the women lowered their eyes in submissiveness, keeping them permanently fixed on the ground. One lowers the head to greet someone else. One bows down to acknowledge the audience. One bows and walks backwards for a bow in the French style. One genuflects in front of the Queen of England. One bows and humbles oneself and this can reach extremes: the phrase ‘to grovel in front of someone’ carries an image that suggests an internal characteristic of being willing to stoop to anything. In the polite greetings of traditional Japanese society, the inferior exhales in front of the superior who inhales. The thorax of the subordinate is lowered in front of that of the superior person, who compensates by the inverse movement; equilibrium is respected. Hierarchy is confirmed through physical manifestations. Space, too, comes into play. In the Charlie Chaplin film The Great Dictator, (1940) Hitler and Mussolini, together in a hair-dressing salon, each operate their adjustable barbers’ chairs to get higher than the other. Authority attempts to dominate the other, or to lower him, but with the minimum of gestures: to gesticulate would be like speaking to no purpose. Recognised authority appears calm, reasonable and motionless. Look at the President of the Republic: he walks with a measured step, his face is impassive on every occasion and does not betray the movement of his feelings; his arms hang down beside his body, his hands are relaxed, all ready for the waxwork museum.

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On the other hand, when authority tries to take or to recover lost power, it will try to get the public on its side by a voice that swells, an emphatic rhythm and sentences that are hammered out. Hitler used to have music by Wagner played before his speeches to work the crowd up, and then he would follow on using the same rhythm, ramping it up with wild gesticulations which no longer appealed to reason. In these circumstances, the gesture of expression takes on a paroxystic dimension which betrays feelings so exaggerated that they may amount to illness. Indicative gestures These form part of descriptive language located principally in the hands. The orator who uses gestures to punctuate his phrases provides a spatial delineation of the very structure of his speech, and places the words within it: here, before you, will appear . . . This pantomime accompanying words, this language in effect, is at its best when the words disappear entirely: for example, the window dresser standing out in the road, indicating to the person inside where the different objects on display should be placed; or the member of the ground staff at the airport, guiding the plane to its place on the apron. In these examples a sort of pantomime is the result of distance or noise preventing the use of speech, and this gives rise to gestures that can replace words. The prohibition of speech, in monasteries or prisons, gives birth to gesture. Secrecy may also create the need to make oneself understood without being heard. Those who are deaf and dumb have no other means of communication. All such gestures are part of the language of the hands, implicating the arms as well to a greater or lesser degree, and they refer us back to pantomime. Popular gestures Popular speech makes use of vivid gestures. Every country has its own repertoire and this street-language, often employing slang expressions, finds its richest flowering of gestures in Italy. Gestures take shape in relation to a particular part of the body. Most frequently it is the head: tapping a finger against the temple means that

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the person being addressed is ‘crazy’. This gesture can be magnified or given greater force: screwing the index finger into the temple as if one were making a hole indicates that one’s adversary is an idiot. The Italians strike their hands against their foreheads two or three times, fingers bent together, like the clapper of a bell. Tapping one’s stomach is the sign of hunger; tapping the heart, a sign of love; tapping the belly the sign that an actor has registered a flop (failed to get any applause); tapping the thigh is a sign of extreme delight. We all tap particular parts of our bodies to express something. Here are a few such expressions: pulling one’s ear screwing one’s finger into one’s cheek clicking a finger against one’s teeth slicing into the cheek with the thumb covering the whole face with an open hand patting one’s nose with the index finger To understand them and to add to this list is to take part in the observation of a whole language of images. Such gestures may also take on an obscene character. In his book La mimica degli antichi investigate nel gestire Napolitano (1832), Andrea de Jorio divides gestures into three categories: serious, neutral, obscene. Neapolitan street pantomime is rich in gestures that are transposed or adapted from realistic images and it remains a great reservoir of such gestures, often dismissed as vulgar and inadmissible in polite society. Insults often have their source in images of the parts of the body thought of as shameful. The phallic image suggested by thrusting up a forearm is common currency but there are many nuances. Here are a few: rubbing thumb and index finger together closing the hand and letting it swing the same thing but with the other hand tapping the forearm from in front a small forearm thrust with the arm bent and the other hand tapping it from behind a grand forearm thrust, the same thing with the whole arm stretched the super-forearm thrust throwing up the stretched arm and tapping hard on the back of the neck with the other hand

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the clandestine reduction of this last movement, reducing the space, bringing the arm down to the index finger and the tap of the hand to the tap of a finger. Things that are not considered polite to show are shown openly or are designated by an analogous image. In his film The Gold of Naples (1954), the great actor Eduardo de Filippo gives a magnificent technical demonstration of the gesture known as pernacolo, showing just how to place both hands correctly so as to be able to blow between them and produce the characteristic ‘fart’ sound. Insults have their origin in the lower boby: in Sicily you show your buttocks as a sign of revolt; sailors tap their private parts or display them to the storm to make the wind drop, or to ward off ill luck. In antiquity mime artists also used to spread these gestures and where often censured for obscenity. But opinions constantly vary on all of this. Everything depends, when deciding whether something is healthy or obscene, on the intentions of those who produce such gestures, the effect they intend to have and the state of those who observe them. Long live Rabelais! A codified language Today the language of deaf and dumb people is in fact a code that is foreign to us and which we have to learn in order to communicate with them. Deaf and dumb people understand us a good deal better than we understand them, since they are able to read our lips and the movements of our vocal expression. The first deaf and dumb language made use of signs that were close to theatrical pantomime, and thus clear to all, just like those one uses instinctively when one has to communicate in a foreign country without knowing its language. Let me quote from a manual written by the Abbé Lambert in 1865, Le Langage de la physionomie et du geste. This is a sort of dictionary of gesture, intended for teaching deaf and dumb people, and at the same time was also supposed to help in the understanding of their confessions. The gestures that replace words are typical of the pantomime of the period. To greet someone: make the gesture of removing one’s hat. To understand: hold the index finger against the forehead which one then suddenly raises.

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To signify ‘sap’ one must construct a series of words: tree, life, rise. Tree: place the right elbow on the left hand, with the forearm raised like a tree trunk, and the fingers spread like branches with a slight trembling movement. Life: form a V with the fingers of each hand and raise each V up from the base of the chest to level of the shoulders. To rise: simulate this action with hands and feet. There were even systems in which each gesture defined a letter, allowing words to be spelled out. Little by little, the early forms of picture language became stylised and perfected; ellipses were invented. The process was similar to that of Chinese writing which, starting from a drawing that reproduced reality, was simplified to a point of abstraction. Television programmes now often show simultaneous translations from verbal to gestural language. Eliminating the gap between verbal and gestural enunciation improves the understanding of people who cannot hear. Gestures too can be codified to the point where they become symbols. Although created rationally, symbolic gestures may join together in rituals which make use of more or less stylised images, seeking to transcend visible signs so as to make contact with the invisible. Religions are the source of countless gestures of this kind.

One gesture, one space Each country displays its own particular way of moving in its gestures of action, its expressive and indicative gestures. Gestures are learned through the mimetic process from childhood onwards, perfected over generations, handed down from parents to children. These gestures become effectively signs of recognition, when personalised within a particular group, or cultural milieu, or community linked by interest or activity. To say ‘goodbye’ in Italy one makes the sign of closing and opening the fingers on the palm of the hand while saying ‘ciao’. It is a charming sign and perhaps conveys the sense of a desire to see the person again. In England, the hand is held up, palm outwards and waved from right to left with no movement forwards or backwards; this ‘cheerio’ is neutral.

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In France, the hand and the arm together are waved backwards and forwards which often seems to convey the sense of ‘clear off!’ These examples contain three different directions for saying ‘goodbye’: towards oneself, parallel, and towards the other. Two countries, the United States and Japan, use gestures in opposite ways. In the United States, especially in Texas, people do not allow their postures to become fixed. Their movements flow without making angles, and these movements appear very youthful, comparable to those of children who never stand still in a fixed posture. Their ample gestures recall the wide open spaces. The swing of their bodies and legs is governed by a functional economy. Once seated, their bodies find no function for their legs so they stretch them out, cross them, etc. In the course of a conversation, you can see how an object, grabbed by an outstretched arm, a glass for example, remains in the hand and follows the movements that result from the person’s speech. In Japan, personal space small. In Tokyo, at street crossings, dense crowds pass one another without ever touching. Imagine the same thing happening in Texas: it is impossible – everyone would fall over! And so, when they penetrate Texan space, the Japanese always travel in groups. The Japanese remain attached to ancient codes of politeness which demand that one presents oneself to another person face on, head and body on the same plane, keeping the head rigid. One may not look the other person in the eye while the body is sideways on: one must be entirely present to him and this results in a contraction of the trapezoidal shoulder muscles, causing the neck to be rigid. In order to compensate for this muscular contraction caused by ancestral etiquette, the Japanese have invented a small contraption composed of a handle and a small wooden sphere, which allows one to relax that part of the body by means of repeated tapping. In the streets of Japanese cities you often see people tapping on their trapezoidal muscles in this way. Interestingly, these tapping contraptions are provided in railway stations: you can put a coin in the slot, place yourself in the appropriate position and the machine does the work for you. It is worth while noting that rigidity of the head on the neck corresponds to a rigidity of the hands and wrists: flexible head, flexible hands; rigid head, rigid hands. Japanese bodies are attached to rigid body positions. The play of space is important in the quality of gestures. It is always regrettable to see someone pouring wine from a bottle and inclining it

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by a reverse movement of the hand, reversing the spatial order, moving from inward to outward. The effect of this gesture is refusal to share the space of the other person – it is an insulting way of serving him. On the other hand, pouring by turning the bottle inwards is a sign of consideration and not of ignorance.

Costume: a different body At any given period one finds gestures in the space around us which do not have any recognisable origin. One says ‘It’s the latest thing’. These unique gestures or ways of moving are willed into being by a whole group of people who recognise themselves in them. They are specially related to fashion and to a certain body-image. People wish for a different body and this will take shape by means of clothing. Let us consider this phenomenon starting with the standing body. The human body stands upright on the ground in the form of an upside down triangle: the narrowest part is below and the broadest is above. We are positioned on our feet, which are positioned on the ground, of which they are part. We are linked to our feet by our ankles. Now clothing covers the body in order to protect it from the weather, but also to make it different from what nature has provided, diminishing or augmenting different parts of the body according to the vagaries of fashion and of a given body-image. Grand outfits invert the pyramid of the body by diminishing the upper part and expanding the lower part; they set up an idea of stability which rejects the difficulties of balance and movement in favour of a monumental, immobile body. In this way kings, great leaders, priests, all wear outfits based on the inverted pyramid: they remain seated while everyone moves around them. Certain parts of the body are delicate: the joints of the wrist or ankle and those parts that are narrow such as the waist and the neck. Jewels are placed at these points and sit well there since they are held in place. Bracelets and necklaces are like handcuffs, collars and chains that are worn by prisoners; even garrottes occupy the same place, for better or for worse, for life or for death. Other ornaments encircle the powerful parts of the body: forehead, shoulders, chest, belly, thighs, arms, forearms. They act like a belt or a hem, to show off those parts better.

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The cowboy’s belt is worn on his hips like the low belt of the rural Harlequin, or like the belt of the Japanese kimono, giving an impression of strength. A fringe on the forehead, stocking tops half-way up the thighs, the edge of the Empire-style décolleté, the fringed belt of the belly dancer, bracelets worn mid-arm, all these are ways of revealing the sensual body. Jewels on a submissive body encircle the most delicate parts; ornaments on the displayed body encircle the most powerful parts. Following changes in fashion, belts are worn higher or lower, like the temperature level, affecting the whole outfit. The same is true of the length of skirts. Look at Bip, the character created by Marcel Marceau: all his hems are high; his hat is worn high on his head; his eyebrows are raised; his whole stature is drawn up to his sternum; his trouser-legs are short and reveal his ankles. Harequin is the exact opposite. Everything tends downward towards the ground: his hat is pulled down and hides his forehead, his body-stature is low at the hips. With Charlie Chaplin, as with clowns, the character is double, in conflict with itself: his hat, eyebrows and jacket give upward movement; his trousers and big shoes move down. All these clues tell us things about the character. Clothes hide defects: for short legs, high heels; for bow legs, long skirts. Clothes can also show off good points: a mini-skirt for the legs and a décolleté for the breasts and the shoulders. An interplay exists between clothes and the body, accentuating or countering its shapes. A thin person will wear figure-hugging clothes; a fat person will add to their bulk by wearing wide, floating materials. A ‘counter-costume’ both hides and reveals through a conflict between body and costume: a thin woman in a wide, floating costume, a fat woman in a dress that hugs her body. Fashions change in order to please all those who, from time to time, need to hide or to reveal some part of themselves, led by dress designers whose talent is to predict the desires of the public and to please everyone in turn. Beneath the costume is the body which also follows the changes in fashion, altering its attitudes and shapes and creating needs. In 1900 feminine fashion silhouetted the body in tight corset and a ‘wasp-waist’. By way of compensation it accentuated the breasts and the buttocks with the hips tilted so as to emphasise the arch of the back. Women who lacked natural advantages made up for it by wearing false buttocks and devices to lift or enlarge the breasts.

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With the 1914–18 war, women had to replace men in the factories. The previous silhouette was not suited to work, so women abandoned it and became flatter. In 1920, having emancipated themselves and learned to act like men, they took to masculine hair cuts and to smoking. They liked to show off at the smart seaside resort of Deauville, walking greyhounds even thinner than themselves. In 1940–44 the female body-shape once again became fleshy: pin-ups of Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe decorated the barracks of soldiers hoping for better times. Then came the rediscovery of the body in a different way by psychoanalysts. The plexus of passions which had puffed up the chests of those in 1914–18, as if in expectation of the medals they would attract, was wiped out, leaving the head speaking only to the pelvis. In this way, from time to time, the body changes from one shape to its opposite, according to the period. It would be interesting to put several of these different shapes together, one after the other, so as to rediscover through a dance the change of body fashions through time. In his book A propos d’art, de forme et de mouvement (Maloine, 1963), Professor Paul Bellugue gives us his reflections on fashion in history. He points out that in France during the ‘directoire’ period the women known as ‘les incroyables’ would wrap an enormous scarf around their necks, which seemed like a protection from the guillotine, whereas at the time of the revolution Georges Danton wore an open-necked shirt as a kind of provocation. Two bodies may play out, between them, the game of freedom and constraint: either by means of clothes leaving freedom for gestures, or through clothes which discipline the body so that it becomes different, transformed by an idea into a style. The body as we see it today Nowadays there is much talk of energy and people fear its loss: you have to improve your energy, be a ‘fighter’. Like a barometer, the body reflects this quest. Today everyone has to be dynamic, juiced up, punchy, fighting fit. Going to the gym is an established way to liberate beneficial energy in cheerful, repetitive exercises done to repetitive musical accompaniment so as to rediscover one’s vitality. Being fit is the name of the game. People run. They jog along behind the exhaust pipes of our polluted cities. There are special intensive training sessions for people to ‘let it all hang out’.

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Gilbert Bécaud’s Monsieur 100,000 volts was a satirical take on this fashion. But we can see its violence on any street corner. The body reflects its society, its milieu and its period. Originally sport depended on strength: muscular power frightened the opposing enemy. Soldiers would throw out their chests, showing their iron cross, their iron fist, their iron discipline and morale. First came the period of building with durable iron and steel, the Eiffel tower planted on the strength of its four great pillars. Later came the discovery of upward thrust: rangy figures appeared on the sporting apparatus, using the long pendulum of their body to accomplish great feats. This was followed by the time of suppleness, with exercises on bars, the splits, stretching, lengthening, and other contortions, emphasising the plasticity of the muscles. And this was followed in its turn by the time of meditation, the return to emptiness brought by oriental attitudes. The Zen club of New York attracts American widows who sit in the lotus position and await the arrival of the absent gods, confusing true and false practice of yoga. The public is fascinated by sport when it can watch others doing it. Sport becomes a show. Skaters used to skate. Now they dance beneath the follow-spots, dressed in music-hall costumes, wearing floating chiffon. The Olympic Games lay on the greatest of shows for the greatest of crowds, to the glory of the host country. Teams of pianists play while a man runs in order to beat a record pushing through the crowds of singers and dancers, and nobody can see him. One always dies in war, but one can also die in the stands of the stadium, as the marathon runner finishes his race. Other, more restful bodily techniques are there, with their own particular vocabulary: cool, relax, chill, etc., enrolling the psyche in their programme to ‘get in touch with the inner self’. An avalanche of strange terms cascades down upon the body and buries it: every taste is catered for. Individuals are divided into two groups: the violent who are fed up and break things up because it liberates them (at least that is straightforward) and those who are helpless, but who share general anxieties. The latter can choose between pure yoga and energy yoga – even high altitude energy for those who cannot do it down in the valley. Bodily creativity is the science of the soul. So many courses are offered – bioenergy, emotional therapy, Gestalt, primal, bioanalytical, naturopathological, psychotheatre, without forgetting medical and social sophrology, antigymnastics, soft gymnastics and the oriental tendencies: Tai Chi Chuan, Sens-hui meditation,

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transcendental meditation, with metamorphic massage, and other methods designed after the promoter’s name. The reason for the quantity of methods that have appeared must mean that there is great demand. All these complex terms, shrouded in mystery, are in the service of a better life and the need to feel good, ultimately, the need to ‘be oneself ’.

chapter 3

from pantomime to modern mime jacques lecoq In this section Lecoq sets out a genealogy of the theatre of movement and gesture, from the famous Pierrots of nineteenth-century French theatre, to the beginnings of modern mime and the central place of movement studies in the renewal of theatre led by Jacques Copeau in the early years of the twentieth century.

Once he had developed Pierrot’s pedigree, by creating a character descended from Gilles, Deburau established pantomime with the Funambules’ audience, who understood everything immediately, quite unlike the elaborate visual codes that were developed after him. Afterwards, Pierrot’s silent torch was passed down a line of white-faced men, before being extinguished by Marcel Marceau’s own white face. Any organic evolution of a character must deviate from its origins, and so the simple and clumsy Gilles matured into numerous Pierrots, each increasingly cunning and refined. He went from being small to being big, from a carrier of flour sacks to a dancer, swapping the constraints of the earth for the air, by way of the moon. Likewise, the hardy Harlequin of the Bergamot Valleys found himself a dancer and acrobat alongside Pierrot and white pantomime. As soon as the role of Pierrot became unclear, theatre’s reformers swept the stage and reclaimed the space. Jacques Copeau set the actor free from artifice and helped him to discover the body and its power to evoke. Modern mime was born in this way, with Decroux and Barrault. But where is Pierrot today? He can certainly be found in the nostalgic imagination that modern mime continued to bring to life in the 1960s, especially in the East, in Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Pierrot may have left France, but the white-faced figure can still be found in Marceau, who is closer to Charlie Chaplin than to Pierrot, and who has added the tragic grin of Japanese actors. He no longer performs pantomime. He mimes. He brings to life. He walks in the wind as though blown by a real wind. The death of one form did not precede the birth of the other; the two overlapped. The old form endures today, traversing the space of the newborn form, like Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. In the same way, as in ‘avant-garde’ theatre,

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Beckett wrote Endgame, but it was Ionesco who played out the endgame with The Chairs; one finished what the other began. Thus with Marceau and his imitators, one form of mime ends only for a theatre of gesture to take shape, renewing the art of the actor, its themes and space. The death of Pierrot The first twenty-five years of the twentieth century saw the end of French pantomime and the beginning of modern mime. The end of one type of theatre gave way to the beginning of another, despite their unifying silence. However, there is no continuity but rather rupture between pantomime and mime, as there is between death and birth. Today’s world is difficult to understand, since the end of one thing

Figures 7 (above) and 8 (opposite) The mime artist Georges Wague in Hearing and Touching. In a lecture given on 19 January 1913 Georges Wague declared: ‘The greatest enemies of pantomime, the ones responsible for killing it, are those mime artists who, having reduced it to incomprehensibility, insisted on continuing with something so pointless’. Jacques Lecoq collection.

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can run alongside the beginning of another, and all of our attention has to focus on what will happen next. Frequently, the fear of tomorrow’s unknown makes us look to the past, to antiquity or to trends, turning back and claiming to discover meaningful re-interpretations. Enduring traditions are found hidden in the depths of silence and not in the typical appearance of a form. If the gesticulatory remnants of pantomime of the nineteenth and early twentieth century denied the spoken word, then mime, in denouncing speech, subsequently gave power back to dialogue by bringing silence to the theatre. Pantomime was a silent performance with scenery. Props and costumes written with actions and dialogue that the mimed gestures would translate, again in relative silence. As newspaper columns of the time tell us: ‘the audience participated in the silence of the play with its murmuring, all accompanied by evocative music.’

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Deburau-Pierrot Jean-Baptiste Gaspard Deburau made Pierrot the star of pantomime. He was the real originator of this character, around 1830 at the Théâtre des Funambules on the Boulevard du Temple. How did Deburau’s Pierrot move? We know nothing, or very little, about Deburau’s manner of miming. All he left us were some family souvenirs so subsequently each mime had to reinvent its own language. In his book Gesture, Dr Hacks, who was a mime artist himself, tells us: a good mime artist must be 1.70 metres tall, firmly muscled, with a chest measurement of 91 centimetres, an ability to lift 95 kilos, a dorsal resistance of 29, a leg extension of 44, and at least a 36 centimetre arm circumference. His weight should not exceed 60 kilos and 700 grammes. The prototype should resemble as much as possible, Rouffe, who mastered mime and who was much admired by Hacks. Too bad for anyone else! It would have been useful to have had some details about the quality of the gestures, their richness. Of course it is difficult to discuss gestures and nothing, except imagining them, can make it easier. Deburau was big and tall, both physically and facially. We know that his entrance on stage at the Théâtre des Funambules was on his hands and that he exited via the window with a jump called de fenêtre (‘via the window’). We also know that he achieved a degree of expression that could communicate all of the nuances of the soul, far more effectively than the spoken word. It is said that Deburau hardly moved during his expressive performances. It was in his ‘reactions’ that the subtlety of his emotions became apparent, especially in his face, as ‘action’ engaged the whole body. Paul Eudel, in his Champfleury and Pantomime (1892), mentions discrete gestures, winks, grimaces and shivers. Being a tightrope walker, Deburau had a sense of balance and doubtless used this in other contexts. His white costume with its long sleeves enlarged his movements and it is likely that he used it to its full potential, playing with either opening it out completely or bringing it all in like a bundle of rags, or even stretching it like a white pole. As with commedia dell’arte characters such as Harlequin or Pantaloon, Deburau’s Pierrot is a distinct character defined by his costume. However, he can appear in other uniforms depending on his role or occupation; the Deburau Gallery shows us a whole range of characters

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based around the white costume: Pierrot as priest, soldier, shopkeeper, etc., always with the white face, wig and moustache. Harlequin, Pierrot’s ultimate rival, has survived in French pantomime. We can follow his evolution from the zanni of the commedia dell’arte of the 1500s to the dancer of the twentieth century. The early zanni (naïve, cunning, clumsy and rustic) bears little resemblance to the elegant and unreliable rogue of pantomime, who played the villain alongside Pierrot’s moralist (see Paul Arène’s pantomime La Statue (The Statue)). Deprived of the starring role by Pierrot, Harlequin became a supporting character. Pierrot’s pantomimes require solutions to practical problems such as turning spoken text into gestures. When Pierrot tells Columbine ‘if you see Harlequin I will kill you’, it becomes necessary to find a language that can be immediately understood by the working-class audience, who were the real audience of pantomime and, through watching the performances, had begun to learn to appreciate the nuances of gesture. A certain complicity developed between the mime artists and the audience. The hand became a sort of performer: pointing, drawing and suggesting. Thus was born a genuine syntax that did not depend on a literal transcription of each word in its original order. Here was an unspoken and visual language. ‘If you see Harlequin I will kill you’, could therefore be shown with the gesture: ‘You see Harlequin not me you kill’. The hand belonged to the arm, which belonged to the body, and the face clarified the intention as shown by the body. I do not think that the mime of individual words in white pantomime was as elaborate as during the time of Roman pantomime. As the Roman performers were masked they could not rely on facial expressions, which the audience would not have been able to see anyway, given the large distances between them and the stage. Everything had to be shown through hand movements and body attitudes. We should not forget that ancient mime actually managed to illustrate philosophical ideas! The audience at the Théâtre des Funambules understood everything immediately without having to be introduced to an overly complicated set of codes. The succession of men in white From start to finish, white pantomime evolved through a series of Pierrots. Handed down from father to son, from teacher to pupil, yet always held by a talented actor who mastered the part, Pierrot was a character that never ceased to grow.

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According to Dr Hacks, Jean-Baptiste Gaspard Deburau was not a mime but rather a performer in the tradition of circus clowns and tightrope walkers who had not yet achieved a true mimed language. His son, Jean-Charles Deburau, and then Paul Legrand, subsequently inherited this tradition. Then came the arrival of Louis Rouffe (1849–83), born in Marseilles but with roots in Corsica, who further developed the language of gesture and sought to define a word for word expression, liberating the hand from the rest of the body. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Marseilles was to become the capital of pantomime. In reclaiming this doorway to the Mediterranean, pantomime rediscovered the birthplace of the self-expression of ancient gesture as originally established in Sicily and Naples. Séverin (1863–1930), also born in Marseilles, followed soon after. Then came Georges Wague (1874–1958) who reacted against the development of increasingly precise codes. He championed a modern pantomime where gesture expressed emotion over a literal translation. He claimed that the error was precisely in trying to translate words with gesture. It was Wague who advised Jean-Louis Barrault on his watch theft pantomime in Marcel Carné’s film, Les Enfants du Paradis (1945). Wague was the last in the long line of Pierrots. And so, over the course of nearly a century, we can see the three stages of the evolution of gesture, from pantomime to mime: 1 2 3

The direct, spontaneous and silent language of the body in action. The elaboration of a set of codes, hand as word and face as idea. Reformation after the ossification of the codes and the search for emotional expression.

Poor Pierrot! Gradually pantomime withered. Pierrot went into mourning, replacing his white clothes with black ones. He left the theatre for the cabaret, helped by the painter Willette who, through his drawings, gave us the exploits of a nocturnal Pierrot dressed in tails. A century after his creation, Pierrot effectively died in 1925, frozen forever in porcelain, sitting on a moon and hanging in department store windows, and his face even graced chocolate boxes, a veritable ‘greedy Pierrot’. There is still a certain nostalgia for those times evident in the many mime artists with their painted black tears. Far removed from the cheerful flour covered rustic, we have a Pierrot who cries, and the current taste

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for all things retro has made those figures that we once displayed on our mantelpiece fashionable again. It is worth noting that, even when Harlequin and Pierrot were central characters, there was often a doubling up of roles. This is why we have plays with two Pierrots or two Harlequins. However, when this phenomenon ended, the female counterpart, Harlequin’s Esmeraldina or Pierrot’s Columbine, were replaced in favour of female versions of the character: Harlequin – Harlequinette, Pierrot – Pierrette. At the 1925 Expo in Paris, the main theatre staged a closing performance by the mime Farina and his company. Farina was an actor seen both on stage at the Paris Opera and in film, and who frequently performed mimed songs. Pantomime still existed, but it had been exiled to the Tivoli gardens in Copenhagen where the last descendents of the nineteenthcentury mime artists had transformed it into children’s theatre. However, a new movement had already begun, taking pantomime into the cinema. The escapades of Pierrot, Columbine, Harlequin and Cassandra could now be found projected through many magic lanterns. The first animation was Pauvre Pierrot (Poor Pierrot), a pantomime by Émile Regnaud (1844–1919), which had its première at the Grévin Museum on the Boulevard Montmartre on 28 October 1892. People flocked to see Pierrot and his band move in their animated garden. Cinema laid its foundations on the ruins of pantomime. The rediscovery of the moving body At the end of the nineteenth century, two exceptional events would shed new light onto the body and movement: the resurgence of physical exercise, through the arrival of sport, and the invention of chronophotography, through the arrival of cinema. By freeing itself from the moral constraints that Christianity had imposed upon it, the naked body rediscovered natural gestures through open-air sports and exercise. It gradually distanced itself from the stifling use of clothing. As for dance, it rejected the stringency of classical form in order to find a natural expressiveness. This return to nature and spontaneity of gesture is an inevitable result of the overwhelming limitations that suppress life. Theatre reflects this experience. However, nature itself is always seen from the viewpoint of the era, and natural gesture is therefore defined by the particular aesthetic of the time. In the nineteenth century gymnastics found their niche in military training. After the defeat at Iena, Ludwig Jahn established physical train-

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ing in Prussia for the German people. War forces nations to examine their own strengths and weaknesses. Both the defeated and the victorious rebuild their homes on the shattered foundations. They discipline their children to be stronger so that they can defend their country, and also, unfortunately, in preparation to attack. The Prussian soldiers trained in uniform, buttoned up and proudly standing to attention (read Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Gym Class for more on this subject). However, it was a Spaniard, Colonel Amoros, who brought gymnastics to France in around 1814. Amoros had been a staunch supporter of Napoleon I and had become a naturalised Frenchman. He created gymnasia stocked with various pieces of equipment that he himself invented: the climbing crossbar and apparatus that we still use today such as the horizontal bar, the pole and the pummel horse. There are two remaining examples of this type of gymnasium found today in Paris, one on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin and the other at 57 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, home of the École Jacques Lecoq. The latter was built in 1876 and was originally called the Christmann Gymnasium. It went on to become the ‘Central’ boxing arena before finally turning into a school. The military was not the only influence on gymnastics and movement. In 1814, Henrik Ling opened his Central Institute of Gymnastics in Sweden. His aim was to develop a regime for ‘the healthy man’. He created analytic exercises that followed strict positions and ultimately corrected any physical deficiency. This was all done with the minimum of effort and had little in common with sports and outdoor exercises. This style of gymnastics was the first experience of physical education for Étienne Decroux, who would later go on to study at Jacques Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier school. The strictness of body position and attitude was an element that Decroux took with him from Ling’s Institute. Étienne-Jules Marey and his assistant Georges Demeny, both creators of the Parc des Princes physiological research station (near the RolandGarros Stadium in Paris), studied human physical movement using chronophotography. In 1882, Marey had invented the ‘photographic gun’, which allowed him to separate movement into a series of images and which also led to the invention of cinema. Demeny was the pioneer of physical education in France, bringing exercises into schools. The study of the human body in motion was therefore expanded by the combination of physical education and chronophotography, which as a result benefited all forms of physical training. Marey’s experiences led to the study of different human and animal movement, such as a man’s walk or a bird’s flight. Attitudes that had

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previously been imperceptible to the naked eye were now brought into relief. This created a conflict between science and art, which sought to harness the flight of birds in order to precipitate the arrival of air travel. Edward Muybridge, an American photographer, was embarking upon a similar study at the same time. Cinema further developed the fluidity of movement and created a more precise image through the use of slow motion. In his piece L’Usine (The Factory), Étienne Decroux actually used the same style of black body stocking with white stripes that Marey made his test subjects wear in order to see the body’s postures more clearly. The continuous and cyclical aspects of gesture, often associated with Isadora Duncan and Émile Jacques-Dalcroze, became apparent through the analysis of physical movement. Jaques-Dalcroze based his style on a musical rhythm that engaged the whole body in geometric or circular movements, regularly using hoops to help him. Other techniques highlighted the beauty of plastic arts: the contours created by Georges Desbonnet, for instance, gave rise to bodybuilding methods and eventual muscular hypertrophy. The irony is that the growth of exercise, whose ultimate goal is to facilitate movement, has resulted today in the pumped-up monstrosities whose muscles are so big that they can hardly move. When Baron Pierre de Coubertin chivalrously reintroduced the Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, the athletes modelled their bodies on Greek statues. Competitive sports subsequently pushed athletes towards a focused training that developed the body in response to specific requirements. This created particular, even abnormal, body types that were actually more delicate than ordinary bodies. This effect has nothing to do with the origins of sport, which were rooted in the play instinct. In 1907, Lieutenant Georges Hébert devised for the marines under his command at the Lorient naval base a natural method of physical education for both body and mind. Derived from obstacle courses, its motto was ‘be strong to be useful’. It consisted of a series of exercises (similar to those of Amoros) on an outdoor circuit, which prefigured a real battleground. The use and repetition of different stages helped to create a sense of continuity in a reduced space. A prolific traveller, Hébert had noticed that primitive cultures had developed a well-formed physique thanks to the exercise imposed by their way of life: walking, running, jumping, climbing, lifting, throwing, attacking, defending, swimming, keeping balance, walking on all fours.

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Hébert contributed to the return of a natural body, heralded by the foundation of large sports clubs such as the French Racing Club in 1882 and the French Stadium in 1883. His methods were used to train actors at Jacques Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier school, and the Joinville system of physical education in France also combined Amoros and Hébert’s exercises with the analytic techniques of Ling and Demeny. It is also worth remembering the 1936 Berlin Olympics, an uneasy display of sport and German Nazism, as glorified in Leni Riefenstahl’s film, The Gods of the Stadium (1938). The body and nature were fused together with totalitarian ideas where the chosen race had to produce champions, supermen, even gods. It is all too clear where a loss of humour and of playfulness can lead. For the people of France, however, 1936 was the time when paid holidays were introduced, when the working classes discovered the seaside. Previously unknown, the beaches now saw an influx of labourers stripping off and diving into the sea, purchasing bicycles and discovering the countryside. These halcyon days saw the arrival of camping, Charles Trenet, naturism and nudism (of which Jean-Louis Barrault was a keen follower) and then, once again, came war. Jacques Copeau and the Vieux-Colombier school In 1913 Jacques Copeau founded the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier with a group of writers and artists. It was time to rethink the concept of theatre, time to sweep away the disorder, greed and extreme self-centredness that had settled. It was time to rebuild a theatre that would use poetry to elevate an audience above the surrounding mediocrity. With this moral and pure intent, Jacques Copeau began his reformation. War would disrupt the activities at VieuxColombier but not those of the group itself, who left for America with Jouvet and Dullin. Having found his audience again, Copeau set up a professional school in 1921, open to young actors, artists and theatre craftsmen. Copeau wanted to take children as young as twelve, who had not yet been corrupted by the current theatre, and train them to serve this new theatre which he craved. He turned his attention towards young people as they possessed a generosity and spontaneity no longer found in older actors of the time. They were also more open to accepting his new ideas. Gordon Craig had also wanted to start afresh, and opened a school at the Goldoni Arena in Florence in 1913. Rather than being for actors, it became a scenographic school, concentrating on three-dimensional

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space. Craig felt that theatres should remain closed for ten years before staging a performance. However he was forced to close his own school after only six months! In 1914, due to the war, the school closed its doors for the last time, but would it have really continued without this disruption? It is impossible to know, but Gordon Craig did not open any other school. Copeau was influenced by Gordon Craig’s example and benefited from the new theatrical space that Gordon Craig had discovered. He made the emptiness of the stage tangible, maintaining a rhythmic relationship with long vertical lines, reminiscent of his beloved San Gemminiano. Both Appia and Jacques-Dalcroze were also to have an influence on Copeau. Jacques-Dalcroze suggested a new form of training based on spontaneity of the body. He sought to establish a connection between physical and sonorous movement, and to liberate personal rhythm from the muscular or intellectual constraints that obstructed any form of impulsive expression. Appia used cubes, staircases and light to find a poetic transformation of the stage. The movement classes at Vieux-Colombier were based on JacquesDalcroze’s rhythmic methods but also incorporated Georges Hébert’s ideas on natural movement. Fratellini gave the classes on acrobatics and clown-based improvisation. Suzanne Bing took responsibility for the running of the school and, right up to the closure in 1924, she devoted herself entirely to it. Three years after opening in 1921, Jacques Copeau closed Vieux-Colombier and left Paris to rethink theatre yet again. Before the school closed, Suzanne Bing directed the students in a Japanese Noh production that was never seen by an audience as the lead actor (François Maistre) sprained his knee in a fall. According to Jacques Copeau: The Noh production, as I saw it in its final rehearsals, remains one of the richest and most joyous secrets of our work at Vieux-Colombier, there was an incredible depth of harmony between the scenography, the rhythm, the style and quality of emotion. (Memories of Vieux-Colombier, 1931) Copeau settled in the Château de Morteuil in Burgundy with the best of the young actors from his school: his daughter, Marie-Hélène Dasté, his son-in-law, Jean Dasté, Étienne Decroux, Jean Vilar (not to be confused with the director of the T.N.P.) and François Maistre, who went on to create the famous double act ‘Gilles and Julien’ (Julien later became director of the Théâtre des Nations). Copeau’s nephew, Michel Saint-Denis, and Léon Chancerel also collaborated with him.

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The company then moved to the Burgundian ‘Côte-d’Or’, to a house that Copeau bought in Pernard-Vergelesses amid the magnificent Corton vineyards. This saw the beginning of the Copiaux, as the local wine growers called the troupe. However, the small familial company was left more and more to its own devices, as Copeau’s interior reflection gradually consumed him. This mystic moment of crisis allowed the Copiaux to take control and discover a popular style of theatre that had more in common with festivals, using masks, songs and mime in different locations such as barns and town squares. They rediscovered a sense of the travelling show, treading the boards, and publicising the performances with parades. The Copiaux were the pioneers of a style of performance that revived the tradition of improvisation and gesture, all with a rural audience who had never before had the opportunity of going to the theatre. Wearing masks, they managed to integrate mime with storytelling, creating scenarios and characters. Thus, a new style of actor was born following in the footsteps of the Vieux-Colombier school: a physical actor who would develop even further, through a series of differing lines of descent. Links and influences The Copiaux lasted for five years, from 1924 to 1929, before the group expanded, separated and branched out. From 1930 to 1932, Michel Saint-Denis brought together some of the Copiaux in his Compagnie des Quinze. After the war he directed the Strasbourg Drama Centre and created the school of the same name. He then moved to Great Britain, where he ran the Young Vic School. He also co-directed the Royal Shakespeare Company and helped set up New York’s Julliard School. Saint-Denis was intensely passionate about actor training and was one of the few people who fully understood the problems of improvisation when approaching classical texts. In 1929, Léon Chancerel founded the touring company known as Les Comédiens Routiers and developed theatre within the French scouting movement. From this group came, among others, Jean-Pierre Grenier and Olivier Hussenot who themselves founded a company, which included the Frères Jacques and Yves Robert. After being part of the Compagnie des Quinze, Jean Dasté formed the Compagnie des Quatre-Saisons in 1937, with André Barsacq and Maurice Jacquemont. Charles Dullin left the Vieux-Colombier company in 1920, after returning from America, and set up his own theatre and school. It

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was with Dullin that Étienne Decroux, Jean-Louis Barrault and Antonin Artaud would give mime its first autonomous drive, based on Copeau’s ideas: the actor on a bare stage, redefining theatre. Étienne Decroux, who had stayed for six months in Burgundy after studying for six months at the Vieux-Colombier school, pushed this concept to its ultimate conclusion, creating a definitive point of reference: a silent, naked body on a silent, naked stage. Decroux’s rigorous methods, Barrault’s talented mime and the magic of Artaud would provide the first experiences of applying mime to theatre. After the Second World War, Marcel Marceau trained at Charles Dullin’s school where, taught by Étienne Decroux, he specialised, as we all know, in mime. As for me, during this time I was discovering theatre with Jean Dasté’s actors in Grenoble, finding a dimension to movement that was completely different from the one I had experienced in sport.

chapter 4

has mime become separated from theatre? Jean Perret In the following section, Jean Perret writes about three of the most famous mime artists of the twentieth-century: Étienne Decroux, Jean-Louis Barrault and Marcel Marceau. Jean Perret is a poet and playwright. He taught at the Lecoq school for one season (1966–7) running a class in theatre culture. He was co-founder of a theatre group affiliated to the National Centre for Dramatic Art run by Léon Chancerel. For 25 years he has led a professional career as a librarian.

We now present three great servants and executants of theatre of gesture: Étienne Decroux, Jean-Louis Barrault and Marcel Marceau. They learned together, performed together, and left their mark on the theatre of movement and gesture. Despite their different roles, what brings them together here is that they all have their place in what one could describe as the sphere of influence of Jacques Copeau and Charles Dullin (though this influence was felt more or less immediately according to their ages). By his own admission, Decroux was deeply influenced by Jacques Copeau and Suzanne Bing who were, as we have seen, the theoreticians of a theatre of gesture that broke with the wordy and affected theatre that was fashionable in their day. At the same time, or almost, he was a student and actor in Charles Dullin’s company, while Jean-Louis Barrault, as well as paying tribute to his master Dullin, frequently refers to the disciplines taught by Jacques Copeau. As for Marcel Marceau, how could he have avoided the influence of the Vieux-Colombier or of the Copiaux, despite being of a younger generation, whereas Decroux, Dullin and Barrault were, in a manner of speaking, his fathers? But these lines of descent should not be allowed to mask differences between them, and the varied paths they followed, illustrated by the place they now occupy in the theatre, which sometimes sets them in opposition to one another. Nevertheless, each one of these three has made a vital contribution to the theatre of gesture and to the art of mime and movement: theirs is a contribution that goes beyond being creative and imaginative, amounting to a veritable renaissance of the art form. This is demonstrated in the interview with Barrault and the articles on Decroux and Marceau by Jean Perret that follow.

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Of course, while showing that there is common ground shared by Decroux, Barrault and Marceau, it would be absurd to neglect the importance of other great servants of the theatre of gesture in its contemporary renewal: names such as Jean Vilar, Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine, without forgetting exacting directors such as Roger Blin and rigorous teachers such as Jacques Lecoq. In other words, we feel that there is a certain continuity to be found in the work of all of these artists, something resembling a crucible, out of which comes the dimension of gesture in theatre, the basis of every artistic form that springs from authentic movement. Étienne Decroux, master of mime My first encounter with Decroux was a buffeting over the telephone as he answered my call by saying: You’re disturbing me – I’m working (at more than 85 years of age he was still working!). You speak of gestures, now gestures are interesting. But what do you expect me to say about them? You shouldn’t be disturbing me while I’m working. Lecoq, you speak of Lecoq? Well he, too, is a pioneer. But there’s nothing I can say. Another time, a woman’s voice answered the phone: ‘You know, Decroux is working, he’s teaching at the moment I cannot tell you anything.’ Gestures, including all gestures, whether mimed or spoken, are the subject of this book. And this is reflected in the practice, now similar, now divergent, of the creative artists whom we have interviewed – Jean-Louis Barrault and Marcel Marceau – who both make reference to Étienne Decroux, even if both have reservations about one or other of his doctrinaire assertions, of about some aspects of his method of ‘remoulding’ the body through painful exercises. Decroux declared that: Anything is permissible in art, provided it is done for a clear purpose. And since, in our art, the human body is the primary material, it must be able to imitate thought. Since, unlike the materials used in the other arts, the body is sentient, it must inevitably suffer from being remoulded. If not, all the body can do is to imitate other bodies. Writing of their work together in the 1930s (in his book Souvenirs pour demain (Memoirs for tomorrow)), Barrault claims: ‘the genius of Decroux is in his rigour. But that rigour was taken to the point of tyranny.’

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Figure 9 Étienne Decroux performing corporeal mime at his atelier, c. 1950. Etienne Bertrand Weill.

So who was this Étienne Decroux, whose name is on the lips of all who speak of the arts of mime and gesture? André Veinstein gives a brief biography in his preface to Decroux’s book Paroles sur le mime ((Words on Mime) Gallimard, 1963): he began as an actor in theatre and cinema in 1923, and continued to perform until the 1950s. He founded his school in 1940, while continuing to perform and to produce shows such as L’Usine (The Factory), Les Arbres (The Trees), Les Petits Soldats (The Little Soldiers), etc. He performed alongside Barrault in the film Les Enfants du Paradis. His school became for him the place where he could withdraw from public performance and conduct advanced experiments towards his ultimate aim of non-figurative ‘mobile sculpture’. Through relentless analysis and reflection on the human body and on the body of the mime artist, he succeeded in building a theatre whose sole means of expression was the body, and in training the actors, the mimes, who were able to bring this theatre into being, using only silent gesture. In this pantomime theatre, illustrated by Les Marches (Steps), Les Arbres, Les Petits Soldats, L’Usine, etc., he demonstrated his skills, as did others: his son Maximilien, Éliane Guyon, his close disciples, and also Jean-Louis

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Barrault, Marcel Marceau, Pierre Verry and many more – Americans as well as French – both before and after the Second World War. However, from the end of the 1950s, Decroux devoted himself exclusively to teaching and to developing his methods and techniques, with the aim of bringing about a renewal of the art of the actor, of the mime and hence of the whole art of theatre. His most famous pupil today is undoubtedly Marcel Marceau, even though Decroux is unwilling to admit to it, such is his perfectionism and his propensity for feeling betrayed by his best disciples. As for the origins of art, and his own apprenticeship, it is best to use his own words, drawn from his book Words on Mime or to trust to the testimony of those who knew him. ‘I remember my father,’ he writes, ‘a house builder, a manual labourer, who was friendly with a family of Italian sculptors, who would take me to the café-concert every Monday, who would read poetry to me. I remember working as painter, plumber, mason, roofer, butcher, terrace-builder, docker, nurse. [. . .] All the same,’ he writes, ‘I saw a lot of life. [. . .] When I think of those impoverished people who have seen nothing – how can they put on plays? [. . .] All the things one has seen and handled gradually settle down at the back of one’s mind and then pass down the arms to the tip of the fingers, where they alter the very finger-prints.’ Then he joined the Vieux-Colombier in 1923, both the theatre company and the school of Jacques Copeau. Suzanne Bing was director of the school. Decroux writes that without her, without her rigour and asceticism, there would have been no school, despite the great importance that Copeau always ascribed to it. What is important to emphasise is the influence of the VieuxColombier, not only on Decroux, but on innumerable other actors, the Copiaux at first (the company that came out of the Vieux-Colombier), and then the companies started by so many of the former Copiaux, such as the Compagnie des Quinze with Michel Saint-Denis, the Comédiens Routiers with Léon Chancerel, the duo Gilles et Julien, the Quatre Saisons with André Barsacq, and even the Cartel of Dullin, Jouvet, Baty, Pitoëff, the Rideau of Paris, the Rideau Gris of Marseille, etc., and later, after the Second World War, Jean Dasté with the Comédie de Saint-Étienne. From 1920 onwards, the greatest names in theatre all emerged from within or form around the Vieux-Colombier. One should not forget the provocative nature of Copeau’s 1913 call for a ‘bare stage’, for a theatre and an acting profession that had been ‘cleaned up’, by which he meant a rejection of the commercial values of the bourgeois theatre of his time and a return to purity, to dignity and to the demands of poetry.

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The period after the First World War saw the rise of men such as Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Jean-Louis Barrault and Étienne Decroux. Of course it was in 1927 that Roger Vitrac and Antonin Artaud set up their surrealist ‘Alfred Jarry Theatre’. Perhaps they, too, were ‘victims’ of the spread of influence of Copeau, the Vieux-Colombier and the Nouvelle Revue Française. The theatre of cruelty and The Theatre and its Double of Antonin Artaud, certainly have something to do with the experiments of the Vieux-Colombier and of Dullin’s theatre, the Atelier. Through the work of the Vieux-Colombier, then of the Atelier, and of the other companies that emerged from the Copiaux, many famous authors came to prominence, notably André Obey, Charles Vildrac, Paul Claudel, Roger Vitrac, Antonin Artaud, Armand Salacrou, Jean Anouilh, Jean Giraudoux, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Achard, etc. The quantity and activeness of these theatre reformers – also inspired by Gordon Craig, to whom Decroux refers, and by Stanislavski – shows what a creative and intense climate Decroux found himself working in, and what an explosive ‘laboratory’ he was called to, to conduct his first experiments and to discover his vocation. ‘I would have liked to have been a sculptor,’ he writes, ‘for the spirit is worth nothing until it is filtered through stone.’ He became a sculptor of the human body, and from the human body he carved out the body and the spirit of mime. ‘I would have liked to have been a poet,’ he adds, ‘for rhythmic poetry (what Barrault called “breathed” poetry) is what I prefer, and it seems to me that it is to achieve such rhythm that The Word was sculpted.’ In a kind of manifesto on mime, published in 1948, Decroux added: ‘because it can be sufficient unto itself, mime is superior to theatre and the equal of dance, which has a different origin, and must be re-built . . .’ Bip was born in 1947, brought to life by Marcel Marceau, Decroux’s pupil. So what was his definition of mime and of theatre and what training did he think the actor’s body should undergo? Premise: ‘The only art present on stage without interruption is the art of the actor.’ Like his master, Jacques Copeau, he was always suspicious of ‘tricks’, of machinery, of stage sets, and even of the text when it was only there to justify a production. At all events, his preference was for ‘poor’ texts, for he liked to say that the poorer the text the richer must be the music of the actor, and the richer the text, the poorer the music. But what exactly did he mean by ‘poor’ and ‘rich’? By poor, he probably meant texts that say little and suggest much, texts which provoke movements and gestures, texts which inspire the moving body and stimulate the mime to improvise. By rich he meant either the opposite, a great poem

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that says everything, and obliges the actor to be self-effacing, or, worse, a verbose and over-emphatic text that can only provoke wild gesticulation. Ultimately it is a matter of respect and modesty vis-à-vis the text when it is the work of an authentic poet, and not of misunderstanding or ignorance, as has been said. The body of the actor should not mime the text, but should move in harmony with it. The gestures should express the manner of the poem’s presentation and the character that is embodied. Decroux often comes back to this: for him, the whole art is in the manner, style or attitude. ‘In the course of an evening with friends’, he writes, ‘Baudelaire can be read aloud by someone sitting down, but to present Corneille one has to be in shirt-sleeves, and to put across a text of the commedia dell’arte you have to strip down to your shorts’. Later on he adds: ‘the mime presents manner, or style, through his choice of manner or style, just as the painter presents colour by means of colour’. A mime performance is a sequence of present actions. Only words can evoke things that are absent. Only words can say what was, what one would wish to be, whence one comes or whither one goes: words alone can express abstractions. With words one can build up stories and plots. One can engineer surprise events, deviations, repetitions. ‘The mime can do none of those and should not try to. No art form is asked to walk on its hands’. As for Decroux’s technique, the technique through which he proposed to shape the body of the actor, or of the mime, as a sculptor shapes the stone – to the point of achieving ‘mobile statuary’ – it would be presumptuous to attempt to pick out the essentials. Nevertheless we shall attempt to do so with the help of Decroux himself and the few commentaries we have been able to collect. ‘The art of mime is the art of bodily movement, like dance, and bodily movement is necessarily based on the primacy of the body, its volume, and especially on the trunk, rather than the face or the arms’. Could he have overlooked hands and feet? We shall see. Decroux’s premise is: ‘The spirit is egalitarian, the body is not’. ‘Thought has no articulations and thus no rebels’. ‘Thought does not have to undergo the effects of gravity’. ‘Thought, having no physical weight is ignorant of precarious balance’. From these statements follow a certain number of deductions and propositions which make up Decroux’s technique of bodily mime: take the naked body, observe its vertical dimension, analyse its geometry, understand its weight and counter-weight examine its articulations and tame their rebelliousness, to the point of altering the natural reflexes.

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Then bend it, make it flexible, master it, control it, so that none of the sculpting process is visible when it comes to life for the appreciation of the audience. This appears to be the basis of his approach. ‘If I observe the naked, vertical body of a man’, he writes: I see only the envelope. Its form is no more than a tube. It imposes on my mind an anatomical division that is exterior. I see what look like different countries, I imagine borders. Familiar vocabulary confirms this and I say: head, neck, breast, etc. This is how one would consider the body if one was making a puppet or a sculptor’s jointed wooden model. And, concerning the body’s mass and its relation to geometry, he goes on to say: ‘One must know how to maintain the vertical, both stationary and moving, and, if possible, inclined to an angle of forty-five degrees. One must sense one’s median line and one’s lateral line, and one must be able, in the carrying out of a movement, not to lose one’s straightness’. Thus he gives primacy to the mass of the body, to the trunk, and he makes a point of this: ‘What I call the trunk is the whole body, including arms and legs’. And what of the face and hands? He often says that the face cannot take such rigorous shaping as the trunk, and reflects on the artistic reason for this: ‘The body has to imitate thought. It cannot delegate this to the face, for the face, lacking weight or danger, can only demonstrate spiritual force, but cannot remould itself fundamentally’. He calls the face and the hands ‘instruments of mendacity, henchmen of gossip’ and says: ‘they are used to explain, to beg, to make promises and to threaten. The movement of the face cannot avoid intimacy. As for hands, when they are empty they serve only to sketch out false promises’. It appears, then, that Decroux aimed for a ‘dressage’ of the body, wanting to harness its tensions and oppositions and antagonisms and to play with them. ‘The mime is at ease in hardship’ was a maxim of Decroux, and Eugenio Barba tells us (in Bouffonneries no. 4) that this maxim has echoes in the statements of theatre masters of all ages and all traditions. The master of Katsuko Azuma, the great Japanese Buyo dancer, told him that he must tell by the amount of pain whether a position had been correctly adopted: if there was no pain, it was incorrect. And then he added with a smile: ‘but pain does not guarantee that it will be correct’. The same thing is repeated by Sanjukta Panigrahi, by the masters of Peking Opera, by those of classical ballet and of Balinese dance. Pain and hardship become a system of control.

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Through this idea, Decroux finds himself at one with Jerzy Grotowski, as well as Barba, since both advocate what Barba names an ‘architecture of tensions’ which erases daily reflexes and transforms even stillness into action. Just like Decroux, Barba even talks of a ‘fictive body’, devoid of all psychology and from which the actor’s psyche has been erased. Is this really possible? The question remains. In all events, Decroux himself did not pretend to ignore entirely those forces of the unconscious that are feared if not fearsome, as is shown by his statement: ‘What Freud makes you say, mime makes you do’. Or again: ‘When your consciousness is asleep all the birds wake up’. So it is easy to understand why, through their natural immodesty, both face and hands seemed more or less superfluous. In the end, do these techniques of dissociation, interruption and opposition, of disequilibrium and counter-weight, which constrain the body to be no more than an obedient marionette, inevitably guide the actor towards the goal of the mime whose body’s attitudes can inscribe the poem never yet written, never yet read, never yet performed? It is a question that remains open. Jean-Louis Barrault answered it with his idea of ‘total theatre’; Marcel Marceau responded by performing with face and hands. Jacques Lecoq, for his part, responded in two stages: the first was to adopt the scientific analysis and deconstruction of movement and gesture; the second was to reject the ‘torture’ imposed on the actor’s body which, for him, could lead only to formalism and ‘virutosoism’. It remains true that Étienne Decroux was and still is a great catalyst, venerated or detested, who provoked the emergence of a wealth of physical approaches to modern theatre and dance, such as the experiments of Jerzy Grotowski, of Eugenio Barba or of Kantor; those of the Living Theatre and the Bread and Puppet; also those of Bob Wilson and Pina Bausch and the researches and innovations of Ariane Mnouchkine and of Peter Brook. Interview with Jean-Louis Barrault Jean-Louis Barrault – along with Étienne Decroux and Marcel Marceau in particular – is one of those who, as an artist, actor and theatrical creator, rehabilitated mime and pantomime, which had fallen into disuse. He borrowed from Deburau the character of Pierrot in order to create Baptiste in Les Enfants du Paradis, the famous film by Marcel Carné, with dialogue scripted by Jacques Prévert, playing alongside other great actors including Étienne Decroux. Next, Baptiste became a pantomime show in which Marcel Marceau played the role of Arlequin in 1946.

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From 1936, this student of Charles Dullin and partner of Étienne Decroux – with whom he would devote himself up to the ‘thrills of mime’ and of physical expression – created Autour d’une mère, inspired by Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. ‘One only spoke in this piece’, Jean-Louis Barrault would say, ‘when one was alone or when one was dead’. Then there were other pantomimes: La Fontaine de jouvence, which he regretted doing, Renard, by Igor Stravinsky, Les Suites d’une course by Jules Supervielle; not to mention Marches, which he created with Etienne Decroux; but La Marche dans l’eau and L’Escalier he created alone and would later be performed by Marcel Marceau. From Numance by Cervantes, created in 1937 with a revival in 1965, to The Oresteia by Aeschylus, adapted by André Obey and created in 1955, including even Christophe Colomb by Paul Claudel, Jean-Louis Barrault was an actor of gesture and silence as well as an actor of the word. He even talks about oral pantomime, just as Marcel Jousse talks about the manducation of the word. His experimentation with mime in the strict sense ended in the 1950s, but he remains faithful to the benefits of the art of gesture as it

Figure 10 Jean-Louis Barrault mimes the death of the mother in Autour d’une mère. In this shot Barrault experimented with what he would call ‘total theatre’, wherein the actor is a ‘complete instrument’, 1935. Etienne Bertrand Weill.

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was practised under his master, Charles Dullin, alongside Étienne Decroux, whom he calls his comrade, a former Copiau. The language of the body is for him a true language, perfectly identified, coded, possessing of its own grammar and gestural syntax. And when he speaks of a breathed word, this for him means a gesture which, in the silence where it finds its source, is the result of a breath sculpted by a muscular contraction. This is why Barrault moved towards what he has called ‘total theatre’ which embraces the theatre of silence, spoken theatre, pantomime, dance and song as much as the word, the ‘intelligible mouthful’ of Claudel. The Oresteia was very possibly the peak of this, since Barrault, in presenting this work, used the art of gesture, choral song and masks, as much as the art of the word. Although Barrault has written a great deal, given numerous interviews, and in his latest book, Saisir le présent, devotes a long chapter to the language of the body and how he integrates it into his daily life in the theatre, he was willing to talk us through it. Jean Perret: As regards Paul Claudel’s Christophe Colomb, you sought to redefine what you call in your Nouvelles réflexions sur le théâtre and what you have often called, in fact, ‘total theatre’. I quote: Theatre is an art that recreates life at its most complex, simultaneous and present, that is to say fragile, by way of the essential means of the human being in conflict in space [. . .] and were there to be nothing, on these four raised boards, but this man, with nothing else around, playing with the totality of his means of expression, then will there already be total theatre. That was in 1959. Twenty-five years on, would you still say the same thing, and why? Jean-Louis Barrault: Yes, I probably would say the same thing and more, but differently, given that, since then, twenty-five years of experience have allowed me to develop this vision as well as the ambition that I had very early of a total theatre. But let’s look at your why. Why total theatre? Because the gesture, like the word, is part of the body. There was a thrill in studying the human body with Étienne Decroux, and I was taken up in this excitement. The thrills of mime, of the art of silence; I had this enjoyment because for me, and this is still the case, mime finds its source in the silence of life while pantomime is a mute language. Jean Perret: Not all that mute, if, as you say, it finds its source in the silence of life, the inexpressible murmuring . . .

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Jean-Louis Barrault: I mean mute language as opposed to spoken language. Marceau, who is a genius and a genius of pantomime, worked with mute language. Étienne Decroux, who is also a genius, worked with statuary mime, mobile statuary. And myself? Well, I moved towards total theatre, convinced that gesture, like speech, is part of the body, convinced that the word, like the gesture, is first and foremost the result of a breath sculpted by a muscular contraction. Finally, as you know, and I think as I’ve proven, everything results from breath. Jean Perret: You say in your Nouvelles réflexions sur le théâtre, that the art of gesture that you dream of is nothing but the theatre in its essential state, finding its source in silence, as you have just said of mime, which is the art of gesture par excellence. Jean-Louis Barrault: In the silence of life, we should add: in the silence of life, of life that passes us by, ephemeral. We are ephemeral . . . Jean Perret: But has your agenda as a man of the theatre been, since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, since Numance and, I think, since your Claudel work, to evolve towards a theatre where mime, pantomime and gesture are no longer just counterpoints? Jean-Louis Barrault: No! That’s not what it’s about at all. For me, today the art of gesture is inseparable from the art of the word. That is all. Proust himself, writing about Berma, meaning Sarah Bernhardt, performing in Phèdre, says ‘The gestures of the players saying to their arms, to their garments: “Be majestic.” But the unsubmissive limbs allowed a biceps which knew nothing of the part to flaunt itself between shoulder and elbow’.1 He was an artist. He observed that as an artist. Because it is true: when the word does not carry the gesture and vice versa, there is a risk of distortion and discord. I see actors with great talent who cannot be heard, or who make false gestures. You see, pantomime is the art of gesture and the art of gesture implies the mastery of an ideal and unique instrument: the human body. Theatre is a poetic art that uses the human body to recreate life in the present. It is the only art that deals with the present and is total as such as well. The other arts, in a sense, linger. What you call the art of gesture is simply the physical expression of this extraordinary instrument that is, for the human being, the human body: which implies knowledge of its possibilities and the utilisation of these, of which there are basically three: head, chest, stomach (triad or ternary), a whip (the spinal column), a bellows (the respiratory apparatus), percussion (the heart and its beats). Another ternary. The basis of all physical expression is there. Jean Perret: There we return to Étienne Decroux. Jean-Louis Barrault: If you say so; but one must go further . . .

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Jean Perret: To incarnate, incorporate this knowledge in a sense? Can we call it that? Jean-Louis Barrault: Incorporate, yes: but in space. Body and space are inseparable because we emit waves. This is so true: beyond twentyfive metres you are no longer in the magnetic field of the actor and vice versa. Inside a twenty-five metre range, you are in the magnetic field of the human body, beyond it you can see it but are not in range. Not in the same bed. Theatrical representation is precisely the poetry of this moment where magnetic fields meet, mix. At the Théâtre du Rond-Point and at the Théâtre d’Orsay, the last seat is twenty-two or twenty-five meters from the centre of gravity of the stage. Jean Perret: Let us come back, if you will allow it, to what you call the language of the body. What is the foundation of your conception of total theatre: the art of gesture, the art of silence, the art of the word? Does a language of the body link them, and return like a leitmotif in each of your works? Jean-Louis Barrault: Listen – what is the human body? It is a great symphonic orchestra that in a sense joins up the three souls of Plato: the head, the heart, the stomach . . . Jean Perret: Still the ternary, the number three, the trinity. Jean-Louis Barrault: I have been sensitive to the ternary since my friend Antonin Artaud introduced me to the ternary of the kabala. Look, for gesture, one must work the human body in space, depending on the point of concentration. You have twenty-four vertebrae. These twentyfour vertebrae are divided into three: cervical, dorsal and lumbar: again the three souls of Plato. For speech, it’s the same thing. There are five written vowels and sixty sounds for five vowels: twelve for each vowel, meaning that the word is dodecaphonic. As for the instrumental training of the human body, you will observe, as I have said, that not only the whip (the spinal column) is part of a sequence of three, but also the bellows (the respiratory apparatus): to inhale, exhale, hold one’s breath, meaning theatrically and gesturally to receive, give, close up, etc. Jean Perret: The heart beats the iamb, you say, in three parts: a short beat, a long beat, a stroke. Jean-Louis Barrault: That’s it. It’s percussion. Jean Perret: Like in the ternary of the kabala so beloved of your friend Antonin Artaud, the three elements of life: masculine, feminine, neutral. Jean-Louis Barrault: Now you understand why I am so moved by the ternary . . . Jean Perret: Étienne Decroux, with whom you experienced the thrills of the body-instrument, of physical expression and mime, said:

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‘what Freud makes you say, mime makes you do’. And you, speaking of the importance of gesture in spoken theatre: ‘Quite often, we only verbally express what we would very much like to show; but the slightest gesture reveals what we would have liked to hide’. Do you think that the actor of today – where psychoanalysis is, one might say, in the public domain – is conscious of this ambivalence or this ambiguity? Jean-Louis Barrault: I don’t know; what I do know is that theatre is the very site of ambiguity. But the art of gesture is obvious to me: it is inseparable from my physical expression just as is the art of words, whereas today I know that academic snobbism leads to actors mumbling, with enormous, false, dislocated gestures, punctuating their mumbling. As for Freud, I don’t know; what I do know is that the educated, supple, mastered human body is the only instrument the actor has with which to say everything. Jean Perret: Thus, for you it is the instrument that will permit the actor to play the whole play, what it says and what it doesn’t say, but says all the same. Jean-Louis Barrault: Nothing will ever match the poetry of a moving, speaking body in space. Jean Perret: You were Charles Dullin’s student at the Atelier, in 1931. That is where you met Étienne Decroux. You worked together ‘intoxicated with the thrills of mime’, so you tell me. Nevertheless, you did part company. Then came your mime experimentation – which was confirmed in many works for the theatre, and at the cinema in particular in the role of Baptiste, in Les Enfants du Paradis – stopped at a certain point, at the start of the 1950s, I think. So there were ruptures. Why was this? Jean-Louis Barrault: Not really ruptures. It is more about a progression and an evolution. At the Atelier, with my master Charles Dullin, there was an actor called Étienne Decroux who was looking for someone to do mime with. I offered myself to Decroux. We became intoxicated with mime in fact. We were especially thrilled with the study of the human body. We invented walking on the spot. Then came the physical notation theory of Étienne Decroux, which I helped to construct, and which remains with me, even today. Decroux was a genius of selection, and I had the gift of improvisation. One day, he said to me: ‘I cannot work with you anymore. What you do doesn’t feel like work anymore.’ And I replied: ‘you couldn’t make me more happy, because that is exactly what I’m looking for.’ He was tough, a purist. He told me: ‘I didn’t choose to work with a whore.’ I retorted: ‘the more bums on seats, the happier I am.’

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Jean Perret: The artist confronts the pedagogue. Jean-Louis Barrault: Perhaps. I’m not a pedagogue; I can’t teach. Basically, there was no rupture. Decroux’s grammar is still the one I use. Thanks to Decroux, I discovered alchemy of the human body, the infinite world of muscles which are my references, my support points. Jean Perret: But with mime itself was there a rupture? Jean-Louis Barrault: Theatre is a whole. Mime is part of it. I do theatre. There was the art of gesture and then there was what I have called – as you said – total theatre, which contains pantomime, which is nothing other than the art of gesture in the widest sense of the word. There was an evolution. There is no longer an art of gesture for me anymore. It’s part of the human body of the actor. The art of gesture is an integral part of theatre art. Charlie Chaplin belongs to the theatre even though he was revealed to us by the cinema. Jean Perret: And Bip? Jean-Louis Barrault: Bip too, perhaps, but it’s more limited, although, as I’ve already said, Marcel Marceau is a genius of pantomime. Jean Perret: So, no rupture? Jean-Louis Barrault: No, an evolution. Jean Perret: Even though, as regards mime, you have expressed doubts as to its durability! Jean-Louis Barrault: There is a polemic, it’s true, but I respect the people involved, and they respect this indisputable art of gesture. Jean Perret: It is fifty years since As I Lay Dying, your first show. What is the link, what is the relationship, between one work and the next, between one show and another, between mime and speech, since this is what interests us, between Numance and Le Soulier de satin, between Christophe Colomb and The Oresteia, Les Paravents and Beckett and Duras? Jean-Louis Barrault: First poetry, then theatre, then poetry again. It’s like prayer: I get on my knees, I get in contact with the ground. A tree, for example, is just as Nietzschian as it is Claudelian. Jean Perret: Like the Claudel poem you often quote: ‘how you suckle, old man, at the earth . . . And the sky, how you are attached to it.’ Jean-Louis Barrault: That’s about relationships and influences. We are in a homothetic relationship with a tree. Influences happen when an author, a company, actors have recognised this theatre in its primary state, of which I have spoken, and find the source in life, in this kind of murmur of life in us, which is the very territory of theatrical creation, and not in the noise made by men. It is only in silence that the fantastical appears. It was true in Numance; it’s true in Beckett. The link is there; it’s

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obvious: word and gesture cannot be separated. As Claudel, who I love so very much, says: the word is breath, it is not syntax. Jean Perret: And gesture? Jean-Louis Barrault: It is breathed or there is no gesture. Just as Claudelian verse is breathed or one doesn’t hear it, one doesn’t understand it. Iamb, anapaest or trochee, not the same feet . . . Jean Perret: That’s it, I suppose, the intelligible mouthful that Claudel talks about! Jean-Louis Barrault: Yes, that’s it: it’s exactly that. There is a sensuality. It’s in his poetic art. Claudel had a poet’s sensuality. He incorporated the word. Everything was in it: rhythm, sounds, colours, gesture. Jean Perret: Likewise for others, in the Rabelais, for example, which you staged at the Elysée Montmartre, after they shamefully wouldn’t let you have the Odéon? Jean-Louis Barrault: Likewise. In Beckett, too: but Rabelais is a good example in fact of what I would call total theatre. You see, there is no rupture. That is the relationship of one work to another: a rhythm of life. The heart beats the iamb . . . Jean Perret: At the same time as your Rabelais, Madeleine Renaud was doing Marguerite Duras’s L’Amante anglaise and Oh! les beaux jours by Samuel Beckett. Clowns, bouffons and masks are everywhere, derisory and sublime, as you said, accompanying us. Did you not perhaps have a certain tendency towards, let’s say, fable, the fantastical, tragedy and its bouffons, lyricism rather than for other, less poetic forms of theatre? Jean-Louis Barrault: You are looking for what ties me together! Voilà! You’ve found it. In fact, my next show will be fairground theatre; it’s a total liberation from the expression of the self. I am also tempted by an adaptation of Lewis’s The Monk. Jean Perret: Which was the subject of an important work by Antonin Artaud, I believe, which figures in his complete works. Jean-Louis Barrault: Exactly. Did I not talk about our complicity with one another? Jean Perret: Projects, if I understood correctly, which position themselves one beside Numance, in spirit, while the other one, the fairground theatre, in a way, takes us back to Rabelais? Jean-Louis Barrault: If you say so! Jean Perret: And mask? What is your relationship to mask? Jean-Louis Barrault: There is a geographical map of the being in the face. With a mask, you erase it, but at the same time you extend it to the whole body. The mask is a temporary subtraction of the geographical

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map of the being, but which allows it to be spread over the entire body. It’s enlargement, you see? You have a six-foot face. Jean Perret: Decroux said: ‘the face is crippled’. Jean-Louis Barrault: He didn’t use them. With Decroux, we searched for the mask and never quite found it. Jean Perret: Perhaps because the face is not as crippled as all that . . . Jean-Louis Barrault: I said, it represents us. But in The Oresteia, for example, Sartori’s masks allowed us to reach a dimension, an intensity of expression, that we would not otherwise have reached. Jean Perret: And commedia dell’arte? Is that a form of art that figured in your research? Is it still, for you, today, a reference, or a model for mime and pantomime? Would you say that it is the archetype of total theatre? Jean-Louis Barrault: We are double. The human being has the possibility of living and seeing itself live. Commedia dell’arte is the perfect expression of this duality. Listen, when one of our great modern directors takes himself seriously, which does happen, he’s the Doctor, and I am the Doctor’s Pantaloon, and there you are! This is in fact how the commedia dell’arte created archetypes. Jean Perret: It works through irony. Jean-Louis Barrault: Exactly. Thankfully! What is a theatre that doesn’t use irony? It’s a headache! Jean Perret: You say in your Nouvelles réflexions sur le théâtre: ‘My modest research positions itself between the statuary mime of Decroux and pantomime’. You have in fact been researching. Sadly, you abandoned Baptiste because there was no author around to do with him what Charles Chaplin did with his character. You asked Jacques Prévert, but nothing came of it. You have ended up doing Barrault. But do you think you have found anything? Do you feel like you’ve acquired a following? Jean-Louis Barrault: I don’t know. I don’t think so, because I haven’t done Barrault, as you put it, but simply theatre that never stops searching, questioning . . . so there you go! One should be suspicious of schools. One should not acquire a following. Charles Dullin showed his skill. That’s all. One must obey. Give of oneself and obey. Lenin said: ‘Learn, learn in order to take action and understand’. Jean Perret: If only that was all he’d said and done! Jean-Louis Barrault: That’s a whole different story! But, you know, it’s the same for Brecht. There’s Brecht, and there’s the Brechtians, but they have nothing to do with Brecht. With Leninists or Leninians, there’s no connection anymore either. You know, acting is the art of forgetting oneself in others in order to take them on board, that is in order to

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reproduce the act of love, all the happiness, all the unhappiness, the passions, the desires of man, of his life, and to show them on stage, in the present, in the presence of . . . Jean Perret: Can we conclude this interview with Emerson? I’m borrowing this quotation from you: ‘The body is the first disciple of the soul. Our life is only the soul manifested by its fruit, the body. All the responsibility of man can be contained in one sentence: Make yourself a perfect body’. Jean-Louis Barrault: I’ll sign that, after him of course, and, if I might be so bold, I’ll add another line from him: ‘There is no remedy for love but to love more’. A mime: the Marceau phenomenon A book like this one, which seeks to examine the different aspects of the theatre of gesture, must not be exclusively consecrated to the art of mime. But cannot one speak of it at all? But how can one avoid talking about a mime who has become a true international star, Marcel Marceau? So, let’s talk about him! Or rather let’s try to get the mime to speak and find out how and why Marcel Marceau came to be, well beyond words, the intransigent servant of this art of mime, of the theatre of silence which, sometimes, it’s true, manages to drive out, from the most secret regions of our being, another speech, the essential word. The curtain goes up. We are at the theatre. Yes, we are, even if we sometimes hear it said that ‘mime is not theatre’, which generally means not ‘spoken’ theatre. That said, it is true that Marcel Marceau, purist that he is, adopts a principle that the mime should not ‘use the word’. His only language, in fact, is that of silence, the language of the body in silence. If Marcel Marceau, the man, speaks willingly, the mime Marceau never speaks. Bip doesn’t either. The mime is there to create illusion. In his hands, dream becomes reality. Speech becomes free in the mouth of the other, by way of the magic of the mime, whose art is to enter silence, to bring from it what no word says, and to return speech to all those who love and suffer and die when, in the paroxysm of the emotions, man sometimes cries out ‘I don’t have the words’. Symbolically, then, Bip induces and suggests another dimension of speech: the poem that cannot be heard. But, in fact, if there is a ‘spoken’ theatre, why would there not be a ‘mute’ theatre? And does the art of gesture, the art of mime not precede

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Figure 11 Étienne Decroux talks to students of his atelier, including Marcel Marceau (striped shirt), 1947. Etienne Bertrand Weill.

the word? It precedes writing in any case, surely. On the most ancient of stones, on the oldest statuary, are those not gestures that first signal to us? Animals or hunters, more gestures appear, speaking ones. The mimes of ancient Rome even practised the art of oratory since it happens that they, apparently, would mime Ciceronian speech. No doubt in Greece, as well, they would mime Demosthenian speech. Pantomime and mime began to leave identifiable traces in Greece, in the fifth century bc, thereafter it was Rome and, from century to century, the whole of the western world that would offer the pantomime artist and the mime the possibility of refining their art, not without also rejecting them at times, while in Africa and the eastern world another tradition was constructing itself, that of danced or spoken gestures, in silence or to music (already) and very stereotyped masks. But it is particularly the nearby origins of this art that speak to us the most. Jump forward a few centuries and we find Harlequin, Cassandra, Punch, Matamore, the Doctor, Colombina, the typical characters of commedia dell’arte, and Pierrot (that of Jean-Baptiste Gaspard Deburau). There, we start to approach Bip: and this is the lineage claimed by Marcel Marceau. He adds to it the great silent film actors (silent theatre and film; things are getting closer, in fact), and particularly the greatest

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of them all, Charlie Chaplin, then clowns, dancers, jugglers, tightrope walkers, acrobats. But, above all, in the 1930s, after Séverin, Georges Wague and others, another mime artist would be responsible for revealing Marcel Marceau, a new type of mime, a mime theorist, called Étienne Decroux. Influenced by Jacques Copeau, working alongside Charles Dullin and Jean-Louis Barrault, and eventually on his own, it was Decroux who would codify the language of the body, define the rules of the art of mime – even if this is sometimes disputed today. Fairly quickly, in the 1950s, differences appear with Jean-Louis Barrault and Jacques Lecoq, for example. But Decroux would nonetheless remain the one who ‘awoke’ mime if not gesture, or vice versa. What is certain is that, in the time following the Second World War, Étienne Decroux was the master of mime, the grammarian of physical movement with whom Marcel Marceau would find his own vocation: ‘I will be a mime or I will be nothing’, exclaimed the student Marceau. Three years of school with Decroux, and two simultaneous years with Dullin, another master, it is through him that he met a mime who fascinated him, Jean-Louis Barrault. Marcel Marceau recalls mimed combat, training, imaginary staircases, a mime who would swim, run, walk on the spot, recreating the space and the element by a simple rigorousness of gesture and by the magic that he transmitted. (Marcel Marceau would later bemoan that Jean-Louis Barrault, who was ‘tragic mime of great density’, left the art of mime to devote himself to ‘spoken theatre’). The influence of Jean-Louis Barrault was such a decisive factor at the start of Marceau’s career that his first mimodramas were inspired by Barrault’s most famous ones: Autour d’une mère (from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying), Numance by Cervantes, La Faim by Knut Hamsum . . . and Bip. Then there was Charles Dullin, the other master, a prodigious actor and director whose students included Jean-Louis Barrault and Jean Vilar. It was Charles Dullin who taught him the dramatic breath, rhythm and improvisation – in short the profession of actor, made up of rigour, freedom, invention, qualities without which there would be neither poem nor poetry. Marcel Marceau would always remember this comment by Charles Dullin: ‘It is not the machine to bring down the gods that we need, it is the gods themselves’. It is in a sense under these three auspices that Bip was born in 1947 and that, in 1948, Marcel Marceau would present the mimodrama Mort avant l’aube at a competition for young companies. The career of the mime Marcel Marceau had begun.

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But if the character of Bip was born of this postwar mix of Dullin, Barrault and Decroux, other more distant influences (in terms of time or of space) fed into the art of the mime Marceau – for example, different forms of eastern art (Japanese, Indian, Chinese), not forgetting Marceau’s archetypes: Pierrot and Charlie Chaplin. But back to Bip. He was to become a poetic and burlesque hero of our times, a character, Marceau himself would say, ‘straight from my childhood imagination, surrounded by characters who are no better or worse than him’, who, like Pierrot, like Charlie Chaplin, now belong to the popular imagination: Bip, like us, trembles just as the red flower on the hat worn by Bip trembles. Gangly and pallid, with his high white trousers and his striped sailor’s shirt and his mouth drawn with a violent red stripe, Bip appears less a weirdo than an ingenuous innocent, more tragic than burlesque, and more pathetic than Pierrot whose white face is all that is retained. Most often, Bip reminds us of the tragic aspect of the human condition, with humour and tenderness certainly, but with cruelty as well: be it the fragility of a butterfly in Bip chasse le papillon (Bip hunts for butterflies), Bip matador (Bip the Matador) or Bip soldat (Bip the Soldier), or his dreams of being Don Juan, Faust, or Mephistopheles, David or Goliath. ‘Just as Charlie Chaplin struggles with different professions, Bip struggles with the hopes and despairs of man’, Marceau volunteers. A lion hunter by trade, he finds himself working as a zookeeper. The star of a travelling circus ends up a cashier at a two-bit circus. In short, Bip tells also of the derisory and of derision: he tells the story of today’s ordinary man, who was ordinary today and will be ordinary tomorrow. And when Bip remembers (Bip se souvient is the title of one of his most famous later works), once again it is a childhood, an adolescence suddenly plunged into the war that he remembers: it is purity, faith, dreams, scorned ideals that he remembers. He remembers Gavroche fallen with his nose in a stream, with the cry of ‘Vive la liberté’, he remembers the Holocaust. He remembers love too; but when he parodies Docteur Jekyll et M. Hyde it is, as he says himself, the destiny of a man torn apart by his double that he shows. Bip has been showing up in the four corners of the earth for forty years, and even if Bip and Marcel Marceau have been as one for a long time, Bip, as a hero, symbol or myth, has definitively escaped Marceau; just as Charlie Chaplin did Chaplin. When Marceau will no longer be there to give him life, will Bip be no more than a memory? Or will he live beyond, with the omnipotence of the symbol, with a sort of heritage of this symbol in us?

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For some, he will perhaps be only an avatar of Pierrot. For others, however, a sign, a reference, a memory, for others an archetype that will survive in the collective memory. Who will decide? Time and fashion, no doubt. One can at least be sure that, here and now, Marcel Marceau seems to possess this desire for continuity. When one has had the pleasure of meeting him, it is obvious. For him, it is a question of poetry. Bip has the strength of a poem as well as its function. One must hear him speak of silence, this great mime, with a voice that is at once abundant and restrained, as if oppressed, with his alphabetical hands, his musical hands, of silence and of eternity; of the timeless man: Bip, in silence, will manage to reach the essence of who we are; reaching the inner cry that sometimes smothers us. And the cage that is opened, more true than the true cage, and the bird that flies away, more true than the bird, more true than its wings, will have perhaps handed us freedom, the freedom to be that often makes us afraid when it is not taken away from us. This is what the mime would say if we ‘listened’ to his gestures. This is what the man would say if we listened to his words. A huge heart, stars in his eyes, ardent and surprised under the charcoal of the eyebrows, Bip continues his journey, silent witness to our struggles, our confrontations with life, with death. Bip ‘climbs over the wall of languages’, said Jean Cocteau, and knows no frontiers. But it is not only through the highly symbolic character that became Bip that Marcel Marceau expresses himself, it is also through stylised pantomimes and mimodramas that he has created and performed as his career, already huge, has unfolded and as time has passed: twenty-six mimodramas between Mort avant l’aube in 1948 and Don Juan in 1964, including Gogol’s Le Manteau, created in 1951 at the Studio des Champs-Elysées, perhaps the most beautiful, and the most theatrical, and if not the most famous of all, revived in 1959 and performed in Europe, in Israel, in Mexico, and finally in the USA, in 1960, with the Marcel Marceau company, reconstituted temporarily since it had had to be dissolved due to lack of grant funding the previous year. Of course, other mimodramas deserve a mention, such as Les Trois Perruques (The Three Wigs), Les Matadors (The Matadors), Le Mont-de-piété (The Pawn Shop), Le 14 juillet or even Paris qui rit, Paris qui pleure (Paris laughs, Paris weeps), which ran for six months in 1959 at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu, along with Le Manteau (The Overcoat). Should one not also mention that the music for most of these mimodramas was written by famous composers, such as Joseph Kosma, Jean Wiener, Jean Prodomides or Edgard Bishoff? Is it not

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the case that mime and music work in a kind of osmosis like music and dance? As for the troupe, it included actors such as Gilles Segal and Pierre Verry who both – as we know – spent a fairly long time on their journey with Marceau, Pierre Verry in particular; also: Sabine Lods, Edmond Tamiz, Gérard Lebreton, or even Dimitri, before he became the great clown that he is today. It was a true theatre of gesture, which incorporated mime, music and dance; there were also acrobats, jugglers, clowns, and so on there, all ‘children of the theatre’ in short, actors of gesture. One could go on listing them, from Alexandre Jodorowski, actor and author of pantomimes (La Cage, Le Fabricant de masques) and today a filmmaker, to Jacques Fabbri or Nicole Croisille. More than twenty years have passed since, with the passing of the company, Marcel Marceau stopped being an actor of mimodramas. But if the company has gone, at the same time and continuing to this day, a rapid succession of Bip pantomimes and pantomimes de style (somewhat atypical thematic character pantomimes) have taken its place with, in forty years, more than a hundred pantomimes – around fifty Bip pantomimes and more than sixty pantomimes de style. In fact, the latter have practically always alternated with Bip pantomimes. They have allowed Marceau to embrace an ever-growing universe of physical and artistic expression, to play innumerable characters and to create a dramaturgy particular to the theatre of silence, to the ‘mute theatre’ that he wanted to make his own, but in which he also wanted to give rise to callings, innovations, creations. As a mime passionately committed to perpetuating, enriching and developing his art, Marceau’s dream was to bring about a true theatre of gesture that would integrate the most diverse forms of both eastern and western art, and not just pantomime or mimodrama. In any case, whether it be Bip pantomimes or pantomimes de style, the shows seen in five continents effectively brought about meetings, festivals, callings even, and gave birth to, or revived, an interest in mime. We even see the appearance, over the course of the last twenty years in the wake of Marcel Marceau, as in that of Jacques Lecoq – but for different artistic and pedagogical reasons – companies or schools of mime in countries or regions where they had never existed. Let us add also that Marceau’s often triumphant world tours – in Europe, the USA, Canada, China, India, Japan and the Soviet Union – not only made him a true international mime star, but also contributed to an image (Marceau = mime; mime = Marceau) which, it has often been said, was to provoke much debate on the art of mime.

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In any case, Marceau has the desire, and it is like a mission that he has given himself, to demonstrate – and with what talent – in a virtuoso way that the art of mime did not die with Pierrot; even if he himself did almost die, one day in 1985, on a Moscow stage. No, he does not believe that mime died with Pierrot, nor that it will die with Bip. But we should listen to him talking about pantomimes de style: Pantomimes are silent songs, interior cries, visual sonatas or symphonies, where man tirelessly seeks the why of his existence: a naked man faced with himself who, conqueror or conquered, ends up testifying, by way of the cry of gesture and the echo of the heart, to the vulnerability of the beings living on our earth. [. . .] Sculpting space, making visible the invisible and invisible the visible, pantomimes de style change the notion of time and of space and, as such, bring a new dimension to contemporary theatre. One should note this insistent reference to theatre. For Marcel Marceau, it is clear that the art of mime is an integral part of the art of theatre, even if it is, and because it is – for him – its own art, a total art. ‘In our theatre’, he says elsewhere, ‘mime, through its attitudes, creates a dramaturgy where the universe of sentiments no longer needs the word. It is the representation of a living universe of forms, forms of life, of metamorphosis of life’. In his pantomimes de style as with Bip, Marcel Marceau endeavours to reach the universal in writing with gesture, true symbolic poems, in making use also of eternal themes as in The Tribunal, The Seven Deadly Sins, The struggle against Darkness, or in an even more profound way in The Creation of the World. And what about the admirable poetry and the human dimension contained in the pantomime entitled Adolescence, Maturity, Old Age and Death? It was inspired, we know, by what Marceau calls an ‘extraordinary dramatic exercise’, proposed by Jean-Louis Barrault – more than forty years ago – called Illness, Agony and Death. There, Marceau attained, thanks to elliptical acting and a very rigorous symbolism, a near metaphysical grandeur. Having attempted to evoke the already long career of the mime Marcel Marceau, traced the role of the actor and that of the creator, observed the dimension that he wanted to give to the character of Bip, and distinguished some of the main works that line the path of this great mime, would it not be appropriate to reflect specifically on the art of the mime, on the role or the function that Marceau bestows upon him or her at the theatre and in the theatre? What justifies mime beyond the exceptional gifts and talents of Marcel Marceau? And why would there not

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be one Pierrot or one Bip each century? Are we faced with a phenomenon that is in some way inimitable? Marceau himself gives a definition of mime: ‘Mime is the art of man’s identification with the characters, elements and objects that surround us. An art of attitudes, it reveals man in his most deep and secret aspirations. We must establish’, he adds, ‘a style, a stylisation, an interior musicality, a theatrics and a poetics of silence, creating reference points in space, optical short cuts, changes of character. [. . .] It is a question’, he adds, ‘of a weight different from that one has in life, of a time sculpted with each gesture, of a time that has a sound that one does not hear.’ But does that still necessitate following the rules? To be followed are those that result in a knowledge of movement and, for Marceau, also those of Decroux’s ‘mobile statuary’, a sort of ‘working drawing from which the mime will be able to go to the summit of his art, if he has the gift and the poetry’. The richness and diversity of the physical language acquired by Marceau are such that he can demonstrate them at any moment. But there is nonetheless a polemic regarding mime in general and the mime Marcel Marceau in particular. One sometimes hears that with Marcel Marceau, mime reached its limits, that Marceau’s ‘virtuosoism’ is not transferable, that there is no equal or that there are no other explanations but the gift, the way and the style particular to this artist. One hears also that the art of mime should not only be executed by a mime, that, on the contrary, it should be used by the actor to serve the ‘spoken’ theatre just as it serves the ‘mute’ theatre. One hears also that if Decroux left us his ‘grammar’, then there must be other ones, for other uses; one can very well ‘just move’ and it does not mean that one is Pierrot or Bip and that one can be a good Harlequin without being the only one, the great one, the unique one. Jean-Louis Barrault, for example, having been the accomplice and ‘acting comrade’ of Étienne Decroux, defined and put into practice what he called ‘total theatre’, to which the art of mime is integral because, quite simply, he says, all of the art of theatre must go via the body, which includes speech. Jacques Lecoq, who for more than thirty years, in his own school, has taught movement, gesture and the language of the body has, for his part, always rejected mime as an art in itself. He goes as far as to speak of dangers of fixity and deformation. Ariane Mnouchkine prefers not to talk about it. Mime, the art of mime such as practised by the emulators of Decroux, seems to frighten

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her, as she has received actors, whose bodies, the bodies of a mime, are ‘forced’, impossible to soften, lacking imagination. Of course, Marcel Marceau does not stay out of these controversies. ‘If mime is integrated,’ he says, ‘into the art of the word, it cannot reach fulfilment. If the mime stops to speak, the illusion born of silent dramaturgy, that is imposed by the very art of mime, is destroyed’. And elsewhere he adds: ‘In our dramaturgy, any word spoken by the actor would destroy the mystery and the poetry, and, of course, the dramaturgy, of silence’. And: ‘the art of mime will never be total if we place it in a dramatic universe where the space reserved for it forces it to make concessions’. And finally, he declares that: ‘Mime is the essence of theatre.’ As for the ‘virtuosoism’ and ‘fixity’ people attribute to him and reproach him for, Marceau replies by way of the School of Mimodrama that he founded in Paris in 1978 and by way of the training he gives there (one should perhaps talk more about that elsewhere), ‘because,’ he says, ‘I believe in the profession and its evolution, [and that] only rigour and physical discipline give the freedom to create and to enrich one’s own vocabulary’. So there are revealed, as if by way of conclusion, the contrary positions of various people and of Marcel Marceau, found in programmes from his shows and in some interviews given here and there, or from memory, from conversations we have had. That is to say that the question of mime and the art of mime should remain acutely open. Long may the debate continue. History will be the judge, perhaps, as long as the most certain answers find their way into the history of theatre and its evolution, and especially into the audience. While we wait for that to happen, long live Marcel Marceau and long may he continue to amaze us! Note 1

Proust, M. (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin) (1983), Remembrance of Things Past, London: Penguin, vol. 2, p. 42.

chapter 5

mime, the art of movement Jacques Lecoq

Lecoq anatomises in detail his vision of the art of mime – its different manifestations in modern times and its governing rules. He then goes on to explore its fundamental elements: balance, rhythm, movement, space.

Let us not forget that mime is an art in itself which can be summed up as an artist who imposes his personality and his style, pre-empting the formal question: ‘is it mime or not?’ This question is without interest as regards a poetic space unleashed by talent. Beyond the surprise that the ‘genre’ can produce when seen for the first time, the quality of the poet stands out. Often a solo performer, the mime is an actor-author who cannot claim to own the genre and, as such, is inimitable. Modern mime depends on silence as its point of departure and gives back to gesture the importance that had been buried beneath speech; but it, too, is in danger of being more talkative than speech itself. To fully grasp the art of mime, one must take it to an absolute point, to the extreme, push it to the limits, to breaking point. Just as when one forces concrete to become a sail: one tries to make it too thin or too big and it will collapse. Architecture removes every one of our illusions, those that could not be linked with the real. To build ignoring the laws of the resistance of materials and those of the equilibrium of forces is ultimately to see one’s house collapse. The silent territory of mime, narrower and narrower as a result of constraints, finds itself in a precarious equilibrium, in danger of falling into that which encircles it. To avoid being an actor who does not speak or a dancer who does not dance, such is the challenge to the mime. The limits of mime will not accept mediocrity. How long can mime resist without calling out to that which surrounds it: speech, music, scenery, etc.? That is the question. The view of the human body as a machine always seems a bit simplistic and, often, the temptation is to make a keyboard of it to emphasise the possibilities of the instrument and as such appeal to virtuosos. The great mime attains the domain of Movement, with a capital M, and does not confuse the exercise with the style. This is how he or she touches us in our depths, how the mime’s gestures make us live our own often

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unexpressed ones. There can exist no little handbook on how to become a mime. What is a mime? If you ask people this question, the reply you will often hear is: ‘it’s someone who doesn’t speak and who uses gestures instead’. This is what the word signifies for most people: a kind of special language, like sign language, translating what words say so well into gestures – the language of an actor who has been forbidden to speak. What was true of the pantomime of the nineteenth century is no longer the case, but still lives on as a cliché. Nonetheless, it has to be said that a lot of mimes expressed themselves in a way far removed from true silence, using desperate gesticulation and grimaces to make up for a lack of words, and make themselves understood this way. These poor mimes have led to the genre being seen as an odd zoological case, one to be seen behind glass. A sickness of the theatre. The mime lives in the depths of silence, where gesture does not replace words. The word ‘mime’ is both precise and vague. It refers to the actor and to the genre. History teaches us that the word ‘mime’ was used in the time of the Romans to designate short plays in verse, containing storytelling, gesture and song, which were in no way silent. Thus words travel and their meaning changes with place and with time. We will, in turn, try to make mime travel once again, to get it out of the silent and solitary ghetto where it is frozen in a formal and aesthetic language. The word mime refers to a phenomenon, that of imitation. If to mime is first of all to imitate, one can only imitate that which already exists and which one recognises, sees or hears. A series of observations follow from this. Let us take a simple, or even simplistic, example. During a family reunion, one of the relatives, the ‘comedian’, stands up and imitates each person present. He mimes the walk of the father, copies the poses of the rocker son, the funny look of the grandfather, and apes the simpering young sister. Everybody laughs at the comparison and at the portraits drawn by this observer, the life and soul of the party, especially when they themselves are not targeted. But there are several levels of quality in the act of imitating. First, I create the illusion that the person I imitate is present in my gestures, and will be likewise in all of life’s activities.

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Professional mimics of politicians make us hear the politicians’ voices, as if it was them that were speaking. Patrick Sébastien mimes his characters by physically incarnating them, in order to feel that they are under his skin. The intonation, the way of speaking are one with the body, the imitator recreating a text coming from its source. Thierry Le Luron imitated his characters while keeping an eye on them, in cahoots with the audience, taking a certain critical liberty allowing for irony and parody. He outlines the body and the voice to the point where caricatural gesture and tone appear. Any actor imitates some of the time, and if he is also the author, he performs himself in the role of the one who is imitated. Thus Philippe Avron, in his show Big Bang, imitates the philosophy teacher from his own school days, who becomes ‘The philosophy teacher’ then, at the same time, speaks for him, and it becomes Philippe Avron, philosophy teacher. Sublimation of imitation. The imitation of the actor-mime demands first of all very precise observation of the gestures, attitudes and movements of mankind and of nature, which will then serve as language for the mime’s own poetry in being transposed. For the mime it is a question of seizing the apparent life of the real in order to make it his own, to replay it within himself, in order then to play it for an audience following his own vision. Each mime is inimitable and can resemble no other, although they all participate in a same language: that of the gesture linked to universal laws of movement. All the quality of what is presented will be in the secret, hidden life, brought to light behind the first recognised image. The actor-mime uses talent to allow us to see what is invisible: hidden meaning. If I mime the sea, it is not about drawing waves in space with my hands to make it understood that it is the sea, but about grasping the various movements into my own body: feeling the most secret rhythms to make the sea come to life in me and, little by little, to become the sea. Next, I discover that those rhythms emotionally belong to me; sensations, sentiments, and ideas appear. I play it again, on a second level, and express the forces in it by giving my movements more precise shape: I choose and transpose, my physical impressions. I create another sea – the sea played with this ‘extra’ that belongs to me and which defines my style. I could have made a drawing, music and also speech out of it, if I was an artist, a musician, or a writer. Profound mime is the basis of all the arts.

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‘And on the shore of my body man born of the sea lies stretched out. May he refresh his face even at the spring beneath the sands.’1 Words resonate in the body, inside each other, with other images. Silence Like a heavy and extended silence, I keep quiet, You can’t speak Then there was a long silence . . . The rest is silence. The silence before the battle, the knightly vigil, the silence in anticipation of the next day and the silence once battle is done, that takes the place of the murmuring. Yes, he remains in the silence, the hero. But also, the child does not know what to reply and offers his silence as an answer to the question. Everybody will work in silence and concentrate on their work. The first steps resonate clearly on the asphalt of first morning, as if isolated, they stand out in the silence as the night fades. It was as if life stopped, as if it were hung on the held breath. Silence gives life to a gaze never seen, to gestures not yet ventured. Everything is ready for an arm that is lifted to have meaning. We wait for it in the silence of waiting that gives the act to follow all its value; thus the word is awaited as if it is necessary to the meeting. Silence also distances itself with farewells that have never taken place; In a solitude that shuts down and comes to a close, in a silence that ends . . . It is from silence that the quality of the gesture and the word are born. In this melting pot the trajectories and impulses are prepared and organised. In the inner space, rhythms urgently emerge. Will he speak? Will she take action? He stood up. He walked. He turned around. He looked at me for just an instant, which was enough in order to understand, and he continued on his way. Silence is loaded with different qualities according to whether it begins or concludes an action, an act, a word. The urgency of an action that mobilises us entirely requires a silence favourable to this action. Action requires it. A mountain climber who scales a rock face does not feel the need to speak. A little routine action that does not require great concentration, but rather a kind of automatism, can engender speech

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to facilitate the very act, as well as preventing it from being boring to complete. Old women talk as they knit, but not about what they are doing. Silence at the beginning allies itself to the concentration that allows the action to come. The whole stadium goes quiet: the athlete is still, concentrating on himself, about to try to break the world high jump record, all in marked silence. Silence, action, reaction. The applause breaks out, the champion has gone over the line of victory. Silence after the action on the other hand demands reflection, self restraint. After having consulted the list of examination results, the pupil who has failed often stays painfully silent, close to tears. He who did his very best to pass is prostrated. He isolates himself and wants to be alone. Silence enlivens the gaze, itself, at first. There is always a return into oneself in this rather than opening to the exterior. A shy person is often silent, looking as if he is protecting himself. Silence always hides at the back, where one must look for it if one wants to find it. There is no conflict between speech and silence. Silence offers the word its quality. A speech that does without silence is nothing but

Figures 12 (opposite), 13 (page 73), 14 (page 75), 15 (page 77), 16 (page 79) and 17 (page 81) Jacques Lecoq demonstrates ‘The Wall’, which, when taught at the school, is made up of a total of 57 precise attitudes, c. 1958. Liliane de Kermadec. Jacques Lecoq collection.

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verbiage. One wants to say: ‘Enough! Be quiet! Your words no longer have the necessary silence, where they find their true value.’ The unsaid must be allowed to emerge. Absolute mime Absolute mime, mime at its limits, has an actor performing it alone, without scenery or costumes, in an empty place, without objects, without using words, in silence, but also without replacing words with gestures that might translate them, nor speaking internally and maintaining a sub-speech. These constraints force the actor to create what the eye does not see by way of illusion and, if the actor gives himself the task of being able to recreate the world by miming it in a limited time, he is faced with numerous problems to resolve: giving the illusion of place, of objects, of beings and things and placing them in time and in space. Such is the premise of absolute mime which, by way of constraints, forces the transposition of the real and the invention of an elliptic language. Nonetheless, if one thinks of the audience, one cannot go beyond a certain threshold of fatigue in giving it a real puzzle to solve. The show must be a short one. Absolute mime draws from the audience’s imagination real images held in the memory in order to give life to the illusion; it tends towards short numbers which it takes away from theatre to create an autonomous, plastic and dramatic art. The obstacles to overcome Constraints will force the mime to fix what is lacking from the real with compensations, recreating it. The freedom of ‘everything is possible’ will allow the invention of a world with laws other than those of reality. The constraint of the non-object is about recreating, by imaging, the presence of a piece of scenery or an object and interacting with them in a sensitive way. It is also a relationship of action favouring the illusion of the expanse, of the situation, of resistance and of weight (look at it, touch it, move it). The constraint of silence forces one to make oneself understood without speech being involved: when words are no longer possible or are not yet possible, recovering the territory of the unsaid that the discourse of words had forgotten. These two constraints develop a sense of space for the actor improvising.

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If I open a door, I must close it without changing its location. To take an object and maintain the illusion of its shape, material, weight, without naming it, forces one to recognise it and recover the very sensation of its feeling and its function. If we try to mime all the actions that we do every morning from waking up to having breakfast, the innumerable little gestures that we do automatically without thinking about it, we realise that we did not know what we were doing and everything gains importance as it is recreated. Since the reformers of the theatre, Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Copeau, theatre pedagogues have developed silent improvisation, seeking to return sensitivity to the perception of the body for the performing actor, eliminating real objects in order to perceive them better. But to recreate an action, an object with illusion (action mime) allows the imagination to invent what does not really exist, to change its dimensions, its weight, to overturn gravity and to play with the infinite possibilities that allow the actor-mime to take flight towards other worlds, wherever the imagination might lead them.

Figure 13

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Comic mime allows games like those found in comic drawings, in cartoons, in trick filming. Unfortunately, these possibilities have been used in numerous ‘snap-shot demonstrations’ to pseudo-poetic effect (the sculptor in love with a statue that comes to life). On the other hand, there is one theme of illusion that cannot work before an audience – conjuring, for the lack of real objects removes any possibility of surprise. The constraint of time by way of speed offers the theme being treated the possibility of a short cut, suggestion or ellipse, as in cartoon mime where it is enough to give the attitude from the beginning and the attitude from the end to understand what happened in between. A theme that takes place over a year can be played in three minutes. This is like the four seasons of a tree, as in films where one sees the opening of a flower from images taken every three minutes, playing on the acceleration of time. The constraint of time by contraction can allow a mutation of language, an essentialisation of the gesture, like the distillation of wine into spirits. In approaching the theme of the life of a man, from birth to death, which must not become either an acceleration nor a simplification, contraction causes the essence of things to appear, free from anecdote, from surface effects, revealing the organisation of abstraction. We can see that the infinite possibilities of mime acting can easily fall into the trap of becoming facile demonstration exercises. But when mime travels, carried by a poet, to the interior of the domain reserved for silence, for short moments he or she can express what no word could say. This is part of acting in the great theatre of art. Gesture can affirm, suggest, symbolise and write the poem as in Japanese Noh, where the masked actor comes on stage and dances rage. The constraint of time by way of expansion proposes a lengthening rather than a reduction of time: to do in five minutes what in reality would take thirty seconds, without falling into the trap of slow motion, but showing, as under a microscope, the different emotional moments that we would not see with the naked eye. The constraint of space: on a reduced stage doing what is done on a vast stage forces one to find transpositions (see locomotion on the spot: this is what allows the actor to run while onstage without being obliged to leave!). I remember a cabaret show that the Yves Robert company performed at La Rose Rouge. It was a western where numerous characters

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fought in a saloon; the illusion worked perfectly on a stage reduced to 3 metres by 2. Pushing the diminution of the space even further will necessarily lead to hand mime and puppetry. The constraint of being alone is tempting to the soloist and highlights the qualities of a virtuoso mime: to switch characters, to have them play together, etc. The possibility of being another body, an element, an animal, a tree, a material, objects, a colour, a light, takes the play of combinations and the mime territory to infinity. Let us not forget the constraint of mask, which takes from the face the mimicry so dear to nineteenth-century mime, when it was said that a masked mime was not a mime. Mask allows one to find a stronger expression of gestures and of physical attitudes. The half-mask, which leaves the lower part of the face free, allows speech. Moreover, the actor is obliged to improvise a text that is different from the one he would have spoken without the mask, and to bring out another voice. The final constraint is as follows. In the days of Roman pantomime, a mime stood on his head and did with his feet what he did with his

Figure 14

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hands to show his talent. We come to pure virtuosoism, where absolute mime ends. Pedagogy of the constraint A measure of constraint is indispensable but exaggerating prohibitions can lead to the negation of expression, to the point of absurdity. I have seen pedagogical constraints lead to making an actor wear a hat with a little bell on it; the objective was to move without letting the bell tinkle. This is like the instruction given to an actor to not move while speaking, or to hold the hands tied; thus speech has to be stronger and have maximum intonation. Nevertheless, constraints are necessary as rules of the game for acting. A high jumper would not jump so high if there was no obstacle to clear. The pedagogue must know where to place the bar at exactly the right height to make it a positive provocation and improve the actor’s play. After all, ultimately, anything can be mimed. Constraints favour style; too much constraint leads to virtuosoism, to feats. Not enough constraint dilutes the intentions and the gestures in the soup of natural gestures. This bar of constraint, this necessary obstacle, is placed at different heights according to the pressure expressed in the strength of the intentions and the actor’s play. The most difficult thing is to find the right measure of constraint so that the life presented expresses itself in a style that remains alive; otherwise the bar, if set too high, can result in a bruising that snuffs out its life. Constraints are necessary for transposing life into representations of life, for creating another life that is stronger. They are born of the demands of poetry. Style Style results from the economy of means employed between a desire and a constraint. It results from a convention, from a rule of the game. The necessary obstacle is indispensable in pedagogy as it is in learning to be free. It must vary from person to person. It is not in the armchair that adapts to your body that you will be best off, but rather in one that resists it a little, but not too much. In that armchair you will be better off. In the first case the body gets stuck in a form that receives it, in a sympathy that cancels it. In the

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second case, the body thrives in a living immobility provoked by a little ‘extra’. The most difficult thing is to know how to choose constraints in a way where they are not only a simple exterior given but are born of the desire of artists, of their own special playfulness. The rules of the game The rules of the game in poetic creation are in the playing itself, which seeks for constraints to help improve its quality. Children who play with a ball of rags, kicking it around, bit by bit produce rules that are obligations, and limit the game, in order to make it more interesting: they set boundaries on the playing field, agree on the width of the goal. This is how the old game of soule became rugby football. Soule was a game played between the ablebodied men from two villages. A large ball, made of rags (the soule) was placed between the two villages and, when the signal was given, the players started the attack, and had to get hold of the ball and place

Figure 15

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it in the opposing village square. Everything was allowed, or nearly everything. One must not fall into the trap of formal exterior constraints that impose a particular style on to something that does not justify it: ‘in the style of ’. Rather, one should find the strictness of the constraint in the very heart of the theme at play. One should not be afraid, faced with a great theatre text, to push it around a little in order to reveal the structure that organises it; this can be done without premeditation, without an opinion, as if it were being discovered for the first time. A weak text cannot resist when it is pushed around. The rules of the game belong to the author. One cannot produce a play without going to meet him or her. Directions of mime Mimes use different styles according to their poetic world. One can locate three main directions: dramatic mime, based on the theatrical situation and the character in action, often comic, and dramatic symbolic mime, that represents ideas and concepts through images borrowed from the real plastic mime, which is close to sculpture, that plays on the movements of the body without need for a story, ending up as a game of abstraction of movement. These three directions intermingle. The theatre of gesture and image welcomes the different possibilities that mime offers. Encounter with the temptation to systematise It is tempting to build a perfect system, fixed in rigorous choices that leave no doubt for those who learn it. Such a system, easily conveyed like the Tables of Law, requires devotion to an established order, without the imagination of questioning: it is a gymnastic or aesthetic system easily reduced to fifteen lessons in a manual. For the movements of the human body, the geometric analytic system presents itself thus: the body standing, divided into several parts according to its anatomy: feet, legs, thighs, pelvis, bust, chest, shoulders, arms, forearms, hands, neck, head, and the toes and fingers. First, find a procedure. Each part of the body is isolated from the other parts and animated in the directions suggested by the first space of

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a cube; the mechanics are reduced next to oblique directions from the horizontal and vertical. All movements are not possible from this geometric choice that fixes precise attitudes at 90, 45 and 30 degree angles. Often a body part refuses to do backwards what it does forwards. The body is not a geometric object equal on all sides: one cannot bend the knee the other way. The system then continues with a sequence that takes in all of the attitudes without marking them, with global, curved movements. The cube prepares the ground for the sphere that brings with it twists, circumductions, and rotations; these bring about other movements when they are combined with flexions, extensions, translations in front, behind, and to the side. One can apply all of these movements and combinations to a particular part of the body that ‘assumes autonomy’ in relation to a fixed point: the play of the neck-head atop fixed shoulders, the play of the breastchest atop a fixed pelvis, etc. We thus harvest many different movements and attitudes that lead to the actor becoming a perfect marionette fresh out of the workshop.

Figure 16

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Second, we look for the value of each movement in terms of expression; we seek the justification. Movement thus leaves analytic gymnastics behind in search of dramatic gymnastics. Third, it is enough to allow the articulated über-marionette to take life in order to find life in expression that will have benefited from precision of articulation and have become more readable, in the same way as articulation and diction are necessary in order to be heard and understood. The whole point is for life to reach the surface of movements without them being an aesthetic and formal constraining grid, which is often the case in ‘statuary mime’. The security of a system often makes one take mechanics for technique, just as 1-2-3-4 can be taken for rhythm. The system is a sort of pre-structure to take hold of and animate the body-puppet, like scaffolding that is set up in order to construct a statue (think of the Statue of Liberty) but that should never ever replace it. Now, next, the structure must become invisible, which is the hardest part. One might also fear that this analysis could go too far, to the point of sadism and fear that to push difficulty to this point only ends up destroying what we started with: ‘to play life better’. The comments ‘that hurts’, ‘I have been working hard’, are always suspicious from an artistic point of view, where pleasure must be present. The exercise is not the aesthetic. The demonstration is not the expression. The mechanics is not the technique. Virtuosoism is not life. All theatre characters whose preferred form of expression is gesture (those in commedia dell’arte, or the Peking Opera) are organised by way of analytic pathways. The isolated play of one part of the body alone assumes an expression. The training of an actor, without pushing it as we have seen, borrows the lines of geometry. Wearing a mask lends itself to play and transposes the natural, rounded and continuous gesture into a more readable, articulated one. Movement with a capital ‘M’ A knowledge of the laws of movement is indispensable to artistic creativity, in particular in the domain of theatre, and to the play of author and actor who directly retransmit life into movement. Movement is characterised by a displacement in relation to stillness. There is no movement without a fixed point. Everything that moves is recognised according to a chosen element referring to the immobile. Thus I watch a goose flying in relation to the immobility of the pond. I see the beating of its wings in relation to its body. I observe

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the displacement of its body up and down because of its head being still. I move around on a still Earth, but one that rotates and that moves around a still Sun that, in turn, moves with its galaxy in an infinitely moving universe. It is easy to understand why man needs to find a fixed point in the sky to locate himself, and why he needs to put a stop to the huge vertigo he feels when the different fixed points, in which he sincerely believed, reveal themselves to be false as he gets to know the universe better! The gods are also fixed points for humans; and fixed points make laws, even if humans play a part in that. God has so much work to do that he needs some help. But everything moves, and the fixed point along with it, if we let it. Therein lies the humour of movement. The fixed point If the fixed point situates the displacement of a movement, the movement is evidence of the fixed point. In what moves we see only the immobile. This is a very interesting idea in dramatic expression.

Figure 17

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In illusion mime, if I put a hat on my head, the presence of the hat would be reinforced if I hold it, for a moment, still in space and if I place my head into it with a movement using the whole body. In the Greek tragic chorus, the same problem occurs concerning the coryphaeus, who speaks on behalf of all. If the coryphaeus leaves the ranks to speak, and the chorus remains still, he becomes a chief who has taken an authoritative decision. If the chorus moves, leaving the coryphaeus immobile, he thus becomes the chosen delegate: either way the coryphaeus can speak for all. On Magnani’s entrance in the review Chi e di scena, I employed this principle. The scene takes place in a square in Rome full of carnival characters, dancing in multicoloured costumes. All of a sudden we hear the long and strident sound of a siren announcing an aerial attack, as in Rossellini’s film Rome, Open City; panic, to-ings and froings in the crowd which disappears, leaving the stage empty, revealing, in the middle of the square, standing, alone, still, in a little black dress that clings to her body, Anna Magnani, who quietly sings a song from the Trastevere about Rome. It had to be Magnani: only she could succeed, alone, in balancing the space of the stage left free by the crowd. If there had been a cat there instead, we would have laughed to fill the empty space between the presence of the cat and the presence of the crowd: the weight imbalance. This demonstrates the importance of movement in the relationship between equilibrium and disequilibrium, subject as they are to the laws of gravity.

Equilibrium and disequilibrium The human body is aligned to the laws of gravity that pull it down and give it weight; life pushes it upwards, fighting against these very laws. In moving, upright, from this equilibrium, the body risks falling, through a series of successive imbalances, catching itself at each step; this is how it walks. It acts and reacts; it receives and gives. Standing on one leg, if you catch a medicine ball weighing five kilos from one side, and you want to retain your balance, you had best throw it immediately to the other side. If two opposing forces fight one against the other, the rupture of the equilibrium of forces causes a movement of displacement. Alternating

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Figure 18 Drawings by Gaston Ledoux, taken from Physiognomy and Gestures by Giraudet (1895). In his book, Giraudet explains the system of Delsarte, which aims to analyse the expressive laws of the human body. Here we see ‘opposition’: a movement in one direction implies another in the opposite direction, thus respecting the law of equilibrium. Jacques Lecoq collection.

allows one part of the body to rest in relation to another: what is done on the left is then done on the right. To throw a pebble into the sea, I do a preparatory movement in the opposing direction to the target I am aiming for. In any movement there are two in the opposite direction. Thus love rubs shoulders with hate. Leonardo da Vinci, in his Treatise on Painting, gives us pertinent observations on movement:

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when a man lifts a weight with one arm, he naturally throws out the opposite arm; and if that is not enough to form an equipoise, he will add as much of his own weight, by bending his body as will enable him to resist such an accidental load. We see also, that a man ready to fall sideways and backwards at the same time, always throws out the arm on the opposite side.2 The art of movement must always bear in mind notions of compensation, alternation, preparation, rhythm and space. The body of Artaud Antonin Artaud understood the mobile human body like no champion of the stadium could. His injured body, taken out of orbit because of an ‘error of nature’, had an acute sensitivity to the equilibrium of forces. He cried out the difference between equilibrium and disequilibrium that he could translate no other way than by impossible images and impossible movements; so extreme and absolute were the respective positions. In L’ombilic des limbes he speaks of the tearing apart of the point: all the branches of the fan falling into a single centre. Overturning the body in his desires, opening his arms, the obligation for him was to close them. Two inverse bodies inhabited him, one in conflict with the other in turns. His neurosis launched unfinished transverse lines that could reach no end point. This corporal dynamics can be found embedded in all his texts.

Compensation Illusion mime highlights the resistance and the weight of the object by way of adequate compensatory movements. To carry a bucket filled with water, I compensate by leaning the body to the opposite side to keep balance. This compensatory attitude suggests the weight of the object. At the cinema, I have often seen suitcases that were supposedly full carried as if they were empty, which of course they are. Feelings confront one another within us and create conflict between love and reason, passion and destiny, each pulling one way or the

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other. In tragedy, the choice being impossible, death alone is the outcome. Alternation Alternation favours duration and puts one part into relief while at the same time according it new interest. One cannot imagine a person who laughs all the time – that would be worrying. Just as night lets day rest, in the theatre we alternate different scenes to make the show more interesting, more balanced. The preparation movement In the largest displacement of an object or of oneself (throwing, jumping) one creates, prior to the actual action gesture, a gesture in the opposite direction that serves to define its direction, to find its point of purchase, to concentrate the propelling force. This is the effort preparation, its momentum. The high jumper pushes into the ground before projecting into the air (flexion, extension). One swings back on a chair before moving

Figures 19 (opposite), 21 (page 87), 22 (page 89) and 24 (page 91) Jacques Lecoq miming ice skating, one of the sequence of ‘twenty movements’ that students learn in the first year of the School. Liliane de Kermadec. Jacques Lecoq collection.

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Figure 20 This Bronze statue of a discus-thrower was made for Lecoq, and sits on the bookshelf in his office. In Ancient Greece the discus was not thrown in the same way as in modern athletics. The movement is closer to that used by a sling-shot thrower. This magnificent movement suggests something analogous to a ritual: elevation, prosternation, a painful twisting movement and the cry of release in the disequilibrium of the fall. Joel Anderson.

forward to get up (retreat, advance). The discus thrower prepares the twist with a twist in the opposite direction. In expression, the preparatory movement is so potent that it defines the action that follows it. Thus a child knows a slap is coming only by seeing the hand raised, a threat. Suppressing the preparation movement will create a surprise. To feign is to do an action with a false preparatory movement. An oversized preparatory movement for a tiny action will create a rupture that laughter will balance. This is exploited in the cinema with the burlesque. In cartoons, when the dog Pluto prepares to run, he steps back three metres before setting off towards his goal. In order to start walking, Monsieur Hulot makes a little jump backwards. One could say he takes a step back to take a step forward. In Shakespeare, comic scenes are placed before tragic ones to prepare the audience to receive them, applying the laws of alternation and the preparation movement.

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The accentuation of movement To detach the start of a movement from what precedes it, and to emphasise its ending, is to accentuate a movement. All theatres with a high level of performance, where gesture is stylised, have succeeded in finding this accentuation. Movement is contained between these two physical attitudes, which, through their immobility, mark the start and finish. The accentuation is located in the unleashing of the movement from immobility, in the shortest instant, finding its regular speed very near its start point, giving the impression of relaxation. Likewise, for the ending of the movement, stillness is preceded by an acceleration, emphasising the final position. This accentuation terminates with a slight bump as the movement reaches its arrival point, which can also be expressed as a little explosion. The classical Japanese theatre and the masked play of the commedia dell’arte employ this accentuated movement; as does even the Peking Opera, where actors’ movements literally explode into monumental poses. The accentuation at the end is very important, as it lends its quality to the movement. The full stop that ends the sentence justifies the fact that it ever started. It is the same thing for words in the theatre, where actors tend to drop the ends of lines.

Figure 21

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The great Italian actor Memo Benassi, used to performing in the open air, added a ‘t’ sound to the end of lines that finished with an e. This accentuated the word in order for it to be heard (he had performed with Sarah Bernhardt and Italy did not have its Jacques Copeau). In the theatre it is the last act that counts, and one always remembers the ending better than the beginning. It manifests the quality of the whole. Rhythm A movement has no form and no life if it has no rhythm, and here we touch on a major aspect of movement. We can unpack a rhythm, reduce it into beats and give it a faster or slower tempo. We know that rhythm is organic in essence, that it is made up of rise and fall, of strong and weak beats, but its essence eludes us when we try to penetrate it, just as the mystery of life does. It is life. It carries with it a vocabulary that confuses it and the words for it rock around in everyday language, knocking into each other. It is measure, speed, cadence, time, frequency, and so on. Soldiers march with a cadenced step. Gymnastics on apparatus is done ‘in time’ to music. Jazz has a distinctive beat (why more so than classical music?). A song has rhythm because the bars are cadenced and the frequency is fast. So we can trace rhythm using different perspectives without ever reaching the end. We catch it with the trap of bar-lines. Rhythm brings with it an emotive aspect, sympathy, love. The theatrical communion between the audience and the author through the intermediary of actors is a rhythmical agreement. I knew a great actress who was playing Electra in Sophocles without knowing what she was saying, and I know of spectators who have cried without understanding the words of the text: they are linked by a violent emotive rhythm, the intuition of great artists that goes beyond the power of reason. A couple can be united by a common rhythm and fight to secondary rhythms, like the tree trunk with its branches that argue. In life nothing takes place at the same speed. Speed progresses or regresses. Movement has a beginning and an end but the middle is not in the middle. To talk about movement, about rhythm, about space and about time, is to talk about life and its mysteries. ‘Space is the measure of time’, as Aristotle put it.

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Space Movement is not only a displacement of lines, but also it causes pressures and tensions in space. Forces play against one another in this way, giving a living vibrant consistency to space. To define one’s route is superficial. A Rodin sculpture, immobile in its own material, moves by itself and makes the space around it move: it draws together in its form the contradictions that animate its dynamics. ‘Pushing-pulling’ is the directional motor that comes about along with: pushing-oneself-pulling-oneself and being-pushed-being-pulled. At this level movement takes on its true dimension, organising itself in the time-space, through rhythm. Theatre with a high level of performance places the body in a space of tension that is higher than what it normally inhabits in life. I was thus able to establish a scale of tensions of the body on seven levels. Each of these levels suits a different style of theatre, getting stronger and stronger, and can use varied types of movement, such as sitting, walking or even speaking. Here are the exercises that I give my students and the observations I have made about them.

Figure 22

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Figure 23 Lecoq demonstrates miming ‘pulling’: the fixed point, the engagement of head and pelvis. Early 1950s, Italy. Jacques Lecoq collection.

Sub-relaxation: an expression of survival, like just before death; the image of sea birds that are tarred up on the beach; one speaks with difficulty, for oneself, incoherent, using swear words. Relaxation: a smiling expression of the ‘body on holiday’, leaving the arms to swing freely and playing on gravity’s pendulum, the body rebounds on itself. One speaks to others and seeks out groups of friends. The economic body: neutral, as if programmed for a minimum of effort for a maximum return. Everything is said, politely but no more than that, and without passion. The supported body: one carries the weight of one’s own body. This is the first sensation of the space under pressure: discovery, interest, suspicion, one calls, one designates, a sort of state of alert. One seeks a partner. There is no relaxation. Themes are at the level of the realistic theatre, sensitive to situation. The first muscular tension is decisiveness. I go. It is action that starts it. Words are precise, clean. In the theatre this is the level of realistic acting, in action. The second muscular tension is the arrival of passion. Anger is the natural state. Put an angry person on stage, and he will be at the level of play-acting. The actor must also have this level but without getting

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angry, or shouting. It must be play. This theatre is close to mask and one cannot replay this level in life. It is already stylised theatre at this point. The third muscular tension is the maximum. The gesture plays to resistance, slowly and without a trajectory, as in Noh. One can only simulate the tension of this level, which is close to asphyxiation. Words are no longer spoken, but inter-cut with sounds that lengthen them. We see that this mimodynamic experience offers a scale, a range of different theatres. Speech and the very nature of the text change according to bodily tension. Inversely, each theatre text contains a level of body tension required to play it. But to spend one’s time varying the agreements, performing a ‘relaxed’ version of a high level text, in order to be modern, is a virtuoso game without merit. It is merely intellectual complacency that ignores the very dynamic of the text and the body of the actor. Productions of Greek tragedy (as well as translations) have suffered a drop in quality because of this. The dynamics of the passions Everything can be placed on a scale, on a dramatic climb that is rhythmically organised. The levels are not located at an equal distance from

Figure 24

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each other, but in a living rhythmic relationship. Thus fear starts as worry, followed by dread, and develops into terror. The actor-mime must within himself feel the different nuances of the passions, which make for a richness in his performance that can only be attained through exercise. His understanding must first and foremost be mimodynamic. The performance of commedia dell’arte is an example: you take a situation and carry it to its most extreme expression, where acrobatics come into play, just before death. One dies of everything in this theatrical game: of envy, of jealousy, of laughter. Pantaloon makes the perilous leap into anger. We play at a high level of performance that that ‘essentialises’ the psychology in the action. The mounting situation reaching its climax is returned to its opposite, always in search of equilibrium. It finds itself thus reversed and takes names like The Taming of the Shrew, The Robber Robbed or The Confessor Confessed. Dynamic structure organises the play of the situation and the passions just as it organises the play of the body in movement. The dynamics of words The word is a gesture that modulates within organised sounds, in words propelled by verbs: I throw, I lift, I twist; I throw myself, I lift myself, I twist myself; I am thrown, I am lifted, I am twisted . . . Action is inscribed into words. Articulated language has made use of analogical images. From a movement, each language recognises one part, privileges one moment. Let us take the example of throwing a ball: French privileges the beginning, and lets the ball get away: je lance; Italian privileges the ball’s arrival at its target: io lancio; in Japanese, it is neither the departure nor the arrival but the trajectory that is brought out. Words contain (inner space) in their sound the dynamic of materials, images and action which they more or less remember. Other words circulate around (outer space), in black and white rather than in colour, and look, explain, define. At the centre of these spaces verbs animate, words born of the earth stay faithful to it in their dialects. Each country preserves physical adherences in its words, and sees them differently. For example, for the French, the word beurre participates in the sensuality of the slight melting of the named material; for the English, the word

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‘butter’ is dry, firmer, in the fridge. There are words, like confiture in French and ‘marmalade’ in English, that manage to meet in a neighbouring dynamic; more trickling in French, more upheld, gelatinous and trembling in English. Notes Perse, S-J. (trans. Wallace Fowlie) (1958), New York: Pantheon Books, p. 105. 2 Da Vinci, L. (trans. John Francis Rigaud) (1835), A Treatise on Painting, London: J.B. Nichols and Son, p. 35. 1

chapter 6

the explosion of mime Jean Perret and Jacques Lecoq

The following section consists of an interview of Lecoq by Jean Perret, interspersed with short explanations of key ideas by Jacques Lecoq. This is the part of the book in which Lecoq moves from the history and aesthetics of mime to sketch out his unique pedagogic approach. Here we find, formulated in print for the first time, the approach that will be expanded in a more systematic form ten years later when he comes to write The Moving Body.

Jacques Lecoq is a man with a calling. Be it in competitive sports or physiotherapy; in theatre, dance, cinema or television; architecture or the plastic arts, Jacques Lecoq has always been passionate about movement and form, and, above all, mime and gesture. Since the opening of his school in 1956, he has explored the disappearance of mime and the symptoms of its demise, leading to his involvement in what he called the explosion of mime in theatre, ‘giving voice to silence’ at a time where it was heresy for a mime to speak. He strove to find the essence of mime and integrate it in his pedagogy. Similarly, he incorporated different dramatic territories into his unremitting exploration, creating an ‘actorcreator’ who would use improvisation as a tactical, as well as technical, device. The study of classical texts would come later, once the trained actor had tackled all of the styles of acting and was finally ready. As Lecoq has noted elsewhere, being an actor is no ordinary occupation and this is why his training cannot be compared with traditional methods of teaching. His pedagogy nurtures, directs and strengthens; it helps budding talent to bloom and reveals what was hidden within. What Jacques Lecoq never forgets, and this is central to his pedagogy, is that students come to him with a desire, a vocation, a gift, a talent and occasionally a delusion. They are looking for a way to realise their dreams, for the right suggestions. They want him to stimulate their thirst for life, both from the inside and the outside. They want him to train their bodies, to help them explore gesture and speech, to ignite their ‘actor-creator’ imagination. This has been the aim of Jacques Lecoq and the goal of his International Theatre School: to provoke a creativity rooted in a true theatre of

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gesture that ‘moves and speaks with integrity’. Let us now listen to the words of both the man and the pedagogue. The pedagogy of movement (interview of Jacques Lecoq by Jean Perret, including seven explanations of key ideas by Lecoq) Jean Perret: The school that you created in 1956 has always been an international and professional theatre school, however your career followed a varied progression to arrive at this point: you have been a teacher in physical education, a physiotherapist, a mime artist and actor, and then in Italy, you helped found the Piccolo Teatro School with Paolo Grazzi and Giorgio Strehler, who is now the director of the Théâtre de L’Europe in France. So, can you tell us exactly how you became Jacques Lecoq, or rather, how you became this internationally recognised pedagogue? Jacques Lecoq: I have always loved movement. My first introduction to it was in stadiums and swimming pools, where I could enjoy the simple act of moving: the body’s extension in throwing the discus, pacing my breath and stride in running races, that moment of suspension just above the bar in the high jump. These actions expanded in my mind, and I could feel myself jumping high, swimming fast with the river’s

Figure 25 Lecoq gives feedback to students. Catalan actor Sergi Lopez is seated on the floor, to the right of Lecoq. Alain Chambaretaud.

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current. Going around the track in the evenings, I would see my shadow grow larger or smaller depending on the sun’s position. My body remembers all of this. I can recall doing a 1,500-metre swim where time gradually seemed to slip away and the steady rhythm of my front crawl helped me solve a maths problem that I had been set for homework. These physical sensations were so powerful that they still flow through me today and they have undeniably influenced my teaching of movement. Despite the Occupation, during the war I was able to continue training and become a teacher in physical education and then a physiotherapist. This paramedical work led me to specialise in rehabilitation, especially with paralytics, and the anatomical understanding that this gave me proved incredibly valuable. You see, it was physical education and rehabilitation that first steered me towards bodily expression, movement and, later, to mime and theatre. Jean Perret: Going back to the war and Occupation, wasn’t it during this time that you discovered theatre, whilst other youngsters took refuge or hid in ‘youth camps’? Jacques Lecoq: Absolutely. It was actually during that time that I met Jean-Marie Conty, who had been top of his year at the École Polytechnique, a pilot of the Aéropostal company with Saint-Exupéry and an international basketball player. He was interested in theatre and friends with both Antonin Artaud and Jean-Louis Barrault, whom he had

Figure 26 Acrobatics teacher Christophe Marchand demonstrates stage combat to students. Alain Chambaretaud.

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helped through some difficult times, as Artaud’s letters to Barrault testify. And it was he who stimulated my interest in theatre. Barrault would give us a demonstration; Serge Lifar would ‘choreograph’ us. Under their supervision, we were able to perform theatrical games; ready for the most challenging gestures and actions, and it was an incredibly enriching experience. I later joined Travail et Culture (the T.E.C.) (Work and Culture) with some friends, where I took improvisation classes with Claude Martin, who had been a student of Charles Dullin and an actor in his company. I also took expressive dance classes with Jean Serry, a former principal dancer at the Paris Opera. It was during this time that we formed Les Aurochs, a company that created plays based on improvisation and consisted of myself and, amongst others, the poet and dramatist Gabriel Cousin. Then came the Liberation and, led by Jean Serry, some of us took part in huge demonstrations that would comprise of ten to fifteen thousand people. We demonstrated at Chartres to celebrate the return of our prisoners of war, under the name Les Compagnons de la Saint-Jean; also at Le Puy, for the pilgrimage of the French Scouts, where we performed a show directed by Georges Douking; then at Grenoble, where we took part in two large celebrations directed by Louis Ciccione, one for the freedom of the town and another for May Day, in honour of the work that the newly liberated people could now resume. Jean Perret: You have said that these performances relied on improvisation, on the body and movement. Did they not also introduce you to mime, which could be seen as both your starting and finishing point? In fact, where did you learn mime? Jacques Lecoq: Starting point and finishing point, that’s true to an extent and you’ll see why. As for my apprenticeship, it was a very slow and long process. But we’ll come back to that later. It’s important to talk about it as it was, and always will be, fundamental to my training, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I want to talk to you about Étienne Decroux, whom I respect but who, paradoxically, did not train me. Despite the encouragement of my friends, I refused to work with Decroux, who was attracting everyone who had an interest in mime. I had seen a demonstration that he gave at the Salle Iéna and, sitting in the first row, I was shocked by his mechanical style of movement and the loud and forced breathing that sounded like ironmonger’s bellows. I decided that I could never be a part of this style of mime and that it would be better to find a personal technique myself. At the time, I was interested in nature and its movements. It was later that I understood that natural gesture cannot really be used in art. Decroux said to me once ‘I hate nature and all that is natural’, and

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I thought that, in a way, he was right, but that there were probably numerous ways that one could transpose nature. To be honest, I’ve always thought of Decroux more as a plastic artist or sculptor than a mime, and certainly not a dramatic mime in the sense that I had envisaged. It was on the road that I discovered professional theatre, with Jean Dasté in Grenoble in 1945. He came to see our company performing a show that incorporated mime, dance and song, and subsequently asked some of us, myself included, to join a new company that he was putting together called Les Comédiens de Grenoble. There was no audition to pass just a shared vision, and so, with a leap across the stage, I was employed by Les Comédiens de Grenoble and began my professional acting career. Through Dasté, I was now learning from the experiences of Jacques Copeau and, more importantly, the Copiaux. I took charge of the company’s physical training, and my own experimentation into mime and theatre began. Jean Perret: And you followed in the wake of the Copiaux, using the mask work and other theatrical forms that they rediscovered? Jacques Lecoq: I’m coming to that. It was in Grenoble that I discovered mask work and this was an enormous moment for me. The masks that the Copiaux used didn’t really have any expressions. They were called ‘noble masks’, but I eventually began to call them neutral masks. Two shows in particular affected me. L’Exode (The Exodus), a mimed and masked choral piece that showed the flight of a village faced with occupation, where each performer was alternately transformed into a church, a house, oxen, or wagons. The farmers of the region watched with almost religious silence. Even though they had never seen theatre before, the theme was so poignantly of the time that they understood the transpositions completely. The second was a Japanese Noh play called Sumida River, directed by Marie-Hélène Dasté and Jean Dasté, and liberally adapted by Suzanne Bing. I oversaw the movement of the boat in the play, and it was a very tentative debut into choreography. I think you can see from this, the close relationship between Jacques Copeau and the Copiaux and also their direct influence on me. Jean Perret: So if I understand this correctly, at this time you were leaving teaching behind in favour of becoming an actor. But didn’t the opportunity of meeting Barrault, and especially Dasté, push you towards theatre and a theatre school, long before your time in Italy confirmed this direction? Jacques Lecoq: You know, at the time, the roles of actor and teacher were merging together for me. To such an extent, actually, that after two

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years performing in Grenoble, I moved to the Éducation Par le Jeu Dramatique (Education Through Dramatic Performance) in Paris, where, based on my own education in Grenoble, I taught physical expression for actors. It was a vocational school created by a group of actors and directors: Jean-Louis Barrault, Alain Cuny, Claude Martin, André Clavé, Marie-Hélène Dasté and Roger Blin, driven by Jean-Marie Conty. It was a new French school that wanted, in the words of a book edited at the time, ‘to make its students alive’. It was a place of exchange and sharing. Jean Perret: Was this influenced by Copeau’s ideas or rather those of Antonin Artaud and Charles Dullin? Jacques Lecoq: Much more by Artaud and Dullin, certainly. But the school, under this ‘influence’, if you like, was definitely a place where ideas were exchanged and it had an enormous effect on me because it was there that I met the director Gianfranco de Bosio and his collaborator, Lieta Papafava, who had both come to the Éducation Par le Jeu Dramatique to study for the year. They asked me if I wanted to work with them at the Padua University Theatre. Italy! Well, I agreed to go for three months and ended up staying in Italy for eight years, from 1948 to 1956: three years in Padua, two in Milan and three more doing various things as an actor, mime, choreographer or director in theatre, television and film. Jean Perret: I think it would be fair to say already that this period in Italy was a time of initiation for you. What were its main stages? Jacques Lecoq: Initiation might be too strong a word. However, it is undeniable that my time in Italy was extremely important. It allowed me to expand the possibilities of mime. Gianfranco de Bosio led a professional company, which began a school project resulting in numerous shows, and was also a main component of Italian youth theatre. My time in Italy broadened my perspectives, like a fan opening out. In the first few days after my arrival in Padua in 1948, I gave the company a demonstration of my know-how. Among other things, I showed them the world-famous ‘walking on the spot’ that Étienne Decroux and Jean-Louis Barrault had invented. They responded with admiring looks and then one of the actors, Agostino Cantarello, a poet, watchmaker and central figure of the company, who would later play the role of Pantalone at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, stood up and said: ‘Che bello! Che Bello! Ma dove va?’ (‘Beautiful! Beautiful! But where’s it going?’). This sentence remains a symbol of the moment of realisation that occurred for me: I was suddenly aware that an isolated mime didn’t actually go anywhere. Gradually, Italy brought me back down to earth, grounding me in the lives of everyday people. It introduced me to a commedia dell’arte that was actually a reflection of the human condition, in all of its glorious

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Figure 27 ‘Arguments’ – scene from Travel Diaries, production by the Jacques Lecoq company in 1959. Wearing the masks made by Amleto Sartori, from left to right: Yves Kerboul (Harelquin); Élie Pressman (the Doctor); Isaac Alvarez (Pantalone); Philippe Avron (the Captain). Liliane de Kermadec. Jacques Lecoq collection.

tragedy and comedy, especially in this country that is so sensitive to the urgency of life. The sculptor Amleto Sartori, with whom I began working on masks, is part of this ‘peasant heart’ in which the language and strength of Padua is rooted, closer to Ruzzante than Goldoni, the two extremes of commedia dell’arte (1500–1750). The commedia dell’arte The commedia dell’arte is a magical territory in theatre, one that has always inspired dreams and imagination. For two centuries, this great reservoir of actor-improvisers travelled from Italy all around Europe. The actors kept the same roles and gave a sense of perpetuity to the characters. How many men wore Harlequin’s mask, from the Bergamot peasant Zanni to the elegant and dancing Harlequin of nineteenth-century pantomime? How did they perform? Did they really improvise? For whom did they perform? Where are they now? These were professional actors who played the same role for years and then passed their skills on to their sons. The actor who was playing the role at the time reinvented certain characteristics. There are many contradictions that arise when one talks of commedia dell’arte. The actors did not improvise, as we once believed: he was the author of his own lazzi and did not change them every night; he simply had a wealth of things to choose from.

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Every author, whether he creates a gesture or a spoken or written text, improvises the first time that he moves in the space or puts pen to paper. Even if he has an initial idea, he must at some point throw himself into the unknown. From this starting point, the actor-improviser-author rehearses and refines his creation, testing it and finally performing it for an audience, who see only the finished product. This is where things start to get out of hand: people reinvent the past with few of the facts and all we are left with are basic concepts or verbal descriptions, but no images and no actor or his lazzi, despite the many books written on the subject (I recommend Constantin Mic’s The Commedia dell’Arte, which emphasises the dramatic qualities of this theatre that is often considered as little more than entertainment). In 1947, Milan’s Piccolo Teatro staged Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters with the wonderful Moretti. It was the most performed play at the Piccolo, one that Strehler directed several times, unfortunately ‘improving’ it over the course of time thereby losing its initial freshness. It did, however, reintroduce the audience to commedia dell’arte. The irony is that commedia dell’arte is mostly known thanks to Goldoni, who actually declared war on the genre, rather than to Gozzi who wanted to revive it. Despite the rivalry between these two writers, the era of the actor-improviser-author was over. Between 1500 and 1750, between Ruzzante and Goldoni, commedia dell’arte evolved over the course of its 250-year history and this is what enables us to take such liberties and imagine what it used to be like. Imagining the past is much easier than imagining the future, because we know that the past existed, even if we don’t know the past, we can fairly effortlessly recreate it. I personally prefer the earlier, rural commedia dell’arte, closer to Ruzzante’s work, the performances in the countryside of Padua, rather than the later plays in Venetian salons. When we talk of a theatre of gesture it is this style of theatre, written in dialect, that I think of fondly. Dialects have a very physical and earthy association, and they link word and gesture in a very particular rhythm. That is why they are so difficult to translate: sophisticated language often mistakes rural for vulgar. This explains why knowledge of Ruzzante’s theatre, which was written in Paduan, is now so limited. Commedia dell’arte is based on man’s passions when pushed to their extremes. It highlights the absurdity of our behaviour. It is not an elegant type of entertainment, but one that expresses the urgency of life, closer to survival than to the relative luxury of ordinary life. Commedia dell’arte is rooted in the misery of the human condition, as well as its naïveté and intelligence, and emphasises the hierarchy inherent in society, without the revolt of the servant against his master. In fact, everyone accepts life’s compromises and does what they can to survive, to eat, to love and live. They try to get the better of each other and fall into their own traps. There is no smiling in commedia dell’arte. You either laugh or cry.

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In its infancy, commedia dell’arte acted and reacted like a child, with both word and gesture occurring simultaneously. Harlequin and Pantalone may be the main characters that have stayed with us, but in order to demystify commedia dell’arte and find the human comedy within, we need to separate it from the traditional backdrops and archetypal figures, a move that actually began in the journey from Italy into Europe. Commedia dell’arte is essentially tragic, and is centered on themes such as fear: fear of death, fear of life, fear of everything, etc. It is a cruel theatre, one that is in the here and now, with no regrets. It was when I met the people of Padua and my good friend and sculptor, Amleto Sartori, that I could feel the forgotten power of commedia dell’arte, evident in the people themselves as much as in the town’s markets. At the livestock market, I saw the sale of a bullock settled with a slap: an intermediary was trying to take the vendor’s hand and the buyer’s hand and slap them together, three times to seal the deal. This is what happens after so many comedies where each person runs away, only to be brought back by an intermediary. The hand is strong, calloused and knows how to slap a bullock’s rump, as well as a girl’s.

Jean Perret: Maybe we could just focus on your meeting with Amleto Sartori for a moment. It seems that Sartori’s contribution to the creation of a mask ‘that performs’ has brought about for you, and indeed for many others, a veritable renewal of how we view mask work. Jacques Lecoq: Without a shadow of a doubt. The masks that Amleto, and his son Donato, made are still an integral part of my pedagogical tools. So, come on, let’s talk about Amleto. When I arrived in Padua, I naturally wanted to continue my experiences of the mask work that had so profoundly moved me in Grenoble, and have each actor create their own neutral mask. It was a question of finding someone who could help us do this. Gianfranco de Bosio, the director of the company, knew a sculptor with whom he had already worked: Amleto Sartori. I brought him on to the project and he enthusiastically welcomed us into his workshop at the Scuola Selvatico. The whole company got to work, each of them trying to find their neutral mask under the watchful and curious supervision of Amleto. He prepared the clay for us, then the plaster, and finally the glue and paper, using the same technique that Jean Dasté had previously taught me. Sartori watched our efforts with both respect and compassion. Then, when the day came for us to perform my first masked pantomime, Port de Mer (Sea Port), inspired by the port at Chioggia, Amleto decided, with complete authority and competence, that he would make the masks himself, as ours were not good enough. No one dared challenge his decision,

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exactly as I had expected. Thus began Amleto Sartori’s adventures with masks, first made from glue and paper, and then from leather, and for me it was the beginning of a long collaboration and great friendship. Jean Perret: And I believe that Sartori made the masks for the Piccolo Teatro. Jacques Lecoq: Yes, I introduced Sartori to Giorgio Strehler in a café in Vicenza, near Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico, which led to the making of masks for the Piccolo. Jean Perret: Didn’t you also introduce him to Jean-Louis Barrault? Jacques Lecoq: Yes, and many other people as well. But, let’s get back to my point. Sartori, enterprising as ever, suggested to Strehler that he could try to make some leather masks for Strehler’s upcoming production, and thereby revive the tradition of commedia dell’arte masks. And that was it. He had never worked with leather before and I remember taking him to the Opéra museum in Paris to look at the old Zanni masks (Zanni is the forefather of Harlequin). He looked at them right up close so that he could see how they had been made. Shortly afterwards, the first leather Harlequin mask took shape. I put it on and tried to make it come alive, but to no avail. It didn’t work. I have that very mask at home, hanging on the wall, which is a sad place for a mask to be. One day, Sartori decided to make me a neutral mask from leather. It took a long time, and there were many attempts, much measuring of my face, and finally I went to his workshop to try it on. It was so tight on my face that I couldn’t make it play and the leather was too soft. When he remade it in firmer leather, that was it: it worked. That’s when I realised that you need a distance between a mask and a face to make the mask play. I returned to Paris in 1956, taking with me a full set of commedia dell’arte masks that Amleto had made for me as a leaving present in Italy. Then other mask makers appeared, inspired by Sartori, bringing their own ideas and personal vision to their work. That was definitely the case with Erhard Stiefel and Werner Strub. Mask work A mask forces an actor to raise his game and isolate a character and situation. It focuses physical gestures and the tone of the voice. It elevates text above the mundane, clarifies, filters out the anecdotal and leaves the essential. We train using various types of masks: the neutral mask, expressive masks, larval masks, half masks. To make a mask come to life you have to know it, become friends with it. It must also be made so that it can perform; it has to be a good mask.

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Figure 28 Jaques Lecoq with the Dasté ‘noble’ mask, precursor of the neutral mask. Jacques Lecoq collection.

What makes a good mask? A good mask is one that changes expression when it moves. If it stays the same when the actor moves or changes attitude or state, then it is a dead mask. It is important that a mask does not cling tightly to the face underneath, and a small sponge can often remedy this. It must be able to turn from headon to profile without losing its vitality, and it must not be flat. It should not shine or reflect light. It is a shape, and should not be a drawing or painting. Indeed, it should preferably be one single colour. It should not have an obvious expression: I cannot imagine a mask that laughs all of the time; it could not stay on stage long and would be only a passing shadow. It’s not enough to just look at a mask and identify the propositions of its shape and intent; to really make it work, you have to wear it and experiment with the movements that it suggests.

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The neutral mask This is the basic mask that drives our understanding of all the other masks. It is through the neutral mask that we are able to wear other masks. It has no particular expression or characteristic, it doesn’t laugh or cry, nor is it sad or happy. It is rooted in silence and calmness. The face should be simple, regular and without any hint of conflict. Anyone can make one out of papier mâché, using a plaster negative-mould, which is made from an original clay design. This is the best and most lasting way to make your own mask. Making your own neutral mask is an excellent way of learning how to use it. The neutral mask is not at all like a mask made from the mould of a calm face; that would just be a sort of death mask. The first time that you put on a neutral mask it seems a heterogeneous sort of object that bothers and suffocates you. Gradually, however, you begin to feel hidden and you start to do things that you would never ordinarily do. Finally, once you have totally taken on the mask, you discover a new freedom that is greater than the naked face. Detached from your own face and words, both of which you can usually master in a social context, the body emerges as the only thing to guide you through the silence and you begin to feel its importance. There’s no cheating with just your body. The neutral mask, which had originally allowed you to feel hidden, now exposes you. The mask that you wear in everyday life is gone, devoid of any purpose. You can feel each movement more intensely than before. You can no longer use your eyes to play psychological games and your whole head must now turn for you to look. Your gestures become bigger and slower. At the beginning, you felt stifled; now you breathe deeply. The themes seem simple in description, difficult once you go deeper: wake up as though for the first time; discover the natural world through a journey; become what you see and recognise its rhythms (identification with animals, vegetation, the elements and materials). You can’t have a neutral mask called Albert who wakes up in his bed. The neutral mask is a sort of common denominator for both men and women (there is a male mask, and also a different, female one). It unites us as living things and we can all see ourselves in it. It doesn’t have a specific way of walking; it simply walks. It helps us discover the space around us, and the rhythm and gravity of things: the dynamics of fear, jealousy, pride and anger belong to us all. I have found that great actors, such as Michel Aumont, whom I persuaded to try on the mask, can bring the neutral mask to life without ever having tried it on before. The neutral mask is a tool that forces the actor to search deep within. Larval and expressive masks The difference between larval and expressive masks lies in characterisation. Larval masks are large, simplified versions of the human face: round, pointed,

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hooked. The nose is very important and leads the face. These masks have not quite resolved into human features and so the level of play is big, simple and uncomplicated. The expressive masks are more elaborate with finer details. They need only small movements to come alive. Each larval or expressive mask can be played in two ways: with the mask or against it. If I am wearing a mask with moronic features, I try to identify with this proposition and assume a body that sustains this. But I can also play against this and create an intelligent person underneath the idiot’s mask. This second character is far richer than the first: someone who has the interior conflict of looking like an idiot but isn’t actually one at all. This is the counter-mask. There are masks that demand to be played in both senses: the authoritarian and the weakling, the sad and the happy. In order to really know someone you have to be able to see the face behind the face, and it is the same with masks. It is only the neutral mask that doesn’t have a counter-mask. It is important with all of these silent masks that words are not forbidden or replaced with gestures. You have to find areas where words are no longer necessary or not necessary yet. The audience should never feel that the actor is not speaking because he is wearing a mask that won’t allow it. Half-masks These are speaking masks. When you talk wearing one of these masks you have to find its voice, its language, its way of talking. Commedia dell’arte has given us various ‘types’ that combine different traits in a single character. The rich and old Venetian merchant, Pantalone, is therefore greedy and in love, ill and in good health. He is the amalgamation of various personalities, both old and young at the same time. When he is in love, he dances; when he is asked for his money back, he is at death’s door. The masks of the commedia dell’arte demand maximum physical rigour, as seen in the amazing body attitudes. It is not possible to act in a mask as you would in everyday life. You have to go beyond naturalism towards performance, finding the elements of vivacity that life has not yet revealed. It is hard to give direct instructions on how to perform in a mask. I can, however, say that performing in front of a mirror is useless, you have to live with a mask. I remember one time when Marcello Moretti took out his mask at a restaurant. He wanted to look at it before dessert came. I would advise everyone to make their own mask, even if the results are not entirely satisfactory. At least your involvement will raise the level of play. Physical training is vital, particularly one that specialises in isolating separate parts of the body. Every movement and gesture should have a dramatic intention, so that it doesn’t become mechanical or peripheral. Be careful not to move too much but do rely on moments of immobility, which are fundamental to mask work. Do not fall into aestheticism

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but stay faithful and open to life’s propositions, expanding the meaning and not the form. That’s the hardest thing. There are masks that are very beautiful to look at hanging on the wall, but they do not play. Theatrical masks make sense when they move. It is up to the actor to make these objects come alive and help the audience to discover the mysterious relationship between masks and life.

Jean Perret: As we have seen, these masks evoke for us commedia dell’arte, mime and pantomime, all of which have certain roots in Italy. Would it be reasonable to say that your immersion in Italian comedy has had a lasting effect on your pedagogy? Jacques Lecoq: Not only on the pedagogy, because, as I’ve told you, in Italy I was also the actor that I would one day train. Take the commedia dell’arte as an example. The most famous masks of Sartori are his commedia dell’arte masks. He worked on that Harlequin mask until it played, until it came to life with Moretti, the most famous Harlequin of the day. Jean Perret: And with whom you had the good fortune to work? Jacques Lecoq: That’s true; I met him, saw him perform and also worked on his pantomime for Goldoni’s The Military Lover. As I think I’ve said, I met Marcello Moretti at the Piccolo when he was in The Servant of Two Masters, and it was a revelation to see him play Harlequin. Here in front of me was the mime artist that I had always dreamed of: alive, moving, free of any aestheticism, using his whole body as a voice. He made Harlequin his own, as Deburau did with Pierrot. Subsequent Harlequins at the Piccolo, such as Ferrucio Soleri, followed in his footsteps, but with a deep respect for his innovations. It was another actor, Carlo Ludovici, from Cesco Baseggio’s Venetian dialect company, who taught me Harlequin’s traditional poses and movement. With this knowledge, I was able to create a Harlequin-based style of gymnastics. I stayed in Padua from 1948 to 1951, and while I was there I directed a show that consisted of four different pantomimes: Port de Mer (Sea Port) (a masked chorus piece), Fanfan Bar (a burlesque), La Statue (The Statue) (Paul Arène’s 1889 white pantomime) and L’Usine (The Factory) (a mimed piece with text by Gabriel Cousin). As a nod to Grenoble, we also performed a Noh play, The Hundred Nights, and in 1950, for the first time ever in Italy, Bertolt Brecht’s The Exception and The Rule, directed by Eric Bentley, in which mime combined with the text in a way that was reminiscent of Chinese theatre, a dramatic form very dear to Brecht. In 1951, I was asked by the Piccolo Teatro in Milan to choreograph the chorus for a production of Sophocles’ Electra at the Teatro Olimpico in

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Vicenza. That’s where I discovered the dramatic possibilities inherent in a chorus and its relationship to space, something that continues to be one of the most beautiful theatrical emotions that I have experienced. Then Paolo Grazzi and Giorgio Strehler asked me to stay in Milan to set up the Piccolo drama school. The teaching was based on physical expression, mask work and improvisation. Once this had been achieved, the students moved on to voice work, the history of theatre, the study of specific scenes and text, dance, fencing and singing. Milan became my new home. Jean Perret: To hear you tell it, it seems as though Italy was responsible for turning you into the teacher that we now recognise. Sartori’s masks, the Electra chorus and, in particular, the Piccolo drama school, aren’t these all the foundations of your teaching? Jacques Lecoq: Yes, that’s where my teaching started to take shape. I turned my performance experiences into exercises and refined my approach to mime, space and chorus, movement analysis, theatre acrobatics, burlesque, object manipulation, fixed point, identification with nature, etc. I developed a two-year pedagogy. Jean Perret: I see. However, at the same time you were also developing your own style of mime, which didn’t belong to Étienne Decroux, or Marcello Moretti or even Marcel Marceau, but was ‘yours’; a style which appeared to look back to the origins of the form. Jacques Lecoq: But wait . . . All of that would indeed become clearer towards the end of my time in Italy, and then clearer still as a result of the discoveries and provocations at my school in Paris. But we haven’t finished talking about the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. There was a group of students who had just finished their two years of training and were now free to work, and it was just at this time that I met Franco Parenti, who had been playing the role of Brighella at the Piccolo. Parenti was supposed to put together a company to perform at the Piccolo during the summer holiday period. He asked Dario Fo, who was still in the early stages of his career, Gustino Durano, Fiorenzo Carpi, the music director at the Piccolo, and myself and my students, to join his company along with some other actors. So, during the summer of 1952, we threw ourselves into creating a political and satirical revue, in which mime would play an important part, called Il ditto nell occhio (A Poke in the Eye). It was a great success and marked a break with traditional Italian revue, which, up until that point, had been led by famous actors such as Toto, Rachel, Walter Chiari or Ugo Tognazzi. A second show followed soon after, I sani da legare (Lunatic Sanity), and then the company disbanded. Dario Fo and Franco Parenti each went their separate ways.

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Jean Perret: But what does your experience in performing mime have to do with your search for a new style of mimed expression? Jacques Lecoq: Mime, through its ability to suggest a place, action and image, found itself directly linked to the revue genre and this reintroduced mime to theatre in a wider context. Consequently, numerous companies asked me to work with their actors and do the movement direction for their shows. ‘Movement direction’ is a difficult expression to define, but it is often used in productions when the direction needs something extra. This work allowed me to experiment with different styles and to push the boundaries of mime in performance. Jean Perret: Mime in performance, mime in theatre; your own concept of mime is, at this point, starting to refine itself. Jacques Lecoq: Absolutely, and this is due to the fact that I was able to research mime and its origins in a theatrical environment, over the course of many performances and with many different composers and dancers. I cut all ties with the isolated and virtuoso style of traditional mime. This was how I came to direct the first shows by the composer Luciano Berio, still using a group of actors that I myself had trained in mime. First came Mime Music No. 2, in 1953, and then Allez Hop! with libretto by Italo Calvino, performed at the Fenice in Venice in 1959. I had to create a new vocabulary of gestures to accompany this contemporary music and dance, a vocabulary rooted in mime. You see, at that time, dance had not yet learned how to incorporate mime, as it now does today. Jean Perret: And had the tragic chorus lost its connection to mime? As you now teach it, the chorus certainly makes full use of mime. Jacques Lecoq: I think I’ve said this before: the chorus is like a body – if it lacks a strong sense of mime then it loses it poetic qualities. Working on the movement direction of Greek chorus in Syracuse was a huge part of this process in finding the gestures that had disappeared in dance. The chorus there consisted mainly of dancers from Rosalia Chladek’s school in Vienna, and was now going to be directed by a choreographer of mime. I worked specifically on the dynamic of the chorus and the balancing of the stage, where each configuration in the space generates an interior physical response. How does a chorus move? A chorus is a body, which moves organically like a living creature, depending on the number of people within it (fifteen is the best number: seven plus seven plus one). It offers a wide range of movement and can take many different forms. It can break up into smaller autonomous groupings that are still linked, however,

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by the chorus leader who is their centre of gravity. These groupings can have conflicting opinions, some for, others against, without ever truly separating, as they are connected through their shared wisdom. On the one hand, its fluid form is larval; on the other it is as rigid and organised as crystal, giving it both its human and ritual characteristics. The chorus organises the space and time of the tragedy and also its structure. The chorus does not move as a single group. The style of movement for a chorus is the same as the style of movement for mask work, whether they are actually wearing a mask or not. The chorus is the highest form of organisation in theatre and, when a chorus is used effectively, it attains the very highest form of stylised performance. The chorus calls for a hero and then awaits him. Who will present themselves? This is the question that we are trying to answer in our study of the chorus dynamic. The concept of a tragic hero has disappeared from modern theatre. Tragedies are now usually performed with a chorus of only three people, denying them their spatial structure and performance. In Greek tragedy it is not three friends who share in Electra’s fate, but rather a full chorus that relays her tears and grief, externalising Electra’s internal struggle and making it come alive. The chorus bears witness to her appeals and her pain. Once the hero has left the stage, the chorus occupies the whole space and reorganises itself. The geometric structure of the solitary chorus, whether it is in a square, triangle, V shape, or arc, prepares us for what it is about to say. It comments on or predicts the actions of the hero. It may echo these actions but never reaches the same hysteria as the hero, even if it dances. In Herakles, the chorus of old men remembers its youth in a danced confrontation. The position of the fifteen members of the chorus punctuates the space, explaining their situation, but also reveals the chorus’ soul. Their movements are not everyday movements. They are either very large or very small: the chorus can lower their heads by 3 centimetres or throw themselves to the ground. However, it is important to realise how much more powerful it is to see the slight lowering of fifteen simultaneous heads, compared to the complete lowering of a single head. The chorus must speak the truth of the text in a common voice, which means that everyone must contribute to the ensemble without taking control. The members of a chorus must feel as though they belong to a single body, a single voice, the focus of which is the chorus leader. The entrance of the chorus, especially in a Greek theatre such as in Syracuse, must be one of either two extremes: very fast or very slow. Anything in-between reverts to a natural speed, which would mock the transposed architecture of the space.

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The chorus of women in Seven Against Thebes runs fearfully onto the stage crying and falling. The difficulty lies in trying to unify words when they are spoken from distinct and far places. For example, saying ‘I cry out’ and then running 10 metres and falling with the words ‘and I die’, would seem ridiculous if the chorus did not support the tension between the two phrases. It’s the same principle for the messenger who has to run onto the stage with news, but must come to a complete stop before speaking to the hero or chorus. At the beginning of rehearsals, this actor is usually so carried away with his run up that he inevitable stumbles and falls. When the chorus exits, the space that they have left is highly charged and the next person on stage must fill it completely. The audience can feel that the actor must be at the same level as the chorus in order to rebalance the stage. Many of the great actors at Syracuse were terrified of coming onto the stage before such an enormous audience, one that continued well past the terraces and onto the hillsides. They were also shocked to be able to hear the strange sound of the audience as they followed the text in their copies, turning the pages in unison. At the end of a tragedy, the chorus is the last to leave, as the night falls and claims the stage.

Jean Perret: So what were the key moments of your time in Italy? Jacques Lecoq: I would say firstly my introduction to commedia dell’arte and to Amleto Sartori, then my time in Syracuse and finally the Piccolo Teatro. It was these things that I took back with me to France to set up my own school. Jean Perret: When and how did you start? Jacques Lecoq: In 1956. As soon as I came to Paris I created the school that I had always dreamed of, and for which my time in Italy had certainly prepared me. I called it ‘The school of mime’ adding the subtitle ‘Actor training’. Then I called it ‘The school of mime, movement and theatre’, which was closer to my initial idea and also to my teaching. Jean Perret: Wasn’t it also because of the word ‘mime’ and its limiting, almost pejorative, connotations? Jacques Lecoq: ‘Mime’ was never used in the way that I meant, and I very quickly became a prisoner of a misinterpretation that unfortunately still exists today. However, this misunderstanding is gradually disappearing, due to the reality of what I actually teach and also due to the development of a theatre of gesture that, since the 1960s and 1970s, has occurred in many countries. Jean Perret: So how do you define this style of mime that you unearthed and brought back from Italy?

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Jacques Lecoq: Listen, it’s very simple and clear: 1 2

I offer a form of mime that is free from any of its previous codes or aesthetic formalities. After that, mime can speak. That’s it. That’s where we are.

Jean Perret: It is indeed very simple. So your teaching is based on this style of mime? Jacques Lecoq: Absolutely. This led to the foundations of my teaching: movement analysis and improvisation. These two parallel paths, each supported by preparatory exercises, define the pedagogy. They incorporate the study of various dramatic territories, as much as time will allow, and ultimately create what we call the ‘journey’ of the school. Two features have always been present: what we can observe around us, and the imagination of theatre. I have always tried to stimulate an open dialogue between the two, keeping two focal references in mind: commedia dell’arte and Greek tragedy. These two forms require maximum work from an actor and allow him to use the whole range of skills that he has acquired, even the most interior or psychological. The pedagogical principle is to start big and then to reduce: to go from occupying the largest space to finding the immobility of breath. Let me explain that: every movement pushed to its physical extreme will find a balance, as long as it is supported by its fixed points. Conversely, every movement that is completely reduced will find an internal immobility of breath. For an actor to go from impression to expression, he will have to find the ‘interior body’ of a mime. Jean Perret: Could you explain that in more detail? Jacques Lecoq: Gladly. It’s about searching deep down and finding the deposit that is the result of things that we have observed (impression). For example, let’s take our observations of a tree. In bypassing the concepts and personal responses that we have to a tree, we can find a physical sensation that allows us to experience the dynamic life of a tree. It is this sensation that should act as a reference point in making the tree come alive. It’s as though one side of our skin is used to connect with the exterior world and the other side to connect with our own interior world. These two sides must cooperate for us to make a distinction between impression and expression, between inspiration and expiration. Jean Perret: And I imagine that masks and silence help this? Jacques Lecoq: In a way, yes. The neutral mask, a mask of calmness and balanced emotions, has resonated with the actor’s presence and space since the beginning of the school. The mask proposes a state of complete

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Figure 29 The silence of the neutral mask. Liliane de Kermadec, c. 1958. Jacques Lecoq collection.

stability, from which any line is possible. By observing it, we come to know its angles, in the same way that we can recognise a diagonal when placed next to vertical. The neutral mask finds its place in the economy of movement: the precise gesture, the walk of various gaits. As far as silence is concerned, I began by exploring pantomime and the limiting nature of replacing words with gestures. We would take a newspaper and, through gesture alone, tell the events of the day. This brought a precision of attitudes in both body and hand, but I found that it trivialised the themes. What I did find interesting was the notion of how to actually say something or other. I looked for a form of white pantomime (the name that I gave to this style as a nod to Pierrot’s pantomime) that would be more dramatic, but with no success. The use of overly descriptive hands doesn’t seem to have a place in silent drama, unless the gestures are symbolic. Then again, at the same time I was interested in using words in improvisations

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based on playing, employing both text and mime, chorus and hero, often with voyage as a central theme: crossing from one side of a river to the other, climbing a mountain, departure and return, travelling through the elements, etc. Jean Perret: It’s the theme of exploration. Jacques Lecoq: The school itself is both exploratory and a place of exploration, a laboratory for the explorer. Teaching is a voyage of discovery in which the student will face obstacles of their own as well as the ones constructed by the school. This is where the teacher comes in, helping the student to understand better the meaning behind these encounters. Jean Perret: Now that the foundations of your teaching are firmly set, the school will be able to adapt with the ever-evolving provocations of time, but have you personally given up performing in favour of training others? Jacques Lecoq: Not immediately, but gradually, yes. At the outset I believe I needed to be in tune with the actors, to discover France and her theatre and become part of it. As a result of this my first students were sent to me by Jacques Fabbri, to whom I imparted all ‘my secrets’ for his show La Famille Arlequin (The Harlequin Family) written by Claude Santelli. Three years later, while continuing the school, I went so far as to create my own theatre company with a group of actors whom I had taught. We put on a show called Carnet de Voyage (Travel Journal) with the subtitle of Voyage autour du Mime (Journey around Mime), still with the same idea of broadening the subject-matter of mime and showing the different directions that mime could take. Then we produced a series of twenty-six films called La Belle Équipe (The Great Team), a burlesque pantomime close to the silent movie with the trio of Avron, Évrard, and Alvarez, directed by Ange Casta. The group had some exchanges with Pierre Schaeffer at the Centre for Musical Research of O.R.T.F. (French Office of Radio and Television). Then there was the work with Jean Vilar on the choir of Antigone and Loin de Rueil (Far from Reuil), a review based on the work of Raymond Queneau in which movement had a big role. Jean Perret: So, as you did in Italy, you allied theory with practice. Did this combination not contribute to the broadening of your teaching towards other forms of theatre? You have said: ‘the mime has started to speak’. But did this mean that text, the author’s words, the work, would have the same status as movement analysis as areas of exploration in your school? Jacques Lecoq: Let me explain. There were several steps along the way. In 1962 the school discovered clowns, a phenomenon that was

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to take on an importance that I never anticipated. I was interested in knowing what happened after the commedia dell’arte and to understand what had become of the actors who frequented the pantomime, and what link there was between clowns and circus. The first courses only lasted two days but the core theme had already been identified: clowns make you laugh. So I set up the stage and everyone came on with the sole obligation to make us laugh. It was terrible, ridiculous. Nobody laughed. In an atmosphere of general anguish the student-clowns flopped; and as each one passed across the stage the same phenomenon was repeated. The crest-fallen clown sat down, sheepishly . . . and it was at that moment when we started to laugh at him. The teaching-method had been found – that of the flop. In search of one’s own clown The clown in the circus tradition began by being a tight-rope walker or a trapeze artist, then, as he got older, no longer being able to perform these acts to the same degree of quality, he taught them to a young person who developed their own clown. The years since the 1960s have witnessed an interest in the clown. But the clown is no longer linked to the circus: he has left the big top for the stage and the street. Many young people want to be clowns. It is a profession of faith, a taking up of a position with regard to society, to be this character that is outside and recognised by everyone, to be the one who is drawn to doing things he doesn’t know how to do, to explore those points where he is weakest. He shows his weak points – thin legs, big chest, short arms – wearing clothes that draw our attention to them, where most people use clothes to hide them. He accepts himself and shows himself as he is. Countless young people from every country roam the streets equipped with their three balls, a somersault, an invisible wall, in order to attract our attention. The phenomenon goes beyond a style of performance and staging a show. This ‘psychological’ clown who can develop a way of teaching drama – necessary for the freedom of the actor – isn’t necessarily a clown who performs, and clowning most often remains a private mode of expression. The little red nose doesn’t necessary make a professional clown and public performance doesn’t have to be a consolation show. Clowning also demands a feat, one that often defies logic; overturning a certain order it thus allows one to denounce the recognised order; he lets his hat drop to the ground, goes to pick it up, but, clumsily, puts his foot inside it, and without doing it on purpose, walks on a stick which springs into his hand. The clown fails where you expect him to succeed and succeeds where you expect him to fail. If he tries to make a dangerous jump he falls, but he’ll

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succeed when you give him a push. Thus the clown Grock can juggle three balls from behind a screen (over which the audience can see the balls rise and drop), but fails when in front of the audience. The clown takes everything at its word, in its literal sense; when night falls suddenly he searches for it on the ground, and we laugh at his naiveté and foolishness. When one suggests to him that we take the air, he tries to catch hold of it in his hands. We make jokes at his expense. You ask him to bend over and look at his feet; he bends over and gets a kick in the pants. Finding this a good gag he wants to do it with someone else who asks him to show them what one has to do – and the clown gets another kick in the pants from this third character who knew the gag. The little red nose ‘the smallest mask in the world’, gives the nose a round shape, lights up the eyes with naiveté and makes the face seem bigger, robbing it of all defences. It inspires no fear, which is why children like it. In former times pantomime was a descendant of the circus ring and brought the white face to the Pierrot clown, who then became the white-faced clown. Today’s clown is above all Auguste, and most stage comics follow in this line. Beckett brought a new dimension to the clown in making him discover the major moments of existence. The tragic hero is unattainable and is replaced by the clown, as in Waiting for Godot. Theatre clowns and circus clowns come together in the Czechoslovakian ‘Circus Alfred’ with Ctibor Turba and Boleslav Polivka. Pierre Byland and Philippe Gaulier, clowns of the theatre of the absurd, create a show called Les Assiettes (The Plates). Every country finds its own clown – the phenomenon is international – without circus having given birth to them. Young performers in this world of clowning recognise that they have to evolve far beyond the typical image of the circus clown. This search for one’s own clown resides in the freedom to be oneself, to accept this truth and use it to make others laugh. There is a child within us, that has grown up within us, and which society forbids us to show; it is more permissible on stage than in everyday life. This approach is purely pedagogical and this experience helps the actor in ways beyond the needs of his performance as a clown. For a theatre clown it isn’t necessary to show the audience how to fail to succeed in doing something or to wear a red nose. The professional clown must know how to do what he fails to do, with talent and effort. Theatre clowns are more rooted in the skill of the actor than of the acrobat; without a red nose they bring to life a tragic and absurd world. In theatre companies they mount short pieces basing their characters on themselves, caricaturing themselves.

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Jean Perret: I remember Pierre Byland. I remember Concert, an unforgettable mimed phantasmagoria which enjoyed considerable success. Wasn’t Pierre Byland at that moment the mime-acrobat, the mime-musician, the mime-speaker, in short the very mime-clown proposed by the school, who on leaving this area took theatre on? Jacques Lecoq: You’re right. Pierre Byland was at the very pinnacle of our researches into clowning. He said to me that he wanted to be a clown. His personality, his talents and his gifts as an acrobat contributed to the explosion of the image of the ‘theatre clown’ which we were promoting at the school. He brought the red nose into contemporary theatre and popularised it with his performances and tours. The quest for ‘his own clown’ took him around the world. The little red nose drew countless young people from far and wide who believed, and whom we made believe, that it was enough to don the clown’s uniform to ‘be one’. Today I have taken off the nose to see whether the clown remains. But let’s leave the clown there and consider other stages of our development. The school was growing; at the same time so was the teaching. It’s at this time that we found the masks from Basel which we were to call ‘larval’ since their form was simple (the basis for all the carnival masks was this featureless face). As for the texts that you were talking about earlier, if you remember, it was also at this same time that we were making an experiment in theatre culture for which I had to turn to a certain person called Jean Perret. Jean Perret: I remember very well. And I believe that it is very important that the school pursues this work differently today. I remember that then we were trying to find a remedy for the students’ poor knowledge of theatre literature and to help them discover different dramatic writers. Jacques Lecoq: That’s exactly it; and we pushed ourselves and the students to shed light on comparative dramatic situations. At the same time, Antoine Vitez, before being called to the Conservatoire, did some ground-work on the texts themselves. Jean Perret: I also remember our crossing swords on the subject of Claudel. Jacques Lecoq: But while doing this, and we’ll get to the question that you asked me, teaching was taking an ever stronger hold of me. I had to choose between teaching and doing performances. I chose teaching. Jean Perret: More than ten years had gone by since your return from Italy. What, in the following decades, were the other stages in your now exclusively pedagogical journey?

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Jacques Lecoq: Let’s say that first of all there was 1968; and that when the events of that year took place, not only did we find that they confirmed the school’s vocation and the basis of its work, both in terms of training and research, but the events in themselves, with their power to provoke, gave the school another dimension. The imagination of the students, their desire for authenticity elicited a considerable inventiveness and broadening of the way I taught. But alas, we no longer had any place to work. We were about to embark upon a very difficult period in which we had to change premises very often, always out of place. But during this phase of wandering which lasted ten years (from 1966–76) we had the opportunity to work in some fine spaces, that’s to say impressive establishments, such as the Breton Mission or the Théâtre de la Ville, where, thanks to Jean Mercure in 1972, the school narrowly avoided a complete closure; or again the American Centre on Boulevard Raspail, thanks to Laurence Wylie, professor of French culture at Harvard, who at the age of sixty-two ‘went back to school’. Jean Perret: If I’ve got it right, these peregrinations spurred on your teaching in the same way as the successive generations of students and the mixing of cultures and ethnicities, because this was when the school definitively took on its international profile as well. Jacques Lecoq: They were factors that kept us on our mettle. With each change of venue came a discovery; different dramatic spaces would appear each time. As for the younger generation, the fertility of the school is made up from the very diversity of each generation of students. One can see this in evidence over the course of the following stages: from 1966–76 countless dramatic territories spring up certain of which merit patient exploration, such as, for example, bouffons. The age of the bouffon The difference between the clown and the bouffon is that while the clown is alone, the bouffon is part of a gang; while we make fun of the clown, the bouffon makes fun of us. At the heart of the bouffon is a mockery pushed to the point of parody. Bouffons amuse themselves by reproducing the life of man in their own way, through games and pranks. The parody isn’t directly offensive with regard to the public; there is no deliberate intention to mock – the relation is of a different order. Bouffons come from elsewhere. They are linked to the verticality of mystery and they are part of the vertical axis which links earth and heaven whose values they invert. They spit at the sky and invoke the earth; in this sense they inhabit the same space as tragedy – they meet on the same plane.

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Figure 30 Actor Geoffrey Rush performs in bouffon costume, c. 1977. Dody DiSanto.

Bouffons are organised hierarchically and live in a perfect society, without conflict, where everyone finds their allotted place; an ideal image of ours. There is the bully and the bullied; the one with the right to speak who is supported by the one who hasn’t, without any revolt or any questions asked. They are polite and help each other. Why this perfection? Because they are not like us. The imagination of the mystery makes them take on another body, which enables them to maintain a distance between us and them and to be able to walk in the street, to be alongside us whilst remaining themselves and us ourselves. Every country has, deep within its culture, a spring of the bouffon-esque which wells up in the work of bouffons; South America has the magic birds of the Volador; the English have the nocturnal enchantments of Shakespeare; the Germans, the myths of the Lorelei; the Swedes have the little monsters of the white nights. The bouffon show fully belongs to the theatre of the image. The range of movement is transformed and finds its point of organisation in the costumes which oblige the bouffons to make only certain movements to the point of a catastrophic acrobatics which would be impossible with a normal body. Thus bouffons appear in colourful costumes, with enormous bellies, enormous chests balanced by enormous buttocks; balls grow around their joints, on their thread-like bodies. Legs either grow to the length of two metres or disappear beneath their bodies, in a ball, right on the ground. There are also bouffons with the beauty of the devil, elegant, and there are innocent ones who are protected.

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The number of bouffons is legion; their limits are incalculable. There are echoes in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Père Ubu, the gargoyles on medieval cathedrals, the king’s fool, and forty-year old babies. Bouffons belong to the realm of madness, to that madness which you need the better to safeguard truth. One accepts in a madman what one wouldn’t accept in a so-called normal person. One forgives him when he says upsetting things but one listens to him as a king listens to his fool. The imagination brings forth countless examples in bouffon performances. Each is different from the other, but they are united in the themes with which they deal. They come to show us in a multitudinous manner, very like a parade, our own follies. They play our society, the themes of power, of science, of religion, in ‘follies’ which are organised according to strict rules where the craziest directs the others and declares war because he’s bored. Thus bouffons propose and at the same time denounce the realm of tragedy. It is for this reason that at my school I give them the great poetic texts to speak. At the most suitable moment, when the tension is maximum, one of the bouffons takes the stage, and starts speaking, without parody, lines from great texts such as the Bible, Artaud, Saint-John Perse, Eliot, Pasolini, Rimbaud, Shakespeare. Bouffons allow us to understand them better than when delivered in a poetic soirée dolled up in evening-wear. The rhythm, the dance steps hammering the earth and percussion instruments beating out the metre in rituals that prepare for the event.

Jacques Lecoq: Then, after the discovery of ‘larval’ masks I set up the auto-cours, a period in the time-table where the students work independently amongst themselves to create short pieces based on a given theme. Then come the enquêtes which are conducted outside the school and allow the students to find out about people in their own environment, in their place of work or at leisure, and then re-transmit this in a performance. Then we experimented with ‘concrete danse’ in parallel with musique concrète. This was also the time when I tried devising theatre starting from the rules like those of sports: two teams played the same theme – jealousy, for example – in a space that had the dimensions of a basket-ball pitch; we called in ‘theatre-ball’. And it was also towards the end of these twenty years of wandering that we discovered, at the American Centre, other dramatic areas: bouffons, melodrama, storytelling mime, cartoon mime, tribunes. These discoveries were to nourish our teaching over the following years. But, at the same time, I wanted to settle down, since at heart I’m not really a nomad and I felt the need to anchor the school somewhere. So, in 1976,

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thanks to the perseverance and will-power of my wife, we found a place that is the ideal space for the school, the former boxing centre at 57 Rue Faubourg St Denis. Finally a place to call our own. Another period was about to open up before us. Other stages were about to be negotiated. Jean Perret: One of your sayings is, ‘Everything moves’. This is a recurring theme with you. Does everything move even once you’ve stopped in one place? Jacques Lecoq: We didn’t stop. If the school doesn’t move it dies. Yes everything moves and I confirm that the school does too. This is born out by the fact that from 1976, once settled at the Central, we started to develop the relation between body and space by means of scenographic work undertaken at the Laboratory for the Study of Movement (L.E.M.) based at the school. This work is the result of research into the built space, begun by Jacques Bosson in 1969 at the School of Fine Art and continued today by the architects Krikor Belekian and Pascale Lecoq. Continually, other things are happening, other things are being discovered, whether these be masks, clowns, bouffons, cartoon mime, commedia dell’arte, portable structures, the chorus and tragedy, melodrama, or even storytelling mime – what is important is that all these themes are adapted in order to reflect today’s world and to shed their old names: like commedia dell’arte which becomes the Human Comedy. Cartoon mime Pantomime used the language of the ‘word-movement’, while cartoon mime uses a language of ‘image-movement’. The way in which this genre of mime is played owes much to the strip cartoon. The story no longer unfolds before the audience with a logical continuity but through postures which capture the action in a flash and which are suggested through movement. The speed with which audiences read performances is much quicker today, this being due in large part to the effect of television and advertising. It only needs one pose and then another to suggest the passage from one thing to another without dwelling on the intervening trajectory. In the mime’s performance there are swift changes of scene, and they employ long-shots and close-ups as in the cinema. For example: the character is sitting on his bench piloting a plane, the wings convey him and we see the plane which disappears in the distance, suggested by a hand. To pass freely from one image to another gives the performance the possibility for surprise effects; one can transform one image into another by using an image that has a dual signification. The cartoon mime can include a narrator who relays the image without subtitling it, with the actors passing from mime to the spoken word (storytelling mime). Music can be introduced as can objects

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when they enter into the activity of the illusion and can be transformed into many other things; like Harlequin’s mace which can be a cat’s tail or a hand which one can hold out at a distance. This kind of performance can reach a level of poetry but most often remains an amusing diversion or a lucky find, the way of performing being more interesting than the theme itself. As for the chosen theme, it is preferable that it is known by everyone in order to avoid it becoming a headache for the audience, which must understand everything immediately. The English troupe the Moving Picture Mime Show has grasped this theatre language with humour and brio. As a group of three performers they tell the story of the film The Seven Samurai (1954) – we see all the characters, the settings, the action, the drama. Cartoon mime cannot last too long – fifteen minutes maximum. It is interesting when played by several performers, from between three to five, maybe seven at most, this allows the actor to remain connected with the setting, and creates an atmosphere: for example: to mime coming down the stairs of a haunted castle with a torch in one’s hand which makes the reflections in the armour tremble (the reflections suggested by quick movements of the hand), and then suddenly finding oneself in a torture chamber. The actors remain in contact with the audience and each time surprise them with an unexpected image: as in cabaret, one mustn’t allow them a moment in which they can lift a glass to their lips. A gesture can also indicate images. A house can be drawn in the air with the thumb and two forefingers of both hands, then the actor can go indoors, and turn round to become the housekeeper who is knitting. The talent of the mime justifies the poverty of the theme. There is a syntax of images, a certain order in which they appear, such that the audience will clearly grasp what is going on as soon as possible. To create the idea of the house, as we saw above, it is better to begin by drawing or figuring the roof, the opposite of construction in real life. One gesture is sufficient to suggest a river, but the idea alone isn’t enough – the image must adhere to the rhythm which gives life to it and which expresses the thought of it. If one creates a bird with one’s hand, it must be in the rhythm of a real-life flight, and one should be able to distinguish between a pigeon and a hawk. All the magic of the illusion of mime is there. Cartoon mime, like pantomime, draws upon the audience’s imagination and the reserve of images in its memory. Finding the posture and the movement which unlocks them should be the first concern of this genre of mime.

Jean Perret: I want to ask you two or three final questions. Do you know what has become of those of your pupils who come from across the world? In France some have become famous. Amongst others

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I would name, Philippe Avron, Claude Évrard, Pierre Byland, Ariane Mnouchkine, Anne Delbée, Luc Bondy, Pierre Debauche, Eduardo Manet, Pierre Richard, etc. But elsewhere, in other countries? Jacques Lecoq: I don’t want to answer this question because I’ll need to cite hundreds of people from countless countries who have done remarkable things. I am often invited by former students who, in Japan, in Canada, in the USA and Latin America or in Europe, have become important in theatre. Some of my students were teachers at the school, others still are, helping me along in my ‘journey’; others lead workshops. Some have set up schools abroad: the Theatre School in Bologna, the School of Mimodrama in Milan, the School of Mime-Theatre in Brussels; even the Conservatory in Quebec is run by a former student. Many have started groups which have helped provoke discoveries in theatre schools; thus new performances and new ways of performance that we have opened up are born and continue to be born. I could name many other actors but I prefer them to do this themselves. My demonstration-performance Tout Bouge (Everything Moves) also contributes to help spread the word about my work. Jean Perret: Do you think your teaching can bring about or encourage people to become dramatic authors? Jacques Lecoq: Since my teaching is founded on improvisation, the school is a crucible for creativity. It is not only a school where work is interpreted but where new work is created. Numerous authors, some of whom are performed, have come to draw upon certain themes, ideas or forms. But once again, I prefer that they speak for themselves. Jean Perret: A final question concerning the internationalisation of the school and of its ultimate aim. How has it become the prestigious international school that I think one can say it is today? What is its aim? Jacques Lecoq: OK, let’s start with internationalisation. I believe that it can be explained by this common language of the body which has no need for translators and by this language of movement which knows no boundaries, no more so in the theatre of movement in itself than in the visual arts in general. As to our aim, you know what is very important is Movement with a capital M, and understanding ‘how it moves’. Ultimately, this is the point of departure and of arrival, the fixed point, in fact, around which and from which theatre and the actor who is his own body either moves or doesn’t move. Performing with portable structures Portable structures are the abstract development of performance with masks. The theatre mask contains a more or less expressive character, which while

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Figure 31 Lecoq dances with a female bouffon, c. 1977. Dody DiSanto.

covering the human face, reveals another, more larval, stylised – that’s to say, symbolic one. But the mask is also a form which acts in space like a vehicle, travelling about according to a logic which it proposes itself. It opens up. It turns. It points. It comes up against things – like a real tool, following its own planes, lines, points, masses. Portable structures appear like abstract architectures giving life to space by organising it rhythmically. They are played like masks, worn on the body or manipulated at the end of the arms, moving in space according to indications or forces contained within them. They shouldn’t be played like marionettes in which we recognise the human figure with eyes and mouth, and whose conflicts would be drawn from situations in our daily life. Portable structures make us discover the movement of objects which, outside their everyday use for which they were built, take on a different meaning. This abstract movement is not gratuitous but rests on very real themes which are essentialised in plastic space, beyond any anecdote. I remember very well the emotion that was provoked by a portable structure which took the theme of ‘A tornado in a cornfield in Iowa, USA’ as its point of departure: without any imagery, it was a sensation of colours, of lights, of volume moving in space. The actor’s body was inscribed in the very movement of the structure – now complementing it, now accompanying it, now dodging it, now separating completely from it in order to assist the structure. This direction of mime-architecture is close to scenography by distancing it from scenery and by investing the object with its own plastic and dynamic sense.

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Figure 32 Montage of photographs from the L.E.M. Prior to founding the L.E.M. course at the school, Lecoq gave classes at the École des Beaux Arts. Pascale Lecoq.

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chapter 7

the theatre of gesture and image Jacques Lecoq

In this final section, the book surveys the achievements of the Theatre of Gesture and Movement in the mid-1980s (i.e. at the time of its original publication). The section begins with a summary by Lecoq. It goes on to include an interview with Ariane Mnouchkine by Jean Perret and concludes with an essay in which Alain Gautré provides a panorama of the main theatre companies employing these performance methods in the 1980s. Gautré’s catalogue is evidence of the extraordinarily rapid spread of what is sometimes termed ‘physical theatre’ at this time, and contains a precious record of many artists whose work has not been documented elsewhere. Alain Gautré is a performer, writer and director, and a regular teacher at the Lecoq school. He writes and directs especially for performances with clowns, and he has run research workshops for professional clowns with Catherine Zambron. In 2001 he founded his own troupe: Compagnie Tutti Troppo.

The theatre of movement and gesture can be recognised throughout the world today through the emergence of original productions. Young performers get together in companies, exchange their cultures and mix art forms: their performances are brought alive through gesture, word, music, object, and the image. This theatre makes its appearance following the break-up of that ‘ossified mime’ which flourished in numerous countries after the 1950s. The image of mime then was characterised by routines such as walking on the spot, the imaginary wall, and the typical outfit of white face and black tights. Copying one another, mime artists got stuck in a formula – no words, no objects, no sets other than themselves – and they soon found their limit. The audience applauded the novelty and surprise value; this silent genre was exportable, which increased its audience and allowed mimes to repeat the same discoveries before crowds who had never seen them. Only a mime with the great talent of Marceau could raise the level through his personality and his own poetry. Every mime is, in him- or herself, inimitable. The art of mime is not discontinuous with theatre and dance. When they have become separated from one another, it is because theatre has lost its sense of movement and has failed to realise it. Now that theatre is begin-

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ning to understand this, the mime performer can restore this sense of movement. Mime will have served the role of preserving those qualities of movement and of silence that dramatic action had lost in its preoccupation with text. Mime will restore the power of the word to the art of theatre. The tempting vision of a total theatre, combining oratory, song, mime and dance, each one retaining its own formal autonomy, has often been evoked and realised, notably by Jean-Louis Barrault. This form of performance, influenced by traditional eastern theatre, in particular the Noh theatre of Japan, has always fascinated theatre artists. The actor performs using speech, then miming and dancing, alternating with the chorus which supports him and takes over the spoken word. The chorus speaks and the actor mimes; then the chorus sings and the actor dances. The forms of expression shift between them according to the dramatic pitch and the theatrical action. These sublime types of theatre are consummate forms which are no longer capable of evolution and which are difficult to take as practical models in our period of change. Today Jerzy Grotowski, Maurice Béjart, Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine and Bob Wilson are making the journey east. India, Bali, Japan, China inspire their approach. These theatres with their perfected forms, all so different from each other, have this in common: they stylise the acting, rely on the mask, and focus on the head and hands to the point of symbolic gesture. Their way of moving the hand and head mark the most accomplished form of physical expression, just as they are the most developed form of gestural theatre. To those who are tempted by such an approach, this quest for the mysterious secrets still possessed by the Orient holds out the possibility of emptying oneself and of opening oneself up in order to understand better what is enduring; it permits such people to rediscover a theatre where the whole human being can become one with the universe. But this isn’t about asking a French actor to perform like a Kathakali actor: this would be like putting a Scotsman in the lotus position – an impossible task for his joints. It is the meaning rather than the form that can bring us what theatre needs. The scream seeks out the sign when one has lost one’s memory of the other – that two such different words should be side by side! In 1968 this urgent scream first uttered by Antonin Artaud was rediscovered. Artaud was also fascinated by eastern theatre, that of Bali – he had seen the Balinese dancers at the 1937 Colonial Exhibition in Paris. The juxtaposition of these two phenomena – the scream and the sign – so distant from one another was, in their sudden reunion, evidence of how they had been torn apart. The phenomenon of their reunion becomes elided

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Figure 33 At the end of each trimester at the school, there are public performances by students. In this photograph, Peter Brook and Natasha Parry attend one of these soirées. Alain Chambaretaud.

with the initial separation, concealing the split. It requires much time and work before the living gesture can avoid, from the outset, being rushed into codified definitions, into closed systems. Between the two, scream and sign, there remains a territory to be discovered which will aid the passage between the pelvis and the head and thus restore the whole body. In Japan in 1972 the Kanze brothers, great actors in the traditional theatre forms of Noh and Kabuki, decided to perform the work of a modern author for the first time. Samuel Beckett was chosen, with Waiting for Godot. Having attended one of their rehearsals I asked them: ‘Why have you chosen this play as your first experience of modern theatre?’ They replied: ‘In Beckett’s theatre it is just like Noh, you’re always waiting for something, be it to live or to die.’ Beckett holds a very important position in the theatre of movement and gesture. Already in 1962, at the first

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international festival of mime held in Berlin, his Play without Words was performed by the actor-dancer Derrick Mandel. Then, as a result of that, numerous mimes were chosen to perform Beckett so that his thoughts turned to Buster Keaton for his silent film called Film (1964). The return to physical expression by actors who had been caught up in the great psychodrama of 1968 gave rise to a movement vocabulary which had, up to that point, remained concealed within. The body brought to the visible surface a gestural language which was ‘imprecise’ rather than ‘expressive’, and this marked what could be called a ‘revolt of the hunchbacks’, ‘the why not me’s?’ Physical states that had been considered impossible to show in public were displayed naked on stage for the first time. Grotowski ritualised the body through his semi-private ceremonies in an elitist semi-voyeurism. He wrapped the body in a white sheet, the shroud of purity. Starting from a sort of physical ascesis the actor sought to overcome the limits of his own powers through an act of will, to the point of harming himself. After 1968, so-called ‘classical’ mime collapses. Companies change and abandon the clichés of mime for a theatre of gesture and movement. I am thinking of Els Joglars, a Spanish company who presented Adam and Eve at the 1970 Frankfurt Mime Festival. It was the first festival that publicly espoused this change in mime and which buried the ‘mime of picking flowers’. There were countless discussions which took place in an increasingly positive climate. Mime shifted to such an extent that it lost its name. Pierre Byland was emblematic of this change a prophetic image of which appeared in 1964 in his show, The Concert. Mimes moved into clowning and spread across the world. In the United States, the Two Penny Circus was one of the first groups to make this journey. During the same period Dimitri was already mixing mime and the clown in his acts, whilst at the same time retaining the white face and the black tear. He played under the big top of Circus Knie in Switzerland, followed by Pic, retracing the steps of the earliest mimes of nineteenth-century pantomime who went to the circus to enliven and entertain the audience in between the equestrian numbers. In Czechoslovakia, at the 1971 Prague festival, Ctibor Turba presented a piece which marked the split with the official mime of the period represented by Fialka and his company. Today the theatre of gesture and movement has varied its themes and styles with a greater concern for image and object, thereby rediscovering the plastic function of the stage and integrating this into a whole new

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style of performance. Dance has taken over into its territory the abstract and technical mime in which certain dancers had specialised. This period of exchange and multiplicity makes it impossible to classify differences between productions in which movement has a role, for fear of overlooking what is being born at this time, and with which we are not yet familiar. Interview with Ariane Mnouchkine by Jean Perret Jean Perret: Generally, in your productions, language seems to start with gesture, indeed gesture itself becomes a language. Is this an a priori choice on your part? And if so, what are you aiming for with respect to content or form? Is the written text perhaps of lesser importance in your work? Ariane Mnouchkine: Not at all. Since the three Shakespeare plays that we performed we are seeking to integrate gesture and text. Jean Perret: Why since the Shakespeares? Ariane Mnouchkine: Because when we began and because we were a young company, we did not have the experience to integrate the two. That explains the pre-eminence of gesture in our work. For us, in the beginning was the gesture! Jean Perret: So this was a matter of choice rather than necessity?

Figure 34 Ariane Mnouchkine and actors rehearsing Richard II at the Cartoucherie de Vincennes. Martine Franck/Magnum.

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Ariane Mnouchkine: Absolutely. In any event, it was through performing the three Shakespeare plays in the 1980s that this need to integrate gesture and text became concrete in our work. We needed a writer. The school of Shakespeare had taught us this, so that when the actors began working on the text of Hélène Cixous for the Sihanouk play, they were very pleased. This text suggested a gestural approach to their actors’ imaginations. Jean Perret: But is it not true that the improvisations of the actors of the Théâtre du Soleil have sometimes culminated in a complete work which one could say had been written and produced by a collective author, L’Age d’or (The Golden Age), for example? After all, is Molière’s oeuvre not rooted in the improvisations of Molière the actor? Ariane Mnouchkine: With L’Age d’or we took improvisation as far as it could go. Then we felt the need for a plot, a spine, if you like. The wonderful thing about Molière is the combination of actor and author. Molière was a man who, at a given moment in time, began writing texts for actors, as a poet who understood the dynamics of theatre and the needs of the actor. Jean Perret: He was also a man who understood what you can and cannot put into the mouth of an actor: for people often comment that a given text ‘is impossible in the mouth of an actor’. Ariane Mnouchkine: What is more important is what one puts into his heart and into his body. There are some authors who, as you say, put fine things into the mouth of the actor, but nothing into his heart or his body. As for Molière, he was always sure that what he put into the actor’s mouth came from the heart, from a heart that might have been good or evil, but was profoundly human. The actor’s body can only perform when an author gives him material that comes from the heart. Hélène Cixous discovered, in the course of our work on Sihanouk, as well as earlier in the work on Shakespeare, that actors write with their bodies. It is one of the laws of theatre. Skill in the practice of improvisation in theatre is indispensable for a poet and playwright. Jean Perret: Molière and Shakespeare are perfect examples of this. But closer to our time I think there are some authors who have had this intimate understanding through a close relationship with theatre: for example, Giraudoux with Jouvet, Claudel with Barrault, Brecht with the Berliner Ensemble, Genet with Roger Blin and others besides, such as the Théâtre du Soleil today with Hélène Cixous, and all of this confirms the importance of the combining of author and actor. Ariane Mnouchkine: Yes, although we must be careful to distinguish the theoreticians, the actor-playwrights, the writers, the combinations

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of writer-director, or of writer-company, etc. In the case of Blin and Genet, with Les Paravents (The Screens) at least, there was a real encounter. In his Letters to Roger Blin, Genet says some very powerful things about this. For us, the most important thing is to be ready to welcome the poet in the theatre. We need to be a good tool in the hands of such a poet. And the poet’s task is to allow free rein on the imagination of the actors. Each must give to the other the freedom and the means to go further. If those aspects of the play that concern the actors’ bodies are too prescribed and if the author tries to pre-empt the place of the actor, then those aspects cannot be ‘written’ by the actor, nor can they be played or improvised. In short, nothing can ‘move’. Jean Perret: Concerning authors and texts, I should like to come back to the fundamental role that you have always ascribed to improvisation. You once said: ‘Improvisation is fundamental to creation: the actor who improvises is an author.’ Ariane Mnouchkine: I may have said that. It describes a kind of author, an author seeking to collaborate with another author. Let us not forget that it is the actor who gives a work its final shape. Jean Perret: You have often fallen back on forms of theatre, or prescribed forms of acting, which take shape in ancient traditions – commedia dell’arte, clowning, masked performance, fairground theatre, Japanese Noh, etc., as we saw in L’Age d’or and in the Shakespeares. Why is this? Ariane Mnouchkine: Because we were quite simply engaged in performance research. But rather than speaking of ‘prescribed forms’ I would prefer to call them points within a tradition. I do not believe in the tabula rasa. It is true that we have spent much time researching the origins of theatre, and have gained rich materials from such research. Nothing is invented. Nothing is created from nothing. Everything is transformed. This is true in art as well. It’s as though there exists a great original river on which the thousands of actors navigate who have repeatedly reinvented theatre. I always long to swim in the currents of that river. Is this pride or modesty? I cannot say. Jean Perret: Saying that, you make me think of Jacques Lecoq. His teaching runs through all those traditions and forms of theatre, in the same spirit, I think? Ariane Mnouchkine: No doubt that is why we got on well together. When I met Lecoq I knew very little. Jean Perret: When you speak of origins and of transformation, no doubt you do so in the same spirit as Lecoq in his pedagogy?

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Ariane Mnouchkine: In rediscovering you transform. You set off; you learn. You rediscover; you transform. That, at least, is the path we take. We invent nothing. We rediscover the essential. I remember a rather tempestuous working session with an Italian Harlequin because we failed to place our feet at exactly the same angle as he placed his. But whereas he started from feet up, our way was to start from Harlequin’s desire to escape. There were two kinds of feet involved: ours which were passionate, and his which were a bit too conformist, too ‘conservatoire’ if you like, too mechanical. He said: ‘By starting on the front foot you call everything I do into question’. He was deeply disturbed to see a different Harlequin, but one whose reality he could not deny. When I speak of rediscovering origins, that’s what I mean. Rather than a Harlequin who can do a perfect somersault, I would almost prefer to see a Harlequin who believes he can do one. Jean Perret: But when we think of oriental theatre, would you give the same answer as you do concerning the commedia dell’arte? Would you see the same contrast between ‘fixity’ and ‘transformation’? Ariane Mnouchkine: No, because it is something different. For me oriental theatre is something that is much more internalised. It deals in forms that are absolute and metaphysical. I go to it for nourishment. Oriental theatre is the region of the gods. How does a god walk on stage? This is a real question. You have to work at it. Jean Perret: If I understand rightly, you feel it is indispensable to experiment with the most ancient forms of performance in order to find the answer to that question? Ariane Mnouchkine: The proof is that oriental theatre has solved it. It has come up with so many different gods, with so many different ways for a god to walk on stage. But theatre cannot help being different, according to whether the actor wears a mask, or this or that kind of costume, whether he speaks in verse or prose, whether the work is classical or modern, etc. Walking in verse is not the same thing as walking in prose. But some actors demand too much of their bodies. One must avoid the trap of narcissism, whether of body or of voice. The actor must accept the necessary constraints. Of course if we were engaged in a dance theatre like Kathakali, which requires so much training and bodily discipline, then we would have to go much further. But for a commedia gesture, a willing, flexible body is sufficient. Take Harlequin’s somersault, which I mentioned. There are two kinds: there is the acrobatic somersault which is dry and then there is the somersault of terror or of joy, which is magnificent. Doing a somersault to get off stage is nothing. That is the essential difference.

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Jean Perret: What internal framework do you base your work on? What is the performative framework? Ariane Mnouchkine: We begin by imagining a kingdom of images. This kingdom is both discovered and invented by the actors in just the same way as children playing in a park invent different tribes. Actors have that childlike quality: they have the power, and the courage, to find the child in themselves, the child explorer, the heroic child. This is the essential quality for an actor. Jean Perret: As it is for artists in general? Ariane Mnouchkine: Of course – and for directors as well; if not, nothing could develop at all. Jean Perret: And what about physical training, what is your approach and your practice? Ariane Mnouchkine: No forced marches, no attempt to break in the actor’s body with gymnastic routines. We stretch and warm up at the same time as the musicians are tuning up. Jean Perret: You spoke just now of your collaboration with Hélène Cixous for Sihanouk. Do you now intend to seek other writers, and if so of what kind? Ariane Mnouchkine: Clearly, when good fortune brings together a writer and a company, such as happened for us with Cixous and Sihanouk, it’s like a miracle: the coming together of two kinds of writing, that of the author and that of the actor. Jean Perret: All the same, if you do not read other writers, other manuscripts, are you not worried that you may miss the great poet you hope to encounter? Ariane Mnouchkine: I don’t think so. If such an author exists, we will not fail to meet. What I do know is that a playwright needs a company and vice versa. When a playwright appears on stage with a scene freshly written, he expects a test, a confirmation; if this does not happen, there is nothing. When Cixous saw the work that we were doing on the Shakespeares, following each stage, she realised that there are certain laws of the theatre, and she continues to reflect on them. If, for example, the playwright fails to respect the laws of movement that are particular to theatre, the play will fail. I believe that theatre is best when it is fanatically theatrical. This is its one chance of survival. It will never be satisfactory as journalism, television, or cinema. Neither can it just be literature. It has to remember that it is theatre. Jean Perret: Truer than truth? Ariane Mnouchkine: It must free up the physical imagination of the actor. It must make visible what, in ordinary life, remains invisible. It

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must ‘make believe’ by means of a universe of images. Theatre must reveal what is forgotten in daily life. Jean Perret: That reminds me of Henri Michaux speaking of the gestures of actors in China in his book Un barbare en Asie (A Barbarian in Asia), when he describes a mime showing a glass into which he poured water. There was no glass and no water, but one really saw them. By the way, what do you think of mime? Ariane Mnouchkine: I dislike the word ‘mime’. I have seen too many actors stiffened, deformed by going through mime training. They were in prison. The sole exceptions are those who were trained by Lecoq. He avoids that. Mime is too often a deformation, a kind of formalism, or censorship. Look at Shakespeare and at what he offers to the physical imagination of the actor: mad with joy in one line, mad with grief the next, the human being is there in all its entirety in each succeeding instant. And only the body can translate that. This explains the necessary flexibility of the actor’s body. The body has to do what is instantaneous. Jean Perret: In theoretical and artistic terms, which is the tradition you feel closest to? Who do you feel has influenced you most? Ariane Mnouchkine: Jacques Copeau, Charles Dullin, Jean Vilar; I admire and believe in all three. An actor’s view of a theatre of movement by Alain Gautré Over the passage of time, certain images have become fixed in my memory, forming part of my collection of snapshots, my mnemonic filing-system. One evening an actor’s movement might call up this ‘essential’ realm, revealing what theatre should always be (an illusion, since if theatre was only made up of such vivid moments, the beauty would be banal). How can one forget this actress in Strehler’s production of Campielo whose character was so shy that what began as the turn of the head then involved the shoulders, then the whole body as she traced a spiral of self-effacement which led her blushing to the ground. How can one forget this puppet of the devil in a production by Théâtre de Travers, a Swiss troupe that disappeared prematurely, who closes the curtains of the booth with a cackling laugh and then a second later looms up in front of us larger than a life, an actor wearing a devil’s mask? And possibly the most beautiful of all the images from this period was that of Abdullah/Harlequin (Philippe Caubère in l’Age d’or The Golden Age), an immigrant who is returning home to a room packed to bursting, disturbing all those asleep, where he has to squeeze himself in by standing upside down, his feet in the air and his head and shoulders on the

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ground – while the audience forgets that this is only a solitary actor on an empty stage. In Gevrey-Chambertin with the company Chapeau Rouge (Red Hat), we have a scene where the young Vincent is working himself up by playing his guitar alone in his room. The image was open to interpretation since the guitar was imaginary. Was this only for the benefit of the actor who was miming? Or was it also for the child whose mother couldn’t buy him one? Later when we played this scene in the Eastern bloc countries it acquired an extra force. The young people stamped their feet as if they were really at one of those rock and roll concerts of which they were culturally deprived. The movement had become a symbol. This very visual type of performance became internationally understood, and it’s no accident that this type of production is spreading today. The audience’s eye, accustomed to a diversity of images which has come to it through the cinema, television, print media, strip cartoons, video, has become open to a new way of seeing. Movement, in the widest sense of the word, has had a large part to play in this process. When Théâtre du Soleil presented its version of Shakespeare – in French – at the Los Angeles Olympic Games (there is a strange similarity between the sportsman and the epic actor both of whom have to move with great precision) the audience was thrilled. They didn’t understand everything but they did grasp the essence. This stylised acting, emblematic of theatre in the broadest sense of the word, reconceived with borrowings from the east (the influence of Kabuki and Kathakali), is a faithful reference back to the limitless theatre of Shakespeare. Taking Artaud at his word: ‘the actor is an athlete of the heart’, Théâtre du Soleil returns to the text through the body, and the force of their productions (several hours at a stretch without concentration flagging for a moment) is a reminder of a theatre which we thought had been lost: one which has an insane degree of generosity which places the living actor under an obligation to take up the challenge of the poem. And the French audiences are also delighted when Footsbarn gives, in English, its version of King Lear or Hamlet. Actors, jugglers, musicians, street performers interpret Shakespeare in their own way, which is to sum up the action of a scene in a short pantomime, refining, paring away, stripping it down to its working parts. The least of the paradoxes is that here Shakespeare is entirely respected in his essence. In King Lear, which swings between story telling and street parade, a cast of eight takes on thirty roles. One actress plays Cordelia and one of her sisters at the same time. And in one dialogue it was riveting to see her shift from one character to the other with nothing more than a mask and cape.

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Footsbarn knows how to make something positive out of this primitive poverty: even when they became successful, they never departed from the simplicity of means which can so suddenly lay things bare because the actor treats the author like a brother, an equal. Thus theatre companies travel across the world. The image is one of the most reliable mainstays of this theatre of tomorrow. It is true that, bringing down the barriers of language opens up imaginary universes which can take on the job of words, even if this was not the aim. In the same vein as in yesterday’s theatre there was a burgeoning of shows where the message had an influence on how they were produced, so today’s triumphant aesthetic draws us more towards fashionable clichés than to the truth of the poet (or playwright). Today (irrespective of whether we rejoice or bemoan the fact) we think less, and shows with little or no text have a future since, economically speaking, they are so much more exportable. This is why they proliferate. However, let’s not spoil our pleasure; if there are things to reject, there are also things to retain, and we can see the tightrope walkers of tomorrow’s theatre develop their art on wires which stretch from continent to continent. View from a Frenchman in the stalls

Comfortably settled in our seats, we half-heartedly followed developments in French theatre, when a succession of shocks reached us from abroad to jolt us out of our apathy. The Living Theatre overturned our lives not only because it cried out for the body and soul to be reconciled, there was also a direct challenge to the audience to become involved in the performance. In short, an unmediated subversion of theatre (Paradise Now) and equally a language unknown to us, with a revolutionary use of the body, all of which came together in an alchemical chorus, made French theatre quake in its boots as never before. We discovered urgency. The actor was no longer used as a sign. He became the engine of the image, and for those of us who had not known Dullin, this extremist style of performance which pushed movement toward style and posture, seriously put a flea in our ear. Today some of these images seem clumsy (actors lying on their backs in an imaginary boat with their arms raised to imitate the wind or waves) – that’s to say repetitive, for example, in the tableaux vivants in Mysteries and Smaller Pieces. But one cannot deny that Living Theatre were the first to tear theatre away from a certain conventionality. This was a turning point. These actors in jeans, created grimacing totems. This work on myths took theatre back to its primitive role. As for ritual, these men and women who finally moved differently, gave value to the pelvis being the centre of the body, using sexual drive as

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a revolutionary tool. In effect they were epoch-making – a necessary epoch. The influence of Living Theatre once digested became forgotten in favour of others. Thus El Teatro Campesino, a troupe of Mexican extraction based in California chose as their performance style a loose form of commedia dell’arte. Their first concern was to serve the interest of striking workers in the vineyards. French companies such as the Carriera and Troupe Z took inspiration, with more or less positive results, from this very free attitude and from the highly developed level of these Chicanos whose leader, Luis Váldez, had worked with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the firebrand of radical protest in the United States. In the same vein but with a different performance aesthetic came the giant puppets of Bread and Puppet. Inspired by the Bible and other foundational myths, they re-read the Vietnam era. Peter Schumann, a German émigré in the United States, became the expressionist apostle of a new testament, the force of his theatre lying in the mix of mask/actor/ puppet (the latter could be giant masks covering the actor’s body). We discovered the virtues of refinement or how a crystal teardrop can course incessantly down a cheek (the mask of one of the ‘grey mothers’ whose sons had been killed by the forces of order). Bread and Puppet’s work went a long way towards symbolic representation, which led to them presenting an opaque silence streaked with bursts of red (Fire). Aestheticism was just round the corner. However this hyperstylisation had been preceded a little earlier by a performance of an entirely different colour (for if Bread and Puppet had caught our eye, it didn’t provoke our enthusiasm). Where had our comfortable seats gone? We were standing and being herded by metal structures on castors to one rostrum after another to follow the course of a very fragmented story. In one part of the Baltard buildings in Les Halles, superb Italian actors performed Orlando Furioso, based on Ariosto’s epic poem. We didn’t speak Italian but we were transported. Enough has been said about Luca Ronconi’s style of direction and his removal of the division between stage and auditorium. But the fluency of the forty actors reconciled us with the artificiality of the piece. All this (the talent which seemed to involve no sacrifice, the acting style which devoured life in its impact, and the processions) made us fantasise about circus, music hall and the fairground. It was the Dionysiac actor. A few years later, Dario Fo arrives as the bard of burlesque epic. In The Resurrection of Lazarus he brings to life sixteen characters all on his own, sweeping us along in his truculent Mistero Buffo. The epic actor, through the single force of his performance can project and illuminate each

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character simply through a change of posture or the finesse of a move – all humanity is contained in his entertainer’s bag of tricks. Now we can return to our seats. This is just as well because the shock had been brutal – sweeping away anything to do with reason, all references to any order in the world, whatever they might be. Bob Wilson is a painter (he studied architecture as well). He based Deafman Glance on the experience of a black boy who lost the power of speech and hearing after witnessing a black woman stabbing two children. The 1972 performance in Paris lasted four hours (it took seven hours when it opened). Aragon wrote an open letter, beyond the grave, to André Breton: ‘I have never seen anything so beautiful in the world since I was born’. He spoke of those who were ‘neither dancers nor actors but experimenters in a science as yet unnamed – that of the body and its liberty’. It was a premonition. The curtain opens on a young black boy who is seated, dressed in a black robe with a black crow on his wrist. A chair descends from the flies so slowly that we are astonished when, after several hours, it touches down on the ground. There is a corps de ballet of twenty-four black nannies dancing in slow motion on a beach, Plato’s cave, and a frog who cries. At the back of the stage, a sportsman in shorts runs up and down, his metronomic to and fro subject to infinitesimal variations, and

Figure 35 Dario Fo with Jacques Lecoq and students from the School. Justin Case.

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so on. Hypnotised, I fell asleep and when I woke up I hadn’t MISSED any thing. The show continued on and I had dreamed the interval. Flemish artist Jan Fabre follows in Wilson’s footsteps and in one of his shows he recommends that the audience leave the performance and take a break – a victory of discontinuity, fragmentation and abstraction. The difference in this theatre lies in the fact that Bob Wilson addresses each person’s unconscious and not the audience as a social body. The actor isn’t very important, but the person is. On stage there are dancers, the mentally ill, actors, etc. Is this, theatre of memory, theatre of silence, perhaps? The door opens onto a poetry of space. As Aragon once said: ‘So! Is this not the very Surrealism that is for you a closed book, only fit for academic theses? But this is what we were dreaming of; this is the future that we predicted.’ Tadeusz Kantor is also a painter and a sculptor as well. He puts bodies on stage that resemble twilight mannequins. Identification with the characters is impossible since Kantor directs the actors on stage while they perform, playing himself but on another level. In Ou Sont Les Neiges d’Antan? (Where are the Snows of Yesteryear?) he is separated from the audience by the same piece of rope as the actors and a skeleton is attached at the end of this rope. There is a grotesque force at work here – a circus world revisited by metaphysics. The characters jostle and soldiers grimace. The Jew who is shot gets up to sing and then falls down again. The dynamic resembles that of the circus ring. In Qu’il crèvent, les artistes! (Let the Artists Die) the characters, each of whom bears their individual instrument of torture on their back, all turn towards the General who is mounted on the skeleton of a horse, while the army shouts ‘almost’. In this non-realist theatre which aims only at the real, the actor’s performance is short-circuited. In this clown-like mode we expect an extension, a release in the movement. Rather than this and faced with this over-large space, the actor gathers himself in, a crumpled old moon without a halo. Kantor is seeking to provoke a feeling of death in this broken impulse. In this light Dead Class (1976) remains his most successful piece. Children with fixed smiles sit behind their school desks with the actors, wax dummies. In France manic-depressive shocks somehow or other follow these fashions as they pass through. Rare indeed are those like Ariane Mnouchkine who can integrate BOTH Orlando Furioso AND Bread and Puppet (in 1789). One should note that the Théâtre du Soleil has always lived up to its name since they (even the notion of a troupe is relative: how many of the original troupe remain today?) have ceaselessly managed

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to reinterpret traditional forms of theatre. Judge for yourself: clowning (in Les Clowns), processional theatre (in 1789), commedia dell’arte (in L’Age d’or), satirical cabaret (in Méphisto), and the stylisation of oriental theatre in their productions of Shakespeare. Melodrama alone remains, although it is considered a minor form. However, there is one person in France who has made this form his own, Jérome Savary, and no doubt because through its childlike eyes one can sees the world’s absurdity writ large. Although tears are never far from smiles in his work, he has managed to deck out the misery of sequins to the point where he makes them beautiful. Savary brings us back to a theatre which our generation needs – to the energy of circus, of music hall, of melodrama. ‘The Grand Magic Circus and its Sad Animals’ is today, a sign of the times. The animals have gone and only the magic remains. The flavour of the month is modernity, which is decked out positively. With some justification Savary insists that he hasn’t changed, and that he’s not responsible for the fact that the marginal has taken centre ground. Nonetheless, he does take himself to be Busby Berkeley. The background becomes blurred. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, because when sequins no longer hide the tears, all you have left is sequins. On the other hand it’s true that there has been some positive fall-out from the post ’68 events, and that it is still being felt today. It unbridled the imagination. It was the epoch in which the actor could dream of joining the circus. The Theatre Zingaro, ‘equestrian and musical cabaret’ of today was in the same vein as Circus Bonjour and The Palace of Wonders which flourished then. Minorities spoke up for themselves and we saw an increase in the number of performers cross-dressing. One could cite the Mirabelles who popularised this genre with some talent, or Copi who is also an author of some note. He succeeded in injecting back into melodrama some of the violence of contemporary marginal culture, for example in Les Escaliers du Sacré-Coeur (The Steps of the Sacré Coeur), when the action focuses upon a miserable public urinal. But paradoxically, we must offer our continuing praise to another company – the Théâtre de l’Unité – who in their production of L’Avare & Co after Molière’s The Miser applied Brecht’s theory of alienation in their own characteristic way. It was they who brought Le Carnaval des Ténèbres (the Carnival of Shadows) to Saint-Quentin-en-Yevelines. Anyone who has not seen Hervée de Lafond in La Femme Chapiteau (The Circus Woman) play a giant, underneath whose skirts they are performing Romeo and Juliet has seen nothing. The Théâtre de l’Unité marks a return to the Dionysiac rites.

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The actor face to face with his desire

It’s commonplace to say that all actors move, but it’s a rare thing to see an actor move correctly, and rarer still to see one moving and acting truthfully. The courage to push a physical posture to its limit and moreover to let this come from an inner impulse isn’t something you frequently see on stage (because excessive stylisation without inner life also exists). I can still see that moment in Marivaux’s La Fausse Suivante, where Michel Piccoli is playing Trivelin, miming the love scene between the knight and the countess, contorting himself like a lubricious liana. How astonishing! It’s true that Patrice Chéreau knows how to set up encounters that will enrich his theatre. This explains how someone like Benoît Régent, in the role of the policeman in The Screens, could offer the director something that he wanted, but which he couldn’t pin down. It was an outlandish way of acting, close to clowning, where the movement exaggerated the feeling. You just had to see this lamentable representative of public order face to face with the Algerian mother muddling up his ‘tu’ and ‘vous’. The audience laughed until they cried. Because today it is actors who through their own very personal approach help to transform the shows in which they find themselves. I’m thinking of Christian Colin. In Méphisto, staged by Ariane Mnouchkine, he was the stooge who played Hitler (with a stocking pulled over his head onto which was stuck the moustache and the hairpiece) and who at the end of the sequence fell to pieces like a puppet slung over the railing. This is an example of that demanding actor, who not only writes his roles with his body and cannot tolerate those who perform with indifference but also has this marvellous contemporary capacity to pass with consummate ease from the most acrobatic of acting styles to one which is stripped bare, while dreaming of a combination of the two. Because today the actor likes to take risks and go to extremes, the walls are coming down between genres and styles. Finally a fresh wind is blowing. Buoyed along by the liberating current of the 1970s (express yourself!), encouraged by the aesthetic hygiene of the 1980s (long live the body!), the guilt-free body of today’s young actor assumes a formidable power of seduction. The pleasure is reciprocated. Actors like to move, to act ‘bigger’ and to enjoy themselves. Most still find themselves in the service of directors whose reign on stage is still not at an end, but an increasing number are throwing themselves into independent productions. The actor’s hour has come, and the Avignon Festival hasn’t been wrong over the past few years in giving a free reign to certain actors to present their own work, which will in some respects be their own view of the world.

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Thus there is a new imagination being expressed, different from that of the recognised authors writing today. And, returning to Benoît Régent as a symptom of this trend, the reason why he founded a company with Philippe Fretun was basically because he has always been a little bit unhappy, dreaming of a high-risk theatre that is built upon improvisation and open research into a poetry which he reckons he encounters all too rarely when working as a paid actor. Gerbe de Blé (Wheatsheaf), a completely wordless show, was a parable about food in western countries, and opened with Fretun as a monk peeling vegetables, then putting them into a pot of boiling water to cook. Then Régent’s head emerges from the pot to fix us with a stare. The dream isn’t always a question of big money. Bertolt Brecht, the ‘great codifier’, loved clowns, operetta and cabaret – arts in which there is movement (moreover the more you move the more coded it becomes, and when it no longer moves it gesticulates). If Brecht had known Fernand Raynaud he would have liked him. Fernand Raynaud was a great mime. You had to see him playing a whole regiment with a brass band at the front. He was also a great actor. He did variety, then cabaret, and then music hall. Those who worked with him learned something they’ll never learn anywhere else: direct contact with the audience, for better or worse. When a spectator gets bored in the theatre today, this, alas, is considered a matter of no importance. In cabaret it’s another kettle of fish – what a fantastic school! To create something short is one of the most difficult things to do (some would be saved by a return to this genre – not everyone is born for things that go on and on). In cabaret a movement was an observation – mimes, story-tellers, singers all moved. It was question of professional ethics. When Maurice Chevalier sung Ma Pomme (My Apple) he mimed the words of the song. Naturalism would have been an inconceivable style of performance for such actors (whereas today in café-theatres we are asked to accept a certain heartfeltness, a natural talent, as a language, but which is only the laidback attitude of a generation. Zeami, the Noh master, said: ‘Do not confuse the flower of youth with a real flower’.) Certain actors, influenced by this anti-Naturalistic tendency, return to mime, to circus, to all these more or less parallel arts, which they re-introduce into theatre. Today it’s taken for granted, but in the 1950s it took someone like Jacques Lecoq to dream up a theatre that did not exist anywhere. He had to wait until his heirs had grown up, when the seeds he had sown could be scattered to the four corners of the earth. So what other place was there, apart from cabaret, in the 1950s, while we waited? Raymond Devos, Bernard Haller soon learned to promote themselves so that they had top billing on posters for any music hall

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performance or theatre. We then witnessed the appearance of Avron and Évrard who although working separately today, brought out the best in each other (Évrard playing Sganarelle in Don Juan, overwhelming in his humanity; Avron, a metaphysical actor, touching upon the secret of life in Big Bang). The 1960s and 1970s ushered in a new wave of actor/authors, solo artists who started to go beyond the sketch and make full-length pieces, working alongside comedians and poets. The solitude of the solo performer sets up a different relationship with the audience. Their movements highlight more clearly the emptiness surrounding the character. The silence is denser and the movement more affecting. It is as if when a number of actors are on stage a chemical process like precipitation leads to a sense of superfluity. In order to hear silence with many people on stage a certain way of working is required (like that of Peter Brook). From the start magic is at work in Les Trois Cents Dernières (The Last Three Hundred). It started with an unknown performer trotting out an oldfashioned number and then came a power cut. There was a public outcry. And in the dark one of us was heard asking, ‘Is anything wrong?’ The lights came on again and this person was straddling the stage and the auditorium with one foot already on stage. ‘Am I bugging anyone?’ Rufus, was the actor’s name. The character didn’t have one. It makes no difference, a clown without make-up. ‘Is anyone there?’ The pregnant pauses in his story contrast with the awkward garrulousness of his gestures. He has a stringy body, an unspeakable tenderness. People saying serious things in a light voice made their way on stage from a side door – pearls (and rare ones). It hadn’t yet become this incredible market. Perhaps it helped to exorcise something. It wasn’t routine. One day I was struck by Zouc who was appearing in a programme on laughter. I was thunderstruck but this came from nowhere. There are certain essential people who make you realise that not everything is mediocre. Zouc needles your sense of morality and makes his contemporaries blush to the roots of their hair. Embodying his characters with a hallucinatory truth, whether they be a little girl, a woman on the telephone, a screaming child or an old person in a hospice, we see a gallery of living characters file before us, a gallery whose laughable tics and quirks puts them alongside Goya’s Grotesques. As for Philippe Caubère, he is one of the actors whose body is breathtakingly adaptable. He called his first show La Danse du Diable (The Devil’s Dance); in truth the devil was him. He moved like a leaping flame. He spurned traditional vertical stance, crawling, jumping and exploring sometimes diagonals, sometimes medians. The audience took equal

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pleasure in the actor’s grace as he returned to the sources, in this biography that belongs to today’s creators who know how to draw from their childhood what is the most personal and therefore the most universal. The child in his room, summoning up his idols in secret. Suddenly there’s a noise – his mother. He asks General de Gaulle, Johnny Halliday and Jean-Paul Sartre to hide under the carpet. Such are the dynamics of the imagination. But there are nuances in the solitude: between one who projects and seduces you in this way (Caubère) and another who absorbs the spectator and guides him to silence, like the Belgian Yves Hunstad who bears witness in his solitude on stage to the solitude of us all. In Hello Joseph! he takes the role, among others, of an old peasant whom he plays with a half mask. As you begin to engage in the story of his life, in his gestures and enthusiasms, he dies. It is gripping to watch the actor live this section as he gently takes off the mask, and makes the return to himself coincide with his character’s departure. I haven’t yet mentioned those purveyors of the bizarre who know how to stretch out a really complicated gag or a weighty riposte. Here is Christian Péreira who sweeps before us one fine day, lighting up the stage with his head bedecked with Chinese lanterns. Or Jean-Pierre Sentier who commits suicide in the distance (Faut-il déterrer les morts? (Should we dig up the dead?)) thanks to a system of pulleys and ropes which set off a pistol which is fixed in front of him. Over his career Sentier has foreshadowed many of today’s theatre makers in every detail. Having done a solo mime number in cabaret, he created a number of solo mime shows in the 1970s; then he made a film Le Jardinier (The Gardener) (‘the last comic film before the war’) and two years later, Un Bruit qui court (A sound that carries) which he co-produced with Daniel Laloux after their play, Le Coït Interrompu (Coitus Interruptus). It tells the story is of two men whom society has abandoned on a desert island. This work in the cinema is important. It takes us back to something absurd, mad, a truly fabulous mockery. It reinvents a lost language (for once let’s name those great figures from the past: Chaplin, Keaton, Tati) as well as its themes – lost innocence, wild passion, the quest for happiness – and the manner in which it treats them. The image evokes more than it explains, and in this open space, the slightest sign takes on the value of a symbol. It is as if the active contemplation of despair that characterises some of today’s great directors (e.g. Wim Wenders) has been combined with the density of postwar French actors. One always talks about these actors with regret: ‘ah, those supporting roles in the thirties’. It is at first a question of language. Most of these people came

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from theatre, that’s to say cabaret. Today one doesn’t play in an exaggerated way except in comic films. Often in boulevard theatre it’s a question of a non-style of acting, whose dynamic comes from acting without emotion. Where someone like Sentier is important is that he projects a treatment of the story that obliges the actor to stylise his acting. At its best the film can become a poem. If the world of Terry Gilliam (Brazil; 1985) is so coherent in its excessiveness, it’s in part for the same reason. The paradox is that a certain type of cinema is ready to take on the most talented movement actors (Farid Chopel in La Vengeance du serpent à plumes) but, not knowing how to direct them, ruins their work. There are actors today whose talent for depicting character is equal to that of a Carrette or others who equal Jules Berry. Tomorrow (by default?) they will be the ones making cinema. Returning to the cabaret, who are the heirs of the Frères Jacques and Maurice Baquet? Today musicians feel this appeal of theatre very strongly, an appeal that dancers know so well. Movement has always got on well with music. It’s the story of rhythm. Lacombe and Asselin, one short and fat, the other tall and skinny, would play theatrically on their differences: the double bass would become a boat and the violin a paddle. Six cylinders in the shape of a V, resembling a brass band, offer themselves to us as a tribe, halfway between clown and bouffon. Those who have pushed the alchemical cocktail the furthest (the untidiness of a movement provokes a distortion of a note, while a fluffed note sets off a whole clown routine) are the three delirious Flemish performers, De Nieuwe Snaar. All these characters are fleshed out, convincing and exploiting the music that they perform with accomplishment, and they open the door to a new genre, dramatic variety (which Jacques Lecoq had foretold). For cabaret hasn’t finished haunting our memories. One unique French theatre troupe is a living testament to this. From La grande magie circule (Great Magic Travels) to Fantaisistes (Fantasists), the Biscuit qui craque group (The Crunchy Biscuit Group) has been calling upon music hall, cabaret and Belgian stories, working in that gap which humour traditionally seeks to fill. Stringing together a series of numbers with brio (you simply have to ‘hear’ their homage to the Pétomane) like adherents of a religion which no longer believes in God but celebrates Mass to perfection. There is no longer anything to do, and they do it, taking the poetry beyond the ‘flop’, attesting to a talent which is the mark of a politeness, that of despair. In the 1970s there were a number of us who defended the ‘grotesque’ where laughter, coming from the tragedy of the living, would have lessened the combined impact of a neo-naturalism and an abusive

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intellectualism. Alas, the result exceeded our expectations. Laughter invaded everything, a permeation which contributed to a lowering of the demands it placed on audiences. It is true that one response to the agony of an economic crisis is the desire to dream. There corresponds a desire for lightness and forgetting the weight of everyday troubles. Thus laughter has become, somewhat abusively, a fashionable phenomenon with a festival here and a forum there, to such a point that Jango Edwards now goes down less well, despite his astonishing lunacy a few years back. The surrealist delirium which a while ago seemed revolutionary is no longer so today. In making itself banal it has become the norm. It is difficult to be constantly surprised by the absurd (just look at how advertising is constantly trying to go one better) and if someone like the Argentinian Carlos Trafic (O.K. Doc!) survives longer it’s because his cruelty is intact. All the talent of the real bouffons lies in their being able to go beyond the pathological to lead us to the poetic. The laughter he provokes has nothing to do with the laughter we were talking about above. Each time he performs, Trafic risks his life. And, happily, that remains the yardstick of theatre. Nonetheless, let’s not ignore the elegance of certain princes of the absurd. If the burlesque is coming back in force, sometimes it’s for the better, often for the worse. The Spaniard, Albert Vidal, has always sought to push back the limits of theatre. In Charter (1975) he mimed an airport all on his own and it was breathtaking. He pushed pantomime to the point of acrobatics, performing a ‘fish dive’ to simulate a jet landing. Then he brought each painting to life in a gallery for us as he stood in front of it. There was also Marx’s Das Kapital which was treated as a wrestling match. More recently there was his Urban Man where Vidal toured to all the zoos in the world and took his enclosure alongside all the other animals. There we saw him shave himself, drink beer, make telephone calls, etc. You can’t discuss humour without mentioning the clown. I will always remember that little circus in Sweden where Joe Jackson, already an old man, was doing the bicycle routine that he’d inherited from his father. There were a few of us who energetically applauded this great ‘Auguste’ clown. He seemed flattered, if a little surprised. He wasn’t familiar with the ‘clown complex’ in theatre. He was just doing his job. The humour of the 1970s nourished the human (while the 1980s took performance as its point of departure). And it was here that the derisory style of clowning blossomed. Solo acts and companies were born. Those who survived the longest were those who brought some black humour into the mix. For example, Amédée Bricolo plays on the

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theme of his own death in Nécromédie (in order to make no noise while committing suicide he stuffs the barrel of his revolver with cotton wool). Another example is Smol, who begins as a great jolly clown (with his round red nose) and ends up as a worrying character (with a blue square nose) who is libidinous, fascistic, deeply sad. He opens out his huge flasher’s coat and two puppets dressed up as bride and groom appear, with death between them. Then he hangs himself by his own belt, while devouring the head of one of his creatures. You cannot escape the cliché that the great comics are always tragic. Amongst these are the Czech Bolislav Polivka who with his giant puppet’s body leads us into an unheard of universe of tenderness and cruelty. Laughter is like a distress call, comforting and wounding. The actor within a company

There are two ways of looking at theatres of movement. Either the image speaks for itself with the actor being used like an object (Bob Wilson and the whole trend of art theatre right up to Richard Foreman), or the actor speaks, and generates his own images. In which case several performers get together and this leads to a company being formed. There has been much talk of collective creation. In its true sense this term tapped into a considerable aspiration, but under the cover of individual opinions, there emerged the spectre of monotheism (the voice of the group). In fact the reality was (and is) often more simple. Actors wanting to bear witness to contemporary reality (theirs, ours) could not find sufficient echoes of this either at the level of content or in the dynamics of existing texts. Using improvisation to open up virgin territory, they created a language in which movement and words suddenly found themselves on an equal footing. After all, this way of going about theatre isn’t as new as all that. Everyone knows that Molière used rehearsals with his actors to generate new material. As for Shakespeare, allow me to cite Gordon Craig: Here is the secret which confronts us: [. . .] we marvel at the order which is sustained across this long series of plays, and at the same time we marvel at their uneven quality. It doesn’t seem possible to us that a human brain could have committed such an egregious contradiction. But grant Shakespeare the collaborators of his time – actors – and the enigma ceases to be obscure. Thus collective composition in the literal sense, is an illusion. There is often a director who is part of the group, often an actor, who synthesises

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Figure 36 Complicite Mnemonic directed by Simon McBurney, devised by Theatre de Complicite. Original production opened in 1999 (co-production with the Salzburg Festival). McBurney founded the company in 1983 with Annabel Arden and Marcello Magni, who also trained at the school. Sebastian Hoppe.

the improvisations and gives them a body. But it’s the actor’s imagination which creates the flesh of the performance. The act of dressing up, of making up stories, of playing, that the actor shares with the child, are taken to another level in these companies. The Théâtre de la Jeune Lune (New Moon Theatre) for example, offered a new perspective on the crisis of 1929 (in a show of the same name) at once paying homage to musical comedy, to burlesque and to American melodrama. Seriousness doesn’t necessarily entail boredom, quite the contrary – there are many of these companies (distant cousins of commedia dell’arte, you could say) who tended to prove this during the 1970s. But once you get beyond a certain youthful stage where the creative dynamic is a mix of faith and enthusiasm (not excluding political commitment), you come up against the problem of the author. Certain troupes managed to stow one away within the troupe; for example, Alain Gautré in Chapeau Rouge (Red Hat), but the secret perhaps lay in the fact that I was already an actor who wanted to write. Then, Pierre Pradinas, the director of the company, took up the baton from me. When all is said and done, writing for the theatre involves the staging as a whole (above all in experimental work where words and movement are interchangeable). Other companies like the Théâtre de la Jacquerie found in Jean-Pierre Chabrol an author who they could commission several times.

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But the meaning of the very word ‘company’ has evolved. Families have expanded and maturity has given them to confidence to invite actors from outside of the original core. At the same time, permanent members of the troupe have wanted to work elsewhere. Thus one can observe in this process of mutual enrichment the coloured skein of tomorrow’s theatre. Three case studies

Farid Chopel is the guiding actor of his generation. He is among those creators who attract a new audience to theatre spaces by playing on an ambiguity. This audience doesn’t like theatre because it finds it boring, and prefers rock concerts and cinema. Do they like Chopel? Ah yes, but that’s not theatre! So what do you call it then? Besides, everyone pleads their own case and will seek to draw it towards mime, clowning, and even dance. So it is hybrid and markets itself as such. It is truly fascinating to discover in his work the greater number of features which characterise the contemporary movement actor. Knowing practically nothing of socalled classical theatre, and very much influenced by strip cartoons and cinema, Chopel the actor-chameleon, forged his dancer’s body in the crucible of street-performance. It’s there that Chopélia (a pun on Délibe’s ballet Coppelia and his own name) and Les Aviateurs (The Aviators) were tried out before reaching their final form on the stage. But Chopel doesn’t like being pigeon-holed and could just as easily have had a career in cinema (he also dreams of revitalising the genre, imparting to it a humour whereby he conveys oddball characters through movement) if he hadn’t have been the kind of creator who is always on the move and who loves throwing his rubber body into experiences that come to him from all corners. In 1985 he returned to his roots (Puttin’ on my Boots, I’m goin’ back to my Roots) proposing to present a series of twenty improvisations/ performances of some of his favourite themes: the American ‘gumshoe’ detective, the descent of the Nile, the Italian Lothario, etc. In his shows he mixes languages with dexterity (who can forget his butterfly, who was flying by when his co-pilot was in agony: ‘Oh! una farfala!’). He sings and is the unchallenged master of improvised dance routines (or how to push a situation to the point of it becoming a choreographed routine, drawing it out to the point of abstraction). He is an instinctive creative artist who refuses any theorisation of his art. One distinguishing feature of those innovators of movement who have revolutionised theatre is that they don’t realise their own contribution to its history (while others, the more theoretically presumptuous, have invested body and soul in their claims to be part of the ‘movement’).

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Take the example of the Mexican Hound (De Mexicaanse Hond). At the beginning of Granite we see five men tied to a monolith trying in vain to drag it along. However, fearing that they may lose their poetic resonance, these Dutch artists refuse to talk about symbolic meanings, preferring to discuss the signifier: ‘Humour is everything, but not any old thing. It has its laws and they are very rigorous.’ In Luisman’s Law the teacher addresses his class with a cauliflower on his head: ‘Today we are going to talk about humour’. It is a gag all on its own. However a pupil replies: ‘Sir, you have a cauliflower on your head’. From that moment on anything can happen because of this basic transgression. In this way they constantly open gaps which provoke ellipses and so create a dizzying effect. With them characters act seriously in absurd situations. You can understand why they are compared to Beckett (the characters have no past, in the psychological sense of the term). But for Alex Van Warmedam, graphic artist, author, and director, the reference would be more to Laurel and Hardy (he quoted the example of Stan playing at hopscotch all by himself). They implode the comic effect in order to enter a zone of obsessional absurdism. However, they don’t see themselves in any particular theatrical tradition. The action is often broken up and background events often displace the main events. Bizarre things are always happening, as with the puma, which one is never sure whether it is there or not; or again with the character who while sleeping has his dreams projected above his head as a strip cartoon. Besides, this is how they start their creative work. Alex gathers together his friends, tells them of a dream he had, or shows them a drawing. The actors then ask questions and he is forced to dig deeper, to write. He also writes poems which composers set to music, this being one of the essential features of their shows. Let us not forget that it was the break-up of the group Hauser Orkater (Look at the Men Fall, 1979) that produced on the one hand The Mexican Hound, and on the other that genial acrobat Jim van de Woude (he was the original elastic man), who first tried working collectively (with De Honde) before going off on his own. It is always a pleasure to note that one of the people who has had the greatest effect on movement theatre in France came to it via the ComédieFrançaise. It is true that Jérôme Deschamps has said that this actually involves two different types of work. It’s now been more than ten years since he charmed us with his music, bitter-sweet like the wine that his characters pour for each other with care. In the Les Blouses (Tunics) you pull down a deer’s horn and the nectar pours through its mouth. In Précipitation (Rainfall), it is a drunk woman who slakes her thirst from a tap set in a pram, and so on. Prams are fetish objects which are found throughout his

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work. In Blanche Alicata, one explodes. Elsewhere, one provokes a hailstorm of popcorn. Objects have a wealth of talent in the work of Deschamps. As for the bodies of the characters they are twisted and grotesquely deformed as a result of any number of melodramatic vicissitudes. The laughable is laid bare; there is a dryness about his gags, around which he expresses a pathos, and a rare cruelty which modesty invests with a tenderness. His characters are often considered as losers and berks, yes and no. They are so human that they become universal. It’s true that Deschamps is able to surround himself with exceptional artists and that he doesn’t like actors who look like actors: ‘When a character comes on stage we want to be wondering whether he’s someone whose come in by mistake.’ So, is Deschamps a clown, an actor, a gag-teller or even a philosopher? In La Veillée, with his beard wrapped round his neck, his sandals and his striped shorts, he has his socio-cultural organiser say in his sprightly voice: ‘Urm. I believe that . . . if I could use this expression . . . urm . . . that this evening is given over to fun.’ Every aspect of the image

At the very moment that ideologies were taking flight and when video games reached as far as the metro, visual theatre had the wind in its sails. At first it blew in the United States where, in the wake of Bob Wilson, we saw a whole flotilla of ‘materialist’ poets arrive. If this new wave, which placed equal weight on sensation as upon sense, was to achieve its aim then it had to be technically precise. The fundamental idea that Bob Wilson introduced was that theatre should be conceived technically: ‘What is the timing of this piece, how does it develop? How many steps does it take to cover this distance, etc?’ In the best examples of this work we came across some touchstones of genius, polymath explorers (sculptors, choreographers, sound artists, puppeteers) like Mabou Mines, Meredith Monk or Winston Tong. They opened a theatre where it was no longer only the text which mattered. It was at this time that there was a happy misunderstanding concerning Le Bal (The Dance-Hall), a production by Campagnol, which was silent. Not a word was spoken, but music provided the through line from 1936 to the present day. This created a near-choreographic relation to space, in which, although the actor played in a stylised way, he nonetheless took part in a structured narrative (the Popular Front, the Algerian War, etc.). It was a triumph – indeed, a revelation for the 145,000 people who saw it. It marked a watershed: before Le Bal and after Le Bal. The misunderstanding lay in the fact that this kind of theatre already existed. But Pina Bausch wasn’t yet known in France and few people had seen Didier

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Flamand’s Prends bien garde aux zeppelins (Beware of the Zeppelins), a visual poem based on the 1914–18 war. This relation to memory (that distant mirror in which we see our present agonies reflected) where war is so deeply etched can also be found in Bernard Chartreux’s and Jean-Pierre Vincent’s wonderful Violences à Vichy (Violence in Vichy), which he conceived as an album of photos by means of which we can try to understand in a sensitive way how the French could take to the Pétain regime. (However the misunderstanding around Le Bal also lay in the public’s discovery of a style performance that no-one had employed until that moment. This reached the point where, for some years, the image was thrown back at you: ‘Oh so what you do is like Le Bal?’ How infuriating!) All these influences produced a new aesthetic, a series of more or less silent shows, some of which worked more happily than others. For, one has to say that today dance produces stronger works of theatre than theatre does when it seeks to integrate dance. Nonetheless, the phenomenon exists and will no doubt be developed in the years to come. Richard Demarcy is someone who hasn’t waited for fashion to catch him up. If he presents himself as ‘a poet of the active image’ it is because he works with sensory material in an almost Bachelardian way. He is one of those artists who elicits the greatest beauty in things when he uses them in their natural state: the iron of the forge and the water of spring, sand, dead leaves, etc. Sometimes he takes costly risks, like the time when he brought together the poetry of the swamps with that of the ocean depths (Albatross) using the framing device of a fish shop where the son of the family is transformed into an alligator. His actors know how to generate a naïve happiness, as for example in his Voyages d’Hiver (Winter Journeys), a wonderful bicycle trip around the stories of every country: ‘God loves cyclists, and on the day of your death he’ll lower a sunbeam to bring you right up to Him.’ There is an infinitely long list of those who have chosen the street as the means and venue for their performance, following the rediscovery of Carnival which takes over entire towns (Els Comediants) or choral pantomime which establishes a ritual (Akademia Ruchu), and not forgetting Royal de Luxe who with Watersplash propose a parable about contemporary violence (Mad Max-style fights employing huge canvasses, feathers and dead leaves raining down, all to a hard rock soundtrack). From these more or less collective events we find ourselves stopped in our tracks at the inevitable street corner by a talented solo street performer. For the laws of outdoor theatre are merciless. The tempo becomes a tightrope on which every false step brings the hapless walker

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back to earth with a bump. There are those whose playing of the crowd approaches genius. Among the thousand and one mimes that strut the world’s stage, we have to mention the unerring Zouzou whose oratorical qualities (sic) are worth crossing the road for. There is also someone who was dubbed ‘the man of the crowds’ by a friend of mine. He was the first, around 1975, to follow people in the street and, contrary to many of his future imitators, he did this with finesse. Not content to follow a fat person simply to imitate him, he would focus on his own size and make it thinner, and then strike up a dialogue with the fat man based on their respective girths (in a similar way, beside someone who had an evil look, he would take on the look of a victim). And then there’s Smith. Was he influenced by Farid Chopel or was it the other way round? Or was it the times which produced this kind of character: an undersised suit, a tightly knotted neck-tie, tortoiseshell spectacles, hat, attaché case – a caricature of the civil servant which was soon to become a uniform in the 1980s? So stylised was Smith’s way of performing that you could say that he almost danced this middle-ranking civil servant. Only walking in straight lines and forbidding himself curved movements, he offered a critique of mechanisation, which by a strange turn of fate was to become a fashion. Thus drummers, street performers, tight-rope walkers, mimes, fairground performers, not forgetting the Rat Tramp (‘le clochard au rat’) or the ‘Cowboy who could swallow razor blades’, all represent a culture which will not be written in the great book of culture, but whose countless audience makes certain theatres green with envy (bringing us to the example of Leo Bassi, a son of the circus who chose the street, and who is featured in the tourist brochures of certain travel agents). Mimes?

In this period of ideological retreat, mime is an untroubling art with a future ahead of it, particularly in the United States where it is in the process of becoming a major discipline alongside dance and theatre. And after all, in keeping with that pioneering spirit peculiar to the Americans, why should it not allow new currents to flourish? But there is equally a fear that it might become considered as a dogma (one can see those specialised reviews which will defend the cause of physical theatre, championing the worst as well as the best). The best, quite rightly, need do nothing to be considered part of this spiritual family. Daniel Stein, actor and sculptor, master of space and

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time, master of the human frame who can efface his own body (itself like a bird of prey) in such a way that we can believe that it is two chairs which are talking to each other (a memorable moment from Timepiece), is first and foremost, a poet. Above the hullabaloo that the theoreticians were making about the silent arts during a colloquium, Toby Sedgewick of Moving Picture Mime Show, was heard to say that he did mime because if he wanted to represent a dragon then it would be an awful lot cheaper than in so called ‘normal’ theatre. Was that a joke? One thing’s for certain: the performers of MPMS knew how to reinvent pantomime by breathing into it contemporary rhythms and humour. Hardly have these new storytellers finished sketching out one movement then they replace one image with the next, trusting in the audience’s ability to fill in the gaps for itself, thus piecing out the rest of the image in their minds. This in no way prevents them from creating pieces with spoken dialogue (Passionate Leave) alongside their mime cartoons (The Seven Samurai). It is true that they are English and that over there, whether mime or not, it is a lot easier to move from one genre to another than it is in France, always provided that this is accompanied by pleasure and intelligence. It is a healthy mentality. Thus David Glass advertises this approach on the posters for his one-man performance, The Shrinking Man. There is in contemporary mime an abstract trend (very much influenced by Decroux) which cannot be overlooked. The Belgian group Pyramid on its Point, and the French group Théâtre du Mouvement, lead us, against the swiftly moving current of our times, into an expanding universe where the aesthetic has a bearing upon the dramatic. There we find a real ascesis in which the actors religiously observe an art. Here there is no place for the social body, where the beautiful is a value in itself, where movement both hides and reveals the invisible. Sometimes there are bursts of humour, but the force of this theatre resides above all in its lyricism. Occupying an important place amongst those who have reshaped the concept of mime, Mummenschantz have been able to create a very personal world which is accessible to everyone, given the amount it relies on fragility, thus humour. Working on the ‘head-object’ (with masks like post-it notes where each player pulls off the preceding layer to sketch out a new expression; or masks of unparalleled tragedy since, being made of edible materials, the character eats himself alive, etc.) they have also created the body mask, a veritable moving sculpture. It is fascinating to watch balls, tubes, huge bits of material come alive and start exploring the full range of emotions.

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Finally, there exists in the French terrain of mime a sort of accident, an aristocrat of pantomime, entirely self-taught. He is young and he performs at speed, also trusting the audience to fill out the images themselves. In Recital, a menagerie consisting of forty numbers into which he dips at random, there is a scene called ‘Recalling the menagerie’. At the end he brings back the horse who takes his bow. The horse is a great success. Quite obviously it is imaginary. They call this man Philippe Bizot. He will be the last mime. The theatre of silence

If there is a community for whom gestures are a necessity, then it is for those whom we prudishly call the hard of hearing. The Theatre of the Deaf which was born in the United States has since spread across the world (Sweden, Germany, Israel, Portugal, etc.) And I should say that if one has never seen one of their productions then one cannot retrospectively understand the full meaning of the title of Bob Wilson’s Deafman Glance. The hearing of the deaf man is his sight, his speech, and his movements. In France, the International Visual Theatre of Vincennes was able to move from a piece of hyper-violent theatre (it was not a time for aesthetics but for urgent action: minorities were struggling for recognition) to a series of pieces that were open to the two communities, such as L.M.S. a fascinating detective story pitting a police commissar (played by a hearing actor) against a witness (played by a deaf actor) who alone had figured out the identity of the murderer (because he wasn’t distracted by noise). The show is full of humour – the deaf man knocks at the door; the policeman says: ‘Come in!’; the deaf man doesn’t enter – and at the same time a great deal of wisdom. Thus what was considered as a handicap can be transformed into a creative force. A theatre that moves

For a long time in the theatre we were drowning in words. The price we pay today for the return of movement is that we are now drowning in images. There is a tendency towards gesticulation. But the resistance is getting organised. We are living in a confused period where many go astray. But for a few more focused creators this confusion is eminently productive. In this whirlwind of images which feeds them, they know how to hold on to the essential ones – one movement which underlines the silence, or even the mordant cruelty which reveals man’s weakness. For we live in a time of transition where traditional modes of representation are being rocked by the shock-waves of a new sensitivity. It is exploding the laws of genre in favour of a theatre which still doesn’t have

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a name but which owes everything to this expansion. And death is certain for those who stand by technique as an end in itself, who insist on the code as a closed language (even more recently, the craze for young people making mime has dried itself up; they have painted themselves into a corner with the excessive coding of break-dance preventing the imagination from being able to take flight). Everything is moving (too?) quickly. Thanks to advertising, the film clip and animated images, the viewer has developed a feeling for the elliptical and is mastering abstraction. These facts are important. And if, on the other hand, there are sensitive artists who remain open to the other, all the while affirming their original vision where movement is interpreted in its widest sense, then I’m hopeful. Intelligence moves forward, and more importantly, it moves to the beat of the heart.

index

Note: page numbers in italics denote references to Figures. action gestures 9–16 ‘actor-creator’ concept 94 L’Age d’or 131, 132, 135–6, 141 Akademia Ruchu 153 Amoros, Colonel 36, 38 anger 90 Appia, Adolphe 39 Aragon, Louis 139, 140 Arène, Paul 33, 107 Aristotle 4, 88 art 43, 45 Artaud, Antonin 40–1, 46, 53, 56, 96, 136; body 84; eastern theatre 127; influence 99 Atelier 46, 54 Aumont, Michel 105 authors 131–2, 134, 149 Avron, Philippe xv, 69, 114, 122, 144 Azuma, Katsuko 48 Bablet, Denis xii–xiii Balzac, Honoré de 15 Baptiste 49, 54, 57 Barba, Eugenio 48, 49 Barrault, Jean-Louis xiv, 29, 34, 42–3, 46, 50; Claudel relationship 131; Decroux 43, 44–5; Dullin 40–1; Éducation Par le Jeu Dramatique 98–9; Illness, Agony and Death 64; interview 49–58; Lecoq 96–7; Marceau 60–1; nudism 38; Sartori 103; ‘total theatre’ 49, 51–3, 55, 56, 57, 65, 127; ‘walking on the spot’ 99 Barsacq, André 40, 45 Bassi, Leo 154 Bausch, Pina 49, 152 Bécaud, Gilbert 26 Beckett, Samuel 29–30, 55, 56, 116, 128–9, 151 Béjart, Maurice 127 Bellugue, Paul 26 Benassi, Memo 88 Berio, Luciano 109

Bernhardt, Sarah 52, 88 Bing, Suzanne 39, 42, 45, 98 Bip 25, 46, 55, 58, 59–62, 63, 64 Biscuit qui craque group 146 Bizot, Philippe 156 Blin, Roger 43, 99, 131, 132 body 5, 26–7, 35–8, 78–80, 89–91; Barrault 51, 52, 53, 54, 58; costume and fashion 24, 25–6; Decroux 43, 44, 46, 47–8, 49; equilibrium 82–4; gestures 8, 9–10, 19–20; Grotowski 129; masks 105; Mnouchkine 131, 133, 135 Bondy, Luc xv, 123 Bosio, Gianfranco de 99, 102 bouffons 118–20, 119, 124, 147 bowing ritual 18 Bradby, David x–xi, xiii–xvi Bread and Puppet 49, 138, 140 Brecht, Bertolt 57, 107, 131, 141, 143 Bricolo, Amédée 147–8 Brook, Peter 43, 49, 127, 128, 144 Byland, Pierre 116, 117, 122, 129 cabaret 143, 146 Camember the Sapper 10–11 Carpi, Fiorenzo 108 cartoon mime 74, 121–2, 155 Casta, Ange 114 Caubère, Philippe 135, 144–5 Chabrol, Jean-Pierre 149 Chancerel, Léon 39, 40, 45 Chapeau Rouge 136, 149 Chaplin, Charlie 18, 55, 57, 145; costume 25; gait 13; Marceau comparison 29, 60, 61 Chartreux, Bernard 153 Chéreau, Patrice 142 Chevalier, Maurice 143 children xiii, 1, 16 Chopel, Farid 146, 150, 154 chorus 82, 108, 109–11, 127

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chronophotography 35, 36–7 Ciccione, Louis 97 cinema 35, 37, 145–6 circus 115, 116, 129 Cixous, Hélène 131, 134 Claudel, Paul 50, 51, 55, 56, 117, 131 Clavé, André 99 clowns xiv, 114–16, 117, 118, 129, 147 Cocteau, Jean 62 Colin, Christian 142 Els Comediants 153 Les Comédiens de Grenoble 98 Les Comédiens Routiers 40, 45 comic mime 73–4 commedia dell’arte 32, 59, 99, 100–2, 111, 112; accentuated movement 87; Barrault 57; Decroux 47; gesture 80; Human Comedy 121; masks 103, 106, 107; Mnouchkine 132, 133; performance 92; El Teatro Campesino 138; Théâtre du Soleil 141; zanni 33 Compagnie des Quinze 40, 45 Conty, Jean-Marie 96, 99 Copeau, Jacques xiv, 29, 36, 41, 73, 88; influence 42, 46, 60, 98, 135; Vieux-Colombier 38–40, 45 Copi 141 Copiaux 40, 42, 45, 98 costume 24–6, 32–4 Cousin, Gabriel 97, 107 Craig, Gordon 38–9, 46, 148 Cuny, Alain 99 dance 109, 130, 153 Dasté, Jean xiv, 39, 40, 41, 45, 98, 102 Dasté, Marie-Hélène 39, 98, 99 deaf people 19, 21–2, 156 Debauche, Claude 123 Deburau, Jean-Baptiste Gaspard 29, 32–3, 34, 49, 107 Deburau, Jean-Charles 34 Decroux, Étienne 29, 37, 39, 42, 43–9, 44; Barrault 50, 51, 53–5; ‘classical’ mime xiv; Dullin 40–1; faces 48, 57; gymnastics 36; Lecoq on 97–8; Marceau 60–1; statuary mime 47, 52, 57, 65; with students 59; ‘walking on the spot’ 99 Delbée, Anne 123 Demarcy, Richard 153 Demeny, Georges 36, 38 Desbonnet, Georges 37

index

I

Deschamps, Jérôme 151–2 Devos, Raymond 143 dialects 101 Dimitri 63, 129 Dort, Bernard xii–xiii Douking, Georges 97 Dullin, Charles xiv, 40–1, 45, 46, 97, 137; Barrault 50, 51, 54, 57; influence 42, 99, 135; Marceau 60 Durano, Gustino 108 eastern (oriental) theatre 127, 133, 141 Éducation Par le Jeu Dramatique 98–9 Edwards, Jango 147 emotions 8, 9, 16 England 22 equilibrium 82–4 Eudel, Paul 32 Évrard, Claude 114, 122, 144 expressive gestures 9, 16–19 Fabbri, Jacques 114 Fabre, Jan 140 faces 48, 49, 56–7 Farina 35 fashion 24–6 fear 7–8, 91–2 femininity 14, 53 Filippo, Eduardo de 21 fixed point 81–2, 90 Flamand, Didier 152–3 Fo, Dario xv, 108, 138–9, 139 Footsbarn 136–7 Foreman, Richard 148 France 9, 23, 26, 38, 140 Fresnay, Pierre 4 Fretun, Philippe 143 gait 10–14, 15–16 Gaulier, Philippe 116 Gautré, Alain xv, 126, 135–57 Genet, Jean 131, 132 gestures 5, 6–28, 34, 74, 94–5, 113; action 9–16; analytic pathways 80; Barrault 51, 52, 53, 54, 55–6; cartoon mime 122; Decroux 43, 47; eastern theatre 127; expressive 9, 16–19; indicative 19; Marceau 63; mask work 105, 106; mime 67–8; Mnouchkine 130, 131; Pierrot 33; popular 19–21; spontaneity 35; universality xiii, 7–8; see also movement Giacometti, Alberto 2 Gilles et Julien 39, 45 Gilliam, Terry 146

I

index

Glass, David 155 Goldoni, Carlo 100, 101, 107 Grazzi, Paolo 95, 108 Grotowski, Jerzy 49, 127, 129 Guyon, Éliane 44 gymnastics 35–6, 88, 107 Hacks, Dr 32, 34 Haller, Bernard 143 hands 19, 48, 49, 113 Harlequin 14, 25, 29, 32–3, 59, 65; commedia dell’arte 100, 102; doubling of roles 35; masks 103, 107; Mnouchkine 133 Hauser Orkater 151 Hébert, Georges 37–8, 39 Hitler, Adolf 18, 19, 142 Hogarth, William 17 Hunstad, Yves 145 ice skating 85, 87, 89, 91 imitation xiii, 1–5, 15, 68–9 improvisation xv, 73, 123, 148; commedia dell’arte 100–1; Copiaux 40; Mnouchkine 131, 132 International Visual Theatre of Vincennes 156 Ionesco, Eugene 29–30 Italy 9, 19, 20, 22, 99, 107–8 Jackson, Joe 147 Jacques-Dalcroze, Émile 37, 39 Jahn, Ludwig 35–6 Japan 18, 23 Japanese Noh 39, 74, 91, 98, 107, 127, 128, 132 Els Joglars 129 Jorio, Andrea de 20 Jousse, Marcel 4–5, 50 Jouvet, Louis 45, 46, 131 Kantor, Tadeusz 49, 140 Kanze brothers 128 Keaton, Buster 129, 145 Laboratory for the Study of Movement (L.E.M.) 121, 125 Lacombe and Asselin 146 Lafond, Hervée de 141 Lambert, Abbé 21 language x–xi, 92–3; see also words laughter 146–7 Lecoq, Jacques xiii–xvi, 43, 49, 60, 139, 143; bouffons 124; genealogy of theatre of movement 29–41; gestures 6–28; ice

161

skating 85, 87, 89, 91; imitation 1–5; language x–xi; masks 104; mime 65, 67–93; Mnouchkine on 132–3, 135; Perret interview 94–125; ‘pulling’ 90; schools of mime 63; technique demonstration 12; theatre of gesture and image 126–30; ‘The Wall’ 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81 Ledoux, Gaston 83 Legrand, Paul 34 Lenin, Vladimir 57 Leonardo da Vinci 83–4 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 4 Lifar, Serge 97 Ling, Henrik 36, 38 Living Theatre 49, 137–8 Lopez, Sergi xv, 95 Ludovici, Carlo 107 Le Luron, Thierry 69 McBurney, Simon xv, 149 Mabou Mines 152 magnetic fields 53 Maistre, François 39 Mandel, Derrick 129 Manet, Eduardo xv, 123 Marceau, Marcel 29, 30, 42–3, 58–66, 59, 126; Arlequin 49; Bip 25, 46, 55; ‘classical’ mime xiv; Decroux 41, 43, 45; mute language 52 Marchand, Christophe 96 Marey, Étienne-Jules 36–7 Marseilles 34 Martin, Claude xiv, 97, 99 Marx, Groucho 13 masculinity 14, 53 masks xv, 59, 75, 103–7, 123–4; Barrault 51, 56–7; Copiaux 40; edible 155; expressive 105–6; half-masks 106–7; larval 105–6, 117; neutral 98, 105, 112–13, 113; Sartori 99–100, 102–3 Mercure, Jean 118 Mexican Hound 151 Michaux, Henri 135 mime 30–1, 34, 67–93, 94, 126–7, 154–6; absolute 72; ancient 59; Barrault 50–1, 54, 55, 57, 65; ‘classical’ xiv, 129; constraints 72–6; Copiaux 40; Deburau 32; Decroux 44, 46, 47, 48, 49; definition 68; directions 78; gait 16; imitation 4–5, 68–9; Lecoq interview 97, 98, 108, 109, 111–12; Marceau 41, 58, 60, 63–6; Mnouchkine 135; Pierrot 29; see also pantomime mimicry 1–5, 8, 9, 68–9

162

mimodramas 60, 62, 63, 66 Mirabelles 141 Mnouchkine, Ariane xiv–xv, 43, 122–3, 130–5, 130, 140; Decroux influence 49; eastern theatre 127, 133; Méphisto 142; mime 65, 135 Molière 131, 141, 148 Monk, Meredith 152 Moretti, Marcello 15, 101, 106, 107 movement 67, 80–1, 95–6, 123, 127, 156–7; accentuation 87–8; actor’s view 135–6, 142; alteration 85; bouffons 119; cartoon mime 121, 122; chorus 109–11; chronophotography 36–7; compensation 84–5; Decroux 47; equilibrium 82–4, 83; mask work 106; portable structures 124; preparation 85–6; rhythm 88; Vieux-Colombier school 39; walking and gait 10–16; see also gestures Moving Picture Mime Show 122, 155 Mummenschantz 155 music 62, 146; see also chorus Mussolini, Benito 14, 18 Muybridge, Edward 37 naturalism 106, 143 nature 97 De Nieuwe Snaar 146 nudism 38 obscene gestures 20–1 pain 48 Panigrahi, Sanjukta 48 Pantaloon/Pantalone 32, 57, 92, 102, 106 pantomime 19, 30–1, 34, 35, 107; ancient 59; Barrault 50, 51–2, 55; clowns 116; Marceau 62, 63, 64; Pierrot 29, 33; street 20; white 113; see also mime pantomimes de style 63, 64 Papafava, Lieta 99 Parenti, Franco 108 Parry, Natasha 128 passions 91–2 pedagogy 76, 94, 107, 112 Peking Opera 48, 80, 87 Péreira, Christian 145 Perret, Jean 42–66, 94–125, 130–5 Pic 129 Piccoli, Michel 142 Piccolo Teatro 15, 95, 99, 101, 103, 107–8, 111

index

I

Pierrot 29–30, 32–5, 49, 59, 60, 61; death of 34, 63–4; white face 116; white pantomime 113 poetry: Barrault 55, 56; constraints 76; Decroux 45, 46–7; Marceau 62 Polivka, Boleslav 116, 148 portable structures 123–4 Pradinas, Pierre 149 Proust, Marcel 52 psychoanalysis 26, 54 Pyramid on its Point 155 Queneau, Raymond 114 Rabelais, François 21, 56 Raynaud, Fernand 143 Régent, Benoît 142, 143 rhythm 39, 88, 91, 146 Richard, Pierre 123 Riefenstahl, Leni 38 Romans 33, 59, 68, 75–6 Ronconi, Luca 138 Rouffe 32, 34 Royal de Luxe 153 Rufus 144 Rush, Geoffrey xv, 119 Ruzzante 100, 101 Saint-Denis, Michel 39, 40, 45 Santelli, Claude 114 Sartori, Amleto 99–100, 102–3, 107, 111 Savary, Jérome 141 Schaeffer, Pierre 114 Schumann, Peter 138 Sébastien, Patrick 69 Sedgewick, Toby 155 Segal, Gilles 62–3 Sentier, Jean-Pierre 145, 146 Serry, Jean 97 Séverin 34, 60 Shakespeare, William 86, 119–20, 130–1, 135, 136, 148 sign language 21–2 silence 31, 67, 68, 70–2, 113; Barrault 51, 52; Marceau 58, 62 smiles 6 Smith 154 Smol 148 Soleri, Ferrucio 107 soule 77–8 space 72–3, 74–5, 88, 89 speech xv, 19, 53, 58, 70–1; see also words sport 27, 35–6, 37–8, 95–6 Stanislavski, Konstantin xii, xv, 46, 73 statuary mime 47, 52, 57, 65, 80

I

index

Stein, Daniel 154–5 street life 8 Strehler, Giorgio 95, 101, 103, 108, 135 Syracuse 109, 110, 111 El Teatro Campesino 138 television 22 texts xiii, 46–7, 91 theatre 38, 64, 66, 98, 134–5; actors 145–6; clowns 116; mime 58, 65, 66, 126–7; outdoor 153–4; physical 126; ‘total’ 49, 51–3, 55, 56, 57, 65, 127; visual 152–3 Theatre of the Deaf 156 Théâtre des Funambules 29, 32, 33 Théâtre de la Jeune Lune 149 Théâtre du Mouvement 155 Théâtre du Soleil xiv, 131, 136, 140–1 Théâtre de Travers 135 Théâtre de l’Unité 141 Theatre Zingaro 141 time 74, 88 Tong, Winston 152 ‘total theatre’ 49, 51–3, 55, 56, 57, 65, 127 Trafic, Carlos 147 tragedy 85, 91, 110, 112 training xii, xv, 66, 134 Travel Diaries 100 Turba, Ctibor 116, 129

163

United States 23, 152, 154 Váldez, Luis 138 Van de Woude, Jim 151 Van Warmedam, Alex 151 Veinstein, André 44 Verry, Pierre 45, 62–3 Vidal, Albert 147 Vieux-Colombier school 36, 38–40, 41, 42, 45, 46 Vilar, Jean 39, 43, 60, 114, 135 Vincent, Jean-Pierre 153 virtuosoism 49, 65, 66, 76, 80 Vitez, Antoine 117 Vitrac, Roger 46 Wague, Georges 30, 31, 34, 60 walking 10–14, 15–16 ‘The Wall’ 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81 Wenders, Wim 145 Wilson, Bob 49, 127, 139–40, 148, 152, 156 women 25–6 words 50, 52, 92–3, 113; see also language; speech Wylie, Laurence 118 yoga 27 Zanni 33, 100, 103 Zeami 143 Zouc 144 Zouzou 154