The Moving Body (review)

Jacques Lecoq inspired a generation oftheatre artists: France's Ariane Mnouchkine and her Théâtre du Soleil; Complicite in the U.K.; and in the U.S., Touchstone Theatre, Theatre de la Jeune Lune, and Pig Iron Theatre, among others. Perhaps only the great teachers of American realism—Strasberg, Adler, and Meisner—have had the same lasting impact on acting and the way it wastaught in the twentieth century. Indeed, Lecoq is often thought of as an "anti-realist" who eschewed psychologically-based approaches to acting. In reading The Moving Body, though, one discovers that Lecoq never rejected the human psyche as a source of inspiration; he simply moved it from the center of study to the side.

In The Moving Body, Lecoq begins, "I came to theatre by way of sports" (3). His training in gymnastics and track, and later, his work as a physiotherapist helping veterans of World War II formed the foundation of an approach to actor training that began with the body. Notable in the first chapter is Lecoq's description of his early encounters with theatre artists of the French Resistance. These friendships led Lecoq to thinkof the actor as an artist connected to the world, while his work as a healer led him to see theatre-making as transformative.

The main part of the book describes the two-year course of École International de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, the school he founded in Paris in 1956. It is an articulate account of Lecoq's work at the school just before his death in 1999. In their first year, students move from "play without words" (16) through mask work to work with text. The second year introduces a sequence of styles: melodrama, commedia dell'arte, bouffon, tragedy, and clown. Descriptions of the course of training are complimented by small sketches, charts, and photographs of students in his studio and quoted excerpts for use in exercises requiring text. Occasionally, Lecoq offers histories of exercises or concepts that illuminate the philosophy behind his practice. In Lecoq's descriptionof the character of the bouffon, for example, he recounts the discoveryof what was initiallya single character—a kind of clown provocateur—who, through years of exploration, evolved into a character type with several different variations.

An essential aspect of Lecoq's training is the auto-cours. He writes that "each week students are given a theme to work on without a teacher in whatever way they choose . . . . It is essential to allow them this freedom" (27-28). Small groups of first-year students might be asked to make a short piece of theatre on "the Exodus," for example, using a recently studied form of masked performance (92). A more elaborate auto-cours is the investigation. At the end of his or her first year of training, each student observes an unfamiliar milieu, and then creates a performance from this investigation. The students finish the second year with clown pieces they create. Surely it is this commitment to eachstudent's own creativejourney (a concept central to the Lecoq ethos) that has led so many of them to create their own theatres.

The culmination of the students' work at the school is the creation of each student's clown. Lecoq regards this work as the most psychologically challenging and profound work of their training. He describes how the student actor must confront his or her own weaknesses and turn them into flops—attempts at exploits that inevitably fail—in order to stimulate laughter in the audience. In this extended section on clown work at the end of the book, one senses Lecoq the healer at work again. As with the wounded veterans at the beginning of his career, Lecoq's humanity and compassion transform his students' liabilities into skills, which in turn soothe a wounded world with laughter.

The Moving Body is thought provoking on many levels, and as...