The Practice of Astonishment: Devising, Phenomenology, and Jacques Lecoq

The Elevator of Love

On my first day at l'Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq there were less than five months before Lecoq's death. Even without this knowledge, there was more than enough to generate anxiety. All seventy of the first-year students in the two afternoon sections met with Lecoq and his staff in the small foyer between the two classrooms. After providing a rough outline of the year to come (only a fraction of which I understood, having had only ten days of French instruction under my belt at the time), Lecoq split us up into our classes and sent the other group off for an improvisation class with teacher Thomas Prattki. Our section was told that each week we would have five sessions of ninety minutes to work without instruction on a theme we would present in groups of seven on Fridays. And our first session was beginning now. The theme was "One place, one event," and there was one rule: no dialogue. The doors to an enormous, magnificently aging former boxing arena were opened and thirty-five students from fifteen countries walked into the decades-old, wood-floored, mezzanine-circled grande halle, each one looking at the other thirty-four students to whom we had not yet been introduced.

My group formed quickly and included students from Switzerland, Mallorca, South Korea, and France; there was no one language spoken fluently by more than two of us. What we did share was a close to utter incomprehension of how we were to go about devising our scene. Not only did most of us have no experience in making performance from "scratch," but we were thrust into the task with virtually no guidance. And we were trying to make a scene without dialogue, when a dialogue among its creators was itself problematic. We lacked a common language, a lingua franca.

We eventually decided that our place was to be an elevator, and our event was to be its unplanned arrest between floors. Over the course of the following sessions, we determined that the scene consisted of people entering the elevator on different floors, the breakdown, mild panic, and then the elevator reaching a floor where we all exited. With no props or scenery, we indicated as best we could the doors and the confines of the elevator by staying within a determined area.

That Friday, we had a final rehearsal, jockeyed for position presenting, and finally performed our work. Although the first part of the assignment's theme had been to communicate place, Lecoq said nothing about our attempts to provide a sense of the elevator. Having witnessed a passable demonstration of place, he was not interested in using the feedback time to comment on our technique; instead, the first observation he made was: "But this is the elevator of love. You have three couples and a person alone. The entrance of the single person is the event, not the malfunction." For us, the three couples were simply a way to avoid staging seven different entrances; during our presentation, Lecoq realized that the choice to have three couples in fact determined what the scene was about.

Lecoq then asked us a question that took us all by surprise: "But why didn't you speak?" As he pointed out, we had created a situation in which language was necessary, and so our insistence on not speaking created a tension in the scene that suggested it was somehow false. We had let the "rules" of the assignment constrain us, such that we could not recognize when our work indicated a failure to devise a scene that could function within the structure given us. To be sure, the goal was to devise a situation that did not require speech, but having failed to do so, we had no reason not to speak.

We had expected the presentation to teach us how to stage place and tell a simple story; instead, we witnessed Lecoq improvising an encounter with our work. He came to it open and accepted its propositions without objecting to their...