Embodying English Language: Jacques Lecoq and the Neutral Mask

My study explores the process of settlement for Newcomer-to-Canada youth (NTCY) who are engaged in English-language learning (ELL) of mainstream education. I propose the inclusion of a modified physical theatre technique to ELL curricula to demonstrate how a body-based supplemental to learning can assist in improving students’ language acquisition and proficiency. This recognizes the embodied aspect of students’ settlement and integration as a necessary first-step in meaning making processes of traditional language-learning practices. Foundational to this thesis is an exploration of the Neutral Mask (NM), an actors training tool developed by French physical theatre pedagogue Jacques Lecoq. A student of Lecoq (1990-1992), I understand NM as a transformative learning experience; it shapes the autoethnographic narrative of this study. My research considers the relationship between the body and verbal speech in English-language learning, as mediated by the mask. An acting tool at the heart of Lecoq’s School, the mask values the non-verbal communication of the body and its relationship to verbal speech. My study explains how the mask, by its design, can reach diverse learning needs to offer newcomer students a sense of agency in their language learning process. I further demonstrate how through discussion of an experimental applied practice field study. One of the overarching questions of this research is whether the ELL experience enhances or hinders newcomer youth in their settlement integration. Through the critical lenses of phenomenology and embodiment, I suggest reshaping the language-learning classroom into a pedagogical space that better fosters newcomer youths’ bodies-of-cultural origin as they begin to distance from their heritage language. Preparing to make Canada their home, newcomer youth can be provided with a learning space for the exploration of the body before the language – for the learning

Imag(in)ing the poetic body : a directorial approach to heightening text(ure) in performance.

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis is the enquiry of a Director of text-based work in search of a more heightened physical texture in staging written text. Inspired by Jacques Lecoq’s use of the idea of the Poetic Body, this enquiry is the Director’s attempt to discover what this ‘Poetic Body’ might mean, and how imagining the Poetic Body and the country/landscape/territories this body might inhabit or occupy, can be useful to the Director in preparing a rehearsal process, and in the ultimate staging of the text for performance

Toward a Female Clown Practice: Transgression, Archetype and Myth

Women who learn to clown within Western contemporary theatre and performance training lack recognizably female exemplars of this popular art form. This practice-as-research thesis analyses my past and present clowning experiences in order to create an understanding of a woman-centered clown practice which allows for the expression of material bodies and lived experiences. It offers a feminist perspective on Jacques Lecoq’s pedagogy, which revolves around a notion of an ‘inner clown’ and is prevalent in contemporary UK clown training and practice. The thesis draws on both the avant-garde and numerous clown types and archetypes, in order to understand clowning as a genre revealed through a range of unsocialised behaviours. It does not differentiate necessarily between clowning by men and women but suggests a re-think and reconfiguration to incorporate a wide range of values and thought processes as a means of introduction to a wider audience. Specific concerns with the terms clown and clowning initiate this investigation, resulting in the creation of a ‘clowning continuum’, which offers a practical way of understanding various modes of clowning and various types of clowns. I examine my experiences, including those of ‘failure’, while working with renowned performer trainers, as well my negotiation of gender and sexuality through both my clowning in character and my creation of clowns. The twentieth century avant-garde artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who inspired me to create ‘Clown Elsa’ and take her to art galleries and onto the street, is identified as a ‘radical female proto-clown’. My practical investigations into the potential interrelatedness of the masquerade of femininity and the mask of the clown are also shaped by discourses of hysteria and the carnivalesque. Drawing on Bakhtin’s concepts of carnival, dialogic practice and heteroglossia, as well as the transgressive potential of classical myth and archetypes for women, this thesis reconfigures clown practice and discourse by both challenging and developing upon Lecoq’s outmoded pedagogic practice. Its goal is to open it up for more types and modes of clown, in particular an ‘inner clown’ that can operate in a number of masks. It culminates in my creation of a feminist clown, Sedusa, who is inspired by Hélène Cixous’s writing on l’écriture feminine, myth and laughter in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976). Sedusa expands clown models and masks for women by exploiting the ‘masquerade’ of femininity, a term originally coined by Joan Riviere in 1929. The thesis includes a performance as Sedusa as an embodiment of my research findings.AHR

Towards an ‘Embodied Poetics’: An Exploration of Devising Processes Based on the Work of Jacques Lecoq and Gaston Bachelard

Taking as its focus the ‘actor-creator’s’ process in devising practices, this study explores the notion of the ‘poetic body’ developed by French theatre pedagogue Jacques Lecoq (1921 - 1999) and the writings of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884 - 1962) on the ‘poetics of imagination.’ The overarching aim is to originate a new ‘embodied poetics’ whereby the sensate, feeling body actively explores correspondences with the ‘material elements’ of earth, air, fire and water. These are experienced as ‘poeticising substances’ – catalysts and conductors for an embodied imagination. More specifically, this thesis asks the following question: What new understandings can a relational encounter between Lecoq’s pedagogy and Bachelard’s ‘poetic imagining’ reveal about the ’poetic body’ and how might these new understandings originate a devising process? I combine three solo practical projects with accompanying written analysis, to first interrogate the working methods I have inherited as a practitioner and teacher since my time as a student at the Lecoq School, from 1987 to 1989. This is followed by an embodied exploration of Bachelard’s ‘poetic imagining’ process through my own practice. In the final project, I develop an ‘embodied poetics’ for devising, based on the ‘actor-creator’s’ active participation with the world and a recognition that the poeticising ‘I’ is intimately entwined with the material elemental substances that comprise it. In considering the material elements as originating substances for an imagining body, their dialectic qualities offer infinite possibilities for a permanent renewal, expansion and transformation of practice. This study also proposes a new reading of Lecoq’s notion of the ‘poetic body’ from an embodied perspective. Equally, in applying Bachelard’s ‘poetic imagining’ to the devising process, I seek to revivify and reposition his philosophical standpoint from a contemporary perspective within the field of interdisciplinary practices.Arts University Bournemouth and Bath Spa Universit

Puppet bodies: reflections and revisions of marionette movement theories in Philippe Gaulier’s Neutral Mask pedagogy

This article examines two aspects of Philippe Gaulier’s pedagogy in relation to the development of Neutral Mask pedagogies in twentieth-century French mime training, specifically those responding to nineteenth and early twentieth-century marionette theories of movement. The first is his strategic use of disorientation through lack of instruction (via negativa) in order to make visible inculturated embodied habits; the second is his emphasis on the performer embodying genuine ‘pleasure’ as she pretends to have a different emotion. The paper examines these techniques in the context of Neutral Mask training, and its development during the twentieth century in France, in order to consider the ways in which they both reflect and revise nineteenth- and early twentieth-century marionette theories of performer movement as espoused in particular by Heinrich von Kleist and Edward Gordon Craig. It considers the ways in which constructions of the ‘natural’ body as pursued by Jacques Copeau and later Étienne Decroux and Jacques Lecoq respond to these marionette theories which seek to do away entirely with interior states such as consciousness and emotion, and in placing these responses alongside Gaulier’s deployments of disorientation and ‘pleasure’. It suggests that Gaulier’s techniques of disorientation serve a similar function to donning the neutral mask in stripping away learned habits of movement, and that his emphasis on experiencing and demonstrating ‘pleasure’ in the pretence of performance both reflects marionette theories by replicating the puppeteer/puppet dynamic, and revises them by foregrounding emotionality

Moving ideas about moving bodies : teaching physical theatre as a response to violence and the violated body

Includes bibliographical references.Includes abstract.In this thesis I explore my obsession with teaching the physical theatre body over the past twenty-five years.Two sets of questions are proposed: How does the teaching of physical theatre respond to violence and the violated body; and how does pedagogy change when it moves from one context to another? Firstly, I argue that the pedagogy developed by Jacques Lecoq in Paris responded like a pendulum to the extreme violence perpetrated on bodies during the Second World War. I argue that my own practice, influenced by my two years of study at École Jacques Lecoq (1984-1986), continued this tradition by responding to what, I propose, existed as a ‘culture of violence’ in South Africa from the period of colonialism through the apartheid era and into the present. I analyse the impact of violence on the body by focusing on three consequences - stillness, erasure and rupture - and come to an understanding of how the teaching of physical theatre, as per Lecoq and myself, counters all three with a focus on the moving, articulate, individuated body capable of transformation. Secondly, I propose that pedagogy responds to geographic, philosophical and historical contexts and is subject to modification when context changes. The methodology has included conventional research, a comparative analysis of the two contexts, and an analysis of my own experiences - from notebooks that I have kept - as a student and teacher

Judo as a devising practice: Yves Klein, La Mancha and Chile

This article describes the creation process of Arquitectura del Aire (Aerial Architecture) devised by La Mancha Theatre Company, Chile, a company I co-founded. The point of departure was the ‘Painting’ exercise initiated at the Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School in Paris and continued in La Mancha Escuela Internacional del Gesto y la Imagen (La Mancha International School of Image and Gesture). The aim of this project was to explore the exercise’s potential for developing a theatre production, inspired by the work of French artist Yves Klein (1928–1962). What was unanticipated, was the intimacy and intricacy with which Klein’s fascination and expertise in judo infused the work. A devoted practitioner of judo, Klein became a fourth dan judoka in the early 1950s, a level that no other French person had achieved at that time. Training with a judo sensei (teacher) for this project, the actor-devisors, including me, experienced a rigorous system of preparation: ukemi (falling safely), kuzushi (breaking the opponent’s balance), throws, counter-throws, grappling techniques, falls, and recovery. Judo’s principles of giving way, maximum efficiency and mutual respect became the essential cornerstones of our approach. In this production, judo shaped both the process and outcome, in effect as co-creator, prompting the question: what performer training practices might engender an imagining disposition for attending to the creative possibilities, movements and dynamics of martial arts as a material devising practice