Jacques Lecoq (15 December 1921 – 19 January 1999) was a French stage actor and acting movement coach. He was best known for his teaching methods in physical theatre, movement, and mime which he taught at the school he founded in Paris known as École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq. He taught there from 1956 until his death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1999.
Jacques Lecoq was known as the only noteworthy movement instructor and theatre pedagogue with a professional background in sports and sports rehabilitation in the twentieth century.
Life
As a teenager, Lecoq participated in many sports such as running, swimming, and gymnastics. Lecoq was particularly drawn to gymnastics.
He was first introduced to theatre and acting by Jacques Copeau's daughter Marie-Hélène and her husband, Jean Dasté.
In 1956, he returned to Paris to open his school, École Internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq, where he spent most of his time until his death, filling in as international speaker and master class giver for the Union of Theatres of Europe. The school was eventually relocated to Le Central in 1976. The building was previously a boxing center and was where Francisco Amoros, a huge proponent of physical education, developed his own gymnastic method.
Teaching style/method
Lecoq aimed at training his actors in ways that encouraged them to investigate ways of performance that suited them best. His training was aimed at nurturing the creativity of the performer, as opposed to giving them a codified set of skills. As students stayed with Lecoq<nowiki>'s school longer, he accomplished this through teaching in the style of via negativa, also known as the negative way. This teaching strategy basically consists of only focusing his critiques on the poorer or unacceptable aspects of a student's performance. Lecoq believed that this would allow students to discover on their own how to make their performances more acceptable. Lecoq did not want to ever tell a student how to do something "right." He believed that was supposed to be a part of the actor'</nowiki>s own experience.
Many actors sought Lecoq's training initially because Lecoq provided methods for people who wished to create their own work and did not want to only work out of a playwright's text.
His training involved an emphasis on masks, starting with the neutral mask. This neutral mask is symmetrical, the brows are soft, and the mouth is made to look ready to perform any action. Lecoq believed that this mask allowed his students to be open when performing and to fully let the world affect their bodies. This is because the mask is made to seem as if it has no past and no previous knowledge of how the world works. This is supposed to allow students to live in a state of unknowing in their performance. The aim was that the neutral mask can aid an awareness of physical mannerisms as they get greatly emphasized to an audience whilst wearing the mask.
Once Lecoq's students became comfortable with the neutral masks, he would move on to working with them with larval masks, expressive masks, the commedia masks, half masks, gradually working towards the smallest mask in his repertoire: the clown's red nose. The larval mask was used as a didactic tool for Lecoq's students to escape the confines of realism and inject free imagination into the performance. The mask is essentially a blank slate, amorphous shape, with no specific characterizations necessarily implied.
The French concept of 'efficace' suggesting at once efficiency and effectiveness of movement was highly emphasized by Lecoq. Lecoq viewed movement as a sort of zen art of making simple, direct, minimal movements that nonetheless carried significant communicative depth.
Lecoq wrote on the art and philosophy of mimicry and miming. Therein he traces mime-like behavior to early childhood development stages, positing that mimicry is a vital behavioral process in which individuals come to know and grasp the world around them.