StageObituaryJacques Lecoq obituary
Jacques Lecoq, who has died aged 77, was one of the greatest mime artists and perhaps more importantly one of the finest teachers of acting in our time. Born in Paris, he began his career as an actor in France. Passionately interested in the commedia dell'arte, he went to Italy to do research on the use of masks by strolling players of the 16th century. There he met the great Italian director Giorgio Strehler, who was also an enthusiast of the commedia and founder of the Piccolo Teatro of Milan; and with him Lecoq created the Piccolo theatre acting school. In 1956 he started his own school of mime in Paris, which over the next four decades became the nursery of several generations of brilliant mime artists and actors.
Lecoq's theory of mime departed from the tradition of wholly silent, speechless mime, of which the chief exponent and guru was the great Etienne Decroux (who schooled Jean Louis-Barrault in the film Les Enfants Du Paradis and taught the famous white-face mime artist Marcel Marceau). Lecoq also rejected the idea of mime as a rigidly codified sign language, where every gesture had a defined meaning. He regarded mime as merely the body-language component of acting in general though, indeed, the most essential ingredient as language and dialogue could all too easily replace genuine expressiveness and emotion.
His approach was based on clowning, the use of masks and improvisation. By putting a red nose on his face, the actor transformed himself into a clown, a basic being expressing the deepest, most infantile layers of his personality, and allowing him to explore those depths. Lecoq used two kinds of masks. By putting on a bland, totally expressionless mask, the actor was forced to use his whole body to express a given emotion. On the other hand, by donning a mask, the features of which were contorted in pain, downcast in grief, or exultant in joy, the actor had to adjust his body-language to that facial mood. And from that followed the technique of the 'anti-mask', where the actor had to play against the expression of the mask. Brilliantly-devised improvisational games forced Lecoq's pupils to expand their imagination.
Another vital aspect in his approach to the art of acting was the great stress he placed on the use of space the tension created by the proximity and distance between actors, and the lines of force engendered between them. This led to Lecoq being asked to lecture at faculties of architecture on aspects of theatrical space.
His own performances as a mime and actor were on the very highest plane of perfection; he was a man of infinite variety, humour, wit and intelligence. I remember attending a symposium on bodily expressiveness in 1969 at the Odin Theatre in Denmark, where Lecoq confronted Decroux, then already in his eighties, and the great commedia-actor and playwright (and later Nobel laureate) Dario Fo. Lecoq surpassed both of them in the sheer exuberance and depth of his genius.
Lecoq's school in Paris attracted an elite of acting students from all parts of the world. His concentration on the aspects of acting that transcend language made his teaching truly international. In this country, the London-based Theatre de Complicite is probably the best-known exponent of his ideas. He is survived by his second wife Fay; by their two sons and a daughter; and by a son from his first marriage.
Simon McBurney writes: Jacques Lecoq was a man of vision. He had the ability to see well. This vision was both radical and practical. As a young physiotherapist after the second world war, he saw how a man with paralysis could organise his body in order to walk, and taught him to do so. To actors he showed how the great movements of nature correspond to the most intimate movements of human emotion. Like a gardener, he read not only the seasonal changes of his pupils, but seeded new ideas. During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris, the pupils asked to teach themselves. Thus began Lecoq's practice, autocours, which has remained central to his conception of the imaginative development and individual responsibility of the theatre artist.
Like an architect, his analysis of how the human body functions in space was linked directly to how we might deconstruct drama itself. Like a poet, he made us listen to individual words, before we even formed them into sentences, let alone plays.
What he offered in his school was, in a word, preparation of the body, of the voice, of the art of collaboration (which the theatre is the most extreme artistic representative of), and of the imagination. He was interested in creating a site to build on, not a finished edifice. Contrary to what people often think, he had no style to propose. He offered no solutions. He only posed questions.
Last year, when I saw him in his house in the Haute Savoie, under the shadow of Mont Blanc, to talk about a book we wished to make, he said with typical modesty: 'I am nobody. I am only a neutral point through which you must pass in order to better articulate your own theatrical voice. I am only there to place obstacles in your path, so you can find your own way round them.' Among the pupils from almost every part of the world who have found their own way round are Dario Fo in Milan, Ariane Mnouchkine in Paris, Julie Taymor (who directed The Lion King) in New York, Yasmina Reza, who wrote Art, and Geoffrey Rush from Melbourne (who won an Oscar for Shine).
Jacques was a man of extraordinary perspectives. But for him, perspective had nothing to do with distance. For him, there were no vanishing points, only clarity, diversity and supremely co-existence. I can't thank you, but I see you surviving time, Jacques; longer than the ideas that others have about you.
Philippe Gaulier (translated by Heather Robb) adds: Did you ever meet a tall, strong, strapping teacher moving through the corridors of his school without greeting his students? What is he doing? Pursuing his idea. What idea? The one his students will need. Jacques Lecoq's father, or mother (I prefer to think it was the father) had bequeathed to his son a sensational conk of a nose, which got better and better over the years. It developed the red hues of claret, lots of dense, vigorous, athletic humps from all the ferreting around, with a blooming fullness, dilations and overflowings from his constant efforts to update the scents of the day.
Jacques Lecoq was an exceptional, great master, who spent 40 years sniffing out the desires of his students. We needed him so much. Bravo Jacques, and thank you.
Kenneth Rea adds: In theatre, Lecoq was one of the great inspirations of our age. Not only did he show countless actors, directors and teachers how the body could be more articulate; his innovative teaching was the catalyst that helped the world of mime enrich the mainstream of theatre. His techniques and research are now an essential part of the movement training in almost every British drama school. Thousands of actors have been touched by him without realising it.
As a teacher he was unsurpassed. Magically, he could set up an exercise or improvisation in such a way that students invariably seemed to do their best work in his presence.
Jacques Lecoq, mime artist and teacher, born December 15, 1921; died January 19, 1999
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