Teaching Style
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's school longer, he accomplished this through teaching in the style of "via negativa," never telling the students how to do what was "right." The goal was to encourage the student to keep trying new avenues of creative expression.
His training involved an emphasis on masks, starting with the neutral mask. 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 a state of neutral was achieved, he would move on to work with larval masks and then half masks, gradually working towards the smallest mask in his repertoire: the clown's red nose. Three of the principal skills that he encouraged in his students were le jeu (playfulness), complicité (togetherness) and disponsibilité (openness). Selection for the second year was based mainly on the ability to play.
He also set up le Laboratoire d'Étude du Mouvement (Laboratory for the study of movement; L.E.M. for short) in 1977. This was a separate department within the school which looked at architecture, scenography and stage design and its links to movement.
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