32 Facts About Jacques Lecoq

Jacques Lecoq was a French stage actor and acting movement coach.

Jacques Lecoq 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 Ecole internationale de theatre Jacques Lecoq.

Jacques Lecoq 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.

Jacques Lecoq began learning gymnastics at the age of seventeen, and through work on the parallel bars and horizontal bar, he came to see and understand the geometry of movement.

Jacques Lecoq described the movement of the body through space as required by gymnastics to be purely abstract.

Jacques Lecoq came to understand the rhythms of athletics as a kind of physical poetry that affected him strongly.

In 1937 Jacques Lecoq began to study sports and physical education at Bagatelle college just outside of Paris.

In 1941, Jacques Lecoq attended a physical theatre college where he met Jean Marie Conty, a basketball player of international caliber, who was in charge of physical education in all of France.

One of these techniques that really influenced Jacques Lecoq's work was the concept of natural gymnastics.

Jacques Lecoq was first introduced to theatre and acting by Jacques Copeau's daughter Marie-Helene and her husband, Jean Daste.

Jacques Lecoq chose this location because of the connections he had with his early career in sports.

The school was located on the same street that Jacques Lecoq Copeau was born.

Jacques Lecoq aimed at training his actors in ways that encouraged them to investigate ways of performance that suited them best.

Jacques Lecoq's training was aimed at nurturing the creativity of the performer, as opposed to giving them a codified set of skills.

Jacques Lecoq believed that this would allow students to discover on their own how to make their performances more acceptable.

Jacques Lecoq's training involved an emphasis on masks, starting with the neutral mask.

Jacques Lecoq believed that this mask allowed his students to be open when performing and to fully let the world affect their bodies.

Once Jacques 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.

Jacques Lecoq believed that every person would develop their own personal clown at this step.

Jacques Lecoq believed that to study the clown is to study oneself, thus no two selves are alike.

Jacques Lecoq viewed movement as a sort of zen art of making simple, direct, minimal movements that nonetheless carried significant communicative depth.

Jacques Lecoq emphasizes that his students should respect the old, traditional form of commedia dell'arte.

Jacques Lecoq believed commedia was a tool to combine physical movement with vocal expression.

Jacques Lecoq emphasized the importance of finding the most fitting voice for each actor's mask, and he believed that there was room for reinvention and play in regards to traditional commedia dell'arte conventions.

One of the most essential aspects of Jacques Lecoq's teaching style involves the relationship of the performer to the audience.

Jacques Lecoq thus placed paramount importance on insuring a thorough understanding of a performance's message on the part of its spectators.

Jacques Lecoq's pedagogy has yielded diverse cohorts of students with a wide range of creative impulses and techniques.

Jacques Lecoq wrote on the art and philosophy of mimicry and miming.

Jacques Lecoq wrote on the subject of gesture specifically and its philosophical relation to meaning, viewing the art of gesture as a linguistic system of sorts in and of itself.

Jacques Lecoq classifies gestures into three major groups: gestures of action, expression, and demonstration.

The documentary includes footage of Jacques Lecoq working with students at his Paris theatre school in addition to numerous interviews with some of his most well-known, former pupils.