Lecoq is not Mocked

The past couple of years at the Fringe have seen a resurgence of physical theatre companies winning awards and kicking it at the box office. I say resurgence, but physical theatre has been a Big Deal since the 1990s in the UK, when DV8 and Frantic Assembly renegotiated the relationship between words and movement.

The name that keeps coming up is Lecoq: Clout were trained there, Red Bastard references him and Gecko takes their cues from his school. By the time I get around to defining physical theatre, it'll have probably been replaced by another phrase (look at the fun I have trying to decide whether it ought to be 'live' or 'performance' art). Fortunately, I can get closer to determining what Lecoq signifies (because one of my lecturers wrote a book about it. Hopefully, they won't be scouring the net to find lazy critics ripping off their ideas).

Pinning down the nature of any school of theatre is notoriously hard: worse in the case of Lecoq, because he is a rare example of a teacher rather than a director. His name is known more for the pupils (Complicite et al) who have gone onto become champions of his approach - even though that approach is often explained in vague terms.

Simon Murray (Jacque Lecoq, Routledge) offers three qualities that are distinctive to the Lecoq technique: disponibilite, le jeu, complicite. He draws a line between the three: disponibilite is the openness of the performer that allows le jeu (play), which lead to the complicite between performers and between performers and audience. There's a lot more detail - my attempts to check the words' meanings in the dictionary wasn't that helpful - but these are the foundation of a Lecoq performance and the object of the training.

Inevitably, there's another aspect of the training that intrigues me: the auto-cours. In response to the 1968 riots in Paris, when his students demanded that they be allowed to teach themselves, Lecoq introduced this: an hour a day, making work for performance, in which the students taught each other. The shows are put on and assessed.

While the three qualities might be the object of the education, I admire the auto-cours as a transferable model of teaching. It's very clear how it works and, unlike the three qualities, doesn't allow for vague allusions to a metaphysical idea. It's simple. It combines the freedom of self-learning and the rigour of public assessment.

From now on, that's what I am going to think about when I hear Lecoq: a combination of freedom and rigour, the balance between teaching and autodidacticism. Oh yeah: and some cool clowning thrown in, hopefully with buffoons.