Building a character
Auto-cours are a defining characteristic of the L 'Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq school and his approach to acting (Murray, 2003, pp.60-61). Basically an auto-cours is a short devised performance piece created within a limited time frame of a week. Groups of Jacques Lecoq actors were given a theme which they presented in front of the whole school and visiting theatre personnel.
The auto-cours meant that the actors:
- had to work effectively
- had to work collaboratively
- received critical feedback by teachers and visitors.
Teachers could stop the performance at any time to give feedback and provide corrections.
The assessment criterion was about choices the actors and groups made in relationship to:
- rhythm
- observation
- play
- timing.
Auto-cours worked with other elements such as:
- production
- playwriting
- ensemble (pp.60-61).
Jacques Lecoq believed that the success of characterisation was the ability to carry the image from the stage to the audience and that a character should not become identical to the actor's personality, as this often reduced the theatricality of the performance.
Melodrama
Melodrama was another dramatic form that Jacques Lecoq used to help his student actors develop body centred characters. Melodrama is taught in the second year of training at his school and its aim is to give the student actors further opportunities to explore the importance of heightened theatricality in their devised work. It also provides a further inÂ-depth study of the connection between physicality and the emotional states of characters. This means that the student actors could physically explore such contradictory emotions as remorse and retribution, evil and virtue, sadness and joy, as well as delving into the essence of stock characters such as Villains and Heroes.
Explore exercise 4.5 on page 138 of the text set for study and follow this by workshopping the theme of The Departure. These activities directly relate to physicaJising opposing emotional states, and the students should try to improvise thls exercise in a state of discovery as well as being open to ideas that may cross theatrical boundaries.
Scripts
Jacques Lecoq saw his actors as physical creators of a script or text regardless of its content but also respected the internal dynamics of this dramatic form. He worked with script and texts through a body-centred approach. A script or text should be explored:
- through physicality
- through the ambiguity of push and pull
- by the body in rehearsal as it is not helpful to sit around and talk too much
- by actively examining the relationship between words and actions (Weekley, 2006, p.79)
- by recognising occasions where the body might not be expressing the same emotion as the words (p. 79)
- through the forces and patterns of movement which underpin particular words or phrases (p. 79)
- through the rhythms of movement created by the ideas
- through the rhythms of the space in rehearsal and performance.
Activity
Pair-up with a classmate online. using the script below, decide upon the who, where, what, when and why and then explore and block the physicality, ambiguity and opposite emotional states of the characters. Afterwards, discuss the questions below.
A: Did you.
B: I thought so.
A: Really.
B: Great.
Discuss
- Can you describe the rhythm of this script?
- How did you and your partner incorporate the physical pull and push of the words?
- Why did you choose to phyicalise the script in the way you did?
- Why should this engage an audience?
Clowning
Jacques Lecoq utterly rejected the superficiality of clown courses that had no depth or philosophical approach behind them. Read and discuss with your peers online the information on pages 60 to 62 of the text where Jacques Lecoq asks what lies at the core of this form of humor.
He said that the clown is:
- a dimension of our personalities
- subversive
- radical
- vulnerable
- political
- allows space to be unruly
and the Lecoq actor seeks liberation from the social mask as they like to come to terms with the more ridiculous (Murray, 2003, pp.61-62).
Activity
Find a place in the room and put something that can used as a red nose, front of them on the floor. Create a spontaneous improvisation. Do not be afraid to push the boundaries of the ideas given below. They are to lie down near the red nose and close there eyes. They:
- awake
- find the red nose and explore it
- put it on
- explore their face with it on
- quickly get up and slowly start walking with a wobble
- find their balance
- start to dance
- lose their balance
- go swimming
- climb a mountain and it starts to rain
- run down to the dry valley
- find someone else
- together they plant a seed and watch it grow into a flower
- see the flower die, they feel vulnerable
- react to each other
- see or peek at the audience and respond to these 'other' people.
Discuss as a class the questions below.
- How did the metaphors of journey and gardening help create the improvisation?
- Where in the improvisation was the component of pushing and pulling?
- How did the clown's personality develop from the physical to the emotional?
- Was there the threat of uncertainty in the improvisation?
- How did the clown physically and emotionally respond?
- Was there the joy of certainty in the improvisation? How did the clown physically and emotionally respond?
- How does this type of approach to acting allow a student to develop a character that can interact with the audience?