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 in­-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.

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).

Discuss as a class the questions below.

1. How did the metaphors of journey and gardening help create the improvisation?
2. Where in the improvisation was the component of pushing and pulling?
3. How did the clown's personality develop from the physical to the emotional?
4. Was there the threat of uncertainty in the improvisation?
5. How did the clown physically and emotionally respond?
6. Was there the joy of certainty in the improvisation? How did the clown physically and emotionally respond?
7. How does this type of approach to acting allow a student to develop a character that can interact with the audience?