The influence of sports on Jacques Lecoq's actor training

Abstract

This article seeks to examine the extent to which Jacques Lecoq's early experiences of sports, athletics and gymnastics informed his later work as an internationally influential specialist in movement-based theatre training. Although his experiences as a sports coach and therapist have been acknowledged, there has been little work to explore the extent to which these experiences, and the principles and values Lecoq may have acquired during them, have shaped his teaching and the structure and nature of the pedagogy at his school. The article begins with a review of Lecoq's own sports training and the critical influences on his early development as a sports coach and therapist. It then looks both at specific sports-related exercises that Lecoq used within his movement analysis sessions, and also at the overall structure of the school's training (the typical pattern of the classes, the classroom ethos, the integration of group/team activities, the nature of Lecoq's concept of ‘play’, and the development from exercise to dramatic genre). The article draws on personal experience as a student with Lecoq in the early 1980s, as well as writings on his work by recent commentators and by Lecoq himself.

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