Enacting the Consequences of the Lecoq Pedagogy's Aesthetic Cognitive Foundation

Abstract

The theatre pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq (1921-99) is founded on the principle that all physical, psychological, intellectual, and emotional performance registers can be accessed by prioritizing the moving body. Therefore, a Lecoq-based approach is in contrast to dominant principles of psychologically based acting that privilege working through emotion and psychology. While Lecoq pedagogy does not discount these performance registers, normally considered to belong to the internal world of the actor, Lecoq's work reaches them through physical action. Lecoq pedagogy considers it possible to learn how to shape and manage these registers by mastering the moving body as creative theatrical agent. This pedagogical strategy at first reiterates and then inverts the mind privilege of a Cartesian mind-body dichotomy, but ultimately confounds it, reorienting the constitution of body and mind. This reconstitution results in a new, emergent, antidualistic configuration where somatic intelligence accesses and encompasses all intelligence, and is initiated and accomplished through the physical act.