Embodied Thinking Characters
Suzanne Bing (1885-1967), an established actor, was instrumental in reopening the Vieux Colombier School after WWI. Founded by Jacques Copeau in 1913, it closed during the war, reopened on a small scale in 1920, and was fully operational for the 1921-22 academic year. Bing was a teacher and, effectively, assistant principal. She had taught children and adults (the latter at the Sorbonne). Bing and Copeau envisaged actors as primary creators, not merely interpreters of a playwright’s text. To this end, she found creative ways to forge a new teaching praxis. Copeau would read La Fontaine’s fables and then ask students to improvise animal behaviour; Bing took them to the zoo to observe how animals moved. She translated Shakespeare into French and introduced her students to Noh theatre, a continuing Japanese art from the fourteenth century. Noh is slow and highly stylised; she studied it to mine how actors could embody stage authority and presence. Masks could transform ordinary actors into extraordinary characters. Stillness was powerful. In these ways, she developed studio tools to equip actors for a new age.
Etienne Decroux (1898-1991) joined L’École du Vieux Colombier as a student of diction in the autumn of 1923. After observing movement classes, he found his life’s calling. With professional colleagues, he furthered his thinking on movement for the actor and in 1963 he published Words on Mime. Today, Decroux is universally considered the father of modern mime.
Decroux considered the actor’s body an instrument for art. He discerned that technique underscores artmaking: music’s scales and rhythm underpin melody; ballet’s barre enables dance. Each note, colour or gesture is distinct yet deeply interwoven. In Corporeal Theatre (Mime Corporel) the actor learns to master the articulation of straight and curved lines, rhythms, shifts of weight, and varying centres of gravity. The more theatrical element was the study of characters: how they work and walk. If in Bach, scale and melody become one; in Corporeal Theatre abstract expression and recognisable characters are intertwined.
At its core, the art form depicts a deep humanity. Corporeal technique enables an actor to ‘reveal’ the mind of their character. The audience experiences that moment as physically and spiritually potent.
Photo@Christian Mattis Schmocker, Bern Switzerland. www.mattis.ch
Georges Hébert (1875-1957) In 1921 Hébert joined the academic staff of l’École du Vieux Colombier to teach Physical Education. Whilst in the French Navy, he developed the exercise regime known as Hébertism, based on a philosophy of altruism: être fort pour être utile (be strong to be useful for others). Leaving the Navy, post-WWI, he developed specific physical culture programs for men, women, and children, insisting exercise was both a good and a right for ordinary citizens. He published several books. Hébert distanced himself from his training method when the French government made it a core requirement for youth in French schools.
