French Physical Theatre of the 20th and 21st Century - Copeau, Dullin, Artaud, Barrault, Lecoq, Gaulier and Pagneux

French Physical Theatre of the 20th and 21st Century - Copeau, Dullin, Artaud, Barrault, Lecoq, Marceau, Gaulier and Pagneux

French Physical Theatre is a style of training, exploration and performance that concentrates on movement as the central form of communication, character and storytelling. It incorporates forms and techniques such as mime, mask work, gesture, movement and dance to train actors, create explorations and performances. While its origins can be seen in theatre forms such as the Commedia dell'arte, Asian forms of theatre and the work of early Absurdist like Alfred Jarry, many see the originator of modern French Physical Theatre as coming from Antonin Artaud and his ideas of the Theatre of Cruelty. Yet modern French Physical Theatre can be seen to start much earlier with the work of Jacques Copeau and Charles Dullin as actors, directors and trainers.

Jacques Copeau (1879 - 1949) 

Jacques Copeau was French theatre director, actor, trainer and dramatist. He was born in Paris in 1879. Due to family problems, he finished his formal education at the Sorbonne in 1901. After a short stint in Copenhagen, he returned to France and co-founded the influential arts magazine Nouvelle Revue Francaise in 1909. In 1913, he founded the revolutionary Theatre du Vieux-Colombier which put artistic merit above all commercial concerns. The small theatre (500 seater and then eventually reduced to 360 capacity) emphasized the ensemble above the individual. The ensemble often rehearsed in his home. He emphasized physicality in rehearsals. The company put on a number of productions but WWI cur short their work. Around this time, Copeau sojourned with the designer/director Edward Gordon Craig and met the eurythmic master Dalcroze and designer Appia and started to develop ideas for three dimensional performance enhanced by mise en scene and lighting elements.

In 1917, Copeau lectured in the United States and brought some of his company across performing The Tricks of Scapin in which he featured. The use of treteau nu (the naked platform) where actors leapt on and off in slapstick antics became a standard feature in this and later performance work of Copeau. When he with his ensemble returned to Paris in 1919, they started a rigorous training and performance schedule that involved rotating up to three productions a week. They used the designs of Jouvet which added to the treteau nu creating levels and steps which helped Copeau's new physical theatre which emphasized character over situation and plot. Together they worked on trying to emotional essence of scenes where a sense of place was suggested. Levels of platforms and staging were used. He believed in simplifying sets and settings to allow greater realism and flexibility in acting. A large number and range of productions were performed. However, the grueling schedule took its toll of Copeau and his company. 

In 1924, Copeau and his company withdrew to a farmhouse in Burgundy. In Burgundy, Copeau started to refine his training techniques, many of which are still the cornerstone of modern actor training programs. Mask work and improvisation became important to his training approaches. As the ensemble reduced in numbers, only a core of six people remained including his son Pascal, his nephew Michel Saint-Denis and actress Suzanne Bing. Commedia physicality and group movement became a trademark of the style developed. In 1927, Copeau left the company and Michel Saint-Denis took over.  Copeau started to direct plays internationally always aiming for a physical and clean form of theatre emphasizing lyrical rhythmic perfection which was non-illusionistic in its aesthetics. His productions were considered choreographic, balletic and organic. He pre-planned movements, timings and pauses which he unified with his love of improvisation in rehearsal. He was prolific as a reader and also amazing at learning and reciting text and often at early he would recite the entirety of the play to his actors. He believed that the best work came from actors when they worked halfway between total freedom and coercion. This led to the acting in his productions being described as ensemble-based presentational realism.

In 1933, Copeau mounted a production of The Mystery of Saint Uliva in the Santa Croce church in Florence. This was followed in 1935 with an outdoor performance of Savonarola in the central square in Florence. In Paris, from 1936 until 1939, he directed Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night,  Moliere's Le Misanthrope and Racine's Bajazet. Unable to follow the orders of the Germans in Paris, he resigned from his position as Provisionary Administrator of the Comedie-Francaise due to his continual disobeying of German occupier instructions and commands and retired at his home in Pernand-Vergelesses where he died in 1949.

Exercise - The Seven Levels of Tension

The seven levels of tension is an approach to actor training and performance invented by Copeau. Students can try these levels in training or also use them as the basis for developing character and/or a performance. Levels 1-4 or more like states or levels of tension used in everyday life. Levels 5-7 are hyperrealities or conducive to heightened performance.

Level 1 - Exhausted or stillness or catatonic. The Jellyfish. There is no tension in the body at all. Begin in a complete state of relaxation. If you have to move or speak, it is a real effort. Create focus without tension in the body

Level 2 - Laid back – relaxed - effortless. Everyday or like a soap opera. Everything you say is cool, relaxed, probably lacking in credibility. Any words are like casual or throw away lines.

Level 3 - Neutral or move and speak with great economy. It is what it is. There is nothing more, nothing less. The right amount. No past or future. You are totally present and aware. It is the state of tension before something happens. Think of a cat sitting comfortably on a wall, ready to leap up if a bird comes near. You move with no story behind your movement.

Level 4 - Alert or Curious (farce). Look at things. Sit down. Stand up. Indecision. Great comic characters like Tati's M. Hulot or Atkinson's Mr. Bean are like this. 

Level 5 - Suspense or the Reactive (19th century melodrama). The crisis is about to happen. All the tension is in the body, concentrated between the eyes. An inbreath. There’s a delay to your reaction. The body reacts. 

Level 6 - Passionate (opera). There is a bomb in the room. The tension has exploded out of the body. Anger, fear, hilarity, despair. It’s difficult to control. You walk into a room and there is a lion sitting there. There is a snake in the shower. 

Level 7 - Tragic (end of King Lear when Lear is holding Cordelia in his arms). Body can’t move. Petrified. The body is solid tension.

(Taken from David Farmer's Resource on the Seven Levels of Tension)

Charles Dullin

Charles Dullin was a French actor, theatre and film director, theatre trainer and manager who did much to further exploration and performance of movement based theatre. Born in 1885 in Yenne in present day France, by the age of 20, he had started as a full time actor performing mostly in melodrama. By 1908, he and fellow actor Saturni Fabre had started their own company staging melodramas and formalist style dramas including the early play works of Alexandre Arnoux. 

After moving to Paris, Dullin joined Copeau's company in 1913 for a short while before committing to Copeau's company more formally in 1917. As a soldier in WWI, he started to use his pantomime and mime skills and his interest in Japanese Kabuki theatre to perform to his fellow troupes. He saw these as essential representations of human nature even in the most dire of circumstances. By 1920, he was training actors at the Theatre Antoine and by 1921 he had developed ideas for a laboratory theatre and commune which he called Theatre de lÁtelier which he established outside Paris in Neronville. He trained and explored with actors for 10-12 hours a day to create a theatre based on common sharing of life and work. Some of the actors in this original troupe included Antonin Artaud and Marguerite Jamois. He later moved his troupe to the Theatre Montmartre in suburban Paris which had been the 'first purpose built theatre in suburban Paris when it was established in 1822.  

Dullin's by 1922 included mime and mirroring exercises, improvisation and vocal exercises exploring 'Voix de Soi-Meme' (the voice of oneself) and 'La Voix du Monde' (the voice of the world). He saw that actors must "see before describing, hear before answering... and feel before trying to express themselves". His use of soundscape movement exercises involving live and recorded sounds were described by many students. This work was influences by the work of Emile Jaque-Dalcroze and his system of Eurhythmics. Also pivotal to this work was the use of mask work from neutral masks to commedia masks to Noh theatre masks. Two of his most famous students from this period in the 1920s were the actor/theatre theorist Antonin Artaud and the actress Jany Holt (aka Ruxandra Ecaterina Vlădescu). It is interesting to note that Dullin used some Asian performance techniques and masks during the 1920s but he did not see his first performance of Asian theatre until in 1930 he saw Tsutsui Tokujiro's troupe perform in Paris in 1930. This performance was a shinpa style which combined kabuki style theatre with Japanese melodrama and swordplay. 

By the 1930s, Dullin's work had moved more into training actors and acting in films. He used his wonderfully physical and symbolic acting techniques to perform in films such as Les Miserables (1934) and Streets of Shadows (1937). His attempts to create a non-Naturalistic theatre and his creation of anti-war productions, meant that he found it difficult to continue his work during World War Two. After, the war, he continued to train actors and perform in films such as Les jeux sont faits ('The Chips are Down') (1947). He died in 1949 in Southern France while touring as an actor. His legacy and training techniques are kept alive through the Academie Charles-Dullin.

Exercises - Dullin

1. Walk to the music and when the music stops, you stop in a frozen pose of dynamic tension. 

2. Skip or dance to music and when the music stops move with the same rhythm and movements in the opposite direction without the music. The can also be done as doing a scene or movement with music and then when the music stops, continue the scene with the same rhythm or mood.

3. Bounce and catch a tennis ball to the rhythm of different music. This can also be done with the ball or ball passing between member of a group.

Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty

Artaud was born in Marseille in 1896. At the age of 18, he was admitted to a sanitoria. In 1916, he was conscripted into the French army. He was discharged from the army due to sleepwalking and was put back under psychiatric care. He eventually moved to Paris in 1921 and began some training with the symbolist poet and director Lugne-Poe. After a short holiday in Marseille, he joined Dullin's troupe and trained under Dullin in physical theatre techniques. Besides training with Dullin, he also developed over 11 roles for Dullin productions. 

During his eighteen months with Dullin's company, Artaud started to develop the beginnings of his theories for the Theatre of Cruelty. The physical work in Dullin's company helped Artaud to believe that gesture and movement were more powerful as a performance tool than text. He saw the function of lights, sound and set not as merely decorative and aesthetic elements but as tools for sensory disruption. He saw the audience as central to the performance. Around this time he started to describe theatre as an act of 'organised anarchy'. Like Dullin, he was strongly influenced by Eastern philosophy and performance. Whereas Dullin thought believed in a theatre of transposing or translating Eastern performance techniques to Western theatre because he did not "... impose on our Western theatre rules of a theatre of a long tradition which has its own symbolic language...", Artaud saw the adoption of Eastern symbolic gesture and movement as crucial to the survival of Western theatre. By 1923, he was writing poems and essays that became the basis for his work The Theatre and its Double.

During the late 1920s, Artaud started to work in films as an actor and writer and to start to work with the surrealist movement. He was a talented artist as well as a performer. However, Artaud was expelled from the surrealists by Breton because Artaud saw the communist leanings of the Surrealist and Breton's viewpoint that all theatre was bourgeois and anti-revolutionary as counterproductive. Artaud even made a direct attack on the Surrealists in 1926/27 in hos 'The manifesto for an Abortive Theatre' where he called for an "essential metamorphosis of society". Artaud saw film as the natural transition to this process. His most notable acting roles were as Jean-Paul Marat in Gance's Napoleon (1927) and as a monk called Massieu in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Ten of the over thirty screenplays he wrote survive including one of the few which was produced which was the 1928 Dulac directed surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman. 

After being expelled from the Surrealists, Artaud, Robert Aron and Roger Vitrac formed the Theatre Alfred Jarry, where they staged a broad range of productions in different styles. The theatre company put on four seasons of plays including Artaud's own play Theology (1928). In 1931, Artaud's interest in traditional theatre was to change forever when he saw a Balinese dance at the Paris Colonial Exposition. Specifically, Artaud was struck by the hypnotic rhythms of the gamelan and the way the dancers interacted in a dynamic way with the music. This significantly influenced his only official staging of a Theatre of Cruelty performance, Shelley's The Cenci in 1935 at the Theatre des Folies-Wagram in Paris. The play's challenging themes of the play along with directions in the text helped Artaud finally explore his theories on theatre in practice. As Artaud himself said of the play's opening scene, the scenes is "suggestive of the extreme atmospheric turbulence, with with-blown drapes , waves of amplified sound... as well as the presence of numerous large mannequins". Although the play was a commercial flop, it introduced many innovations including the first use in theatrical performance of an electronic instrument called the ondes martenot which was similar to a theremin.  

Later in 1935, Artaud received a grant from the Mexican Legation in Paris to travel to Mexico. Artaud believed that he needed to get away from Western decadence and get back to the deep roots of humanity that he believed existed in societies like Mexico. He studied, lived and even ran with the Tarahumaran in their rugged mountainous homelands and took part in peyote rites. His writings and insights from this period were written up in the book Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara. 

Back in France in 1937, Artaud was given a staff by a friend which he believed was the the famous Irish religious relic called the "staff of Jesus". He travelled to Ireland but eventually was deported as destitute. After an incident where he was attacked on a boat returning to France, he ended up in a straightjacket. This started a period in his life when he was in and out of asylums. He published his famous writings The Theatre and its Double (1938) during this period. He advocated for a theatre of magic and ritual with totem and gesture as its language. He saw words as not able to express the mind and saw that theatre should show spaces crammed with images and sounds where the audience is seized by a whirlwind of higher forces. As WW2 started and continued, Artaud was in and out of mental institutions. In 1943, he was transferred to Rodez in France and underwent electroshock therapy combined with art therapy under the guidance of Dr. Ferdiere. After the war, he was transferred to an institution in Ivry-sur-Seine and friends supported him writing and drawing again. In late 1947, he recorded for radio Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu (To Have Done With the Judgment of God) which stands as a lasting testament to his vision of a theatre of cruelty. The Director of French Radio, shelved the work the day before its scheduled airing in 1948. He died on March 4th in 1948, found seated in his bed holding a shoe by a gardener at the Ivry-sur-Seine clinic.  

Exercises - Artaud - Theatre of Cruelty 

Non verbal Arguments

Non-verbal arguments. Find a partner. This can be done face to face or online. You are to have an argument consisting of only sounds-- primal, aggressive sounds such as barks, howls, grunts, and moans. Manipulate the tone and pace of your argument as you proceed with the argument. Keep going until you and your partner come to an ending. This activity shows how an audience can interpret emotion without words. Sounds can convey the intensity of feeling in a non naturalistic, almost primal manner. Two. Repeat the exercise but this time, use one word each. You must stick to your chosen word and not change it. One word and one word only. You don't need language to evoke meaning. As Artaud said, 'Theatre of Cruelty serves not to entertain nor instruct but to effect'.

References

Artaud, A. 1947. Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu (To Have Done With the Judgment of God). Audio Recording Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DsPUuIQvdQ

Barber, S. 1993. Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs. Faber and Faber: London.

Copeau, J. 1991. Copeau: texts on Theatre. Edited and translated by John Rudlin & Norman H. Paul. Routledge: New York.

Deak, F. 1977. "Antonin Artaud and Charles Dullin: Artaud's Apprenticeship in Theatre". Educational Theatre Journal. 29 (3):346.

Esslin, M. 1976. Antonin Artaud. John Calder: London.

Farmer, D. 2019. 'The Seven Levels of Tension', Drama Resource. Retrieved from https://dramaresource.com/seven-levels-of-tension/

Leiter, S. 1994. The Great Stage Directors. Facts on File: New York.

Ristow, G. 2019. 'Favorite Dalcroze Games Vol. 1', UTheory. Retrieved from https://info.utheory.com/favorite-dalcroze-games-vol-1-2926e42e7a58/

Rudlin, J. 1986. Jacques Copeau. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK.

Yoremikids. 2022. Dalcroze Eurhythmics Activities for Kids. Retrieved from  https://www.yoremikids.com/news/dalcroze-eurhythmics-activities-for-kids

Jean Louis Barrault and Modernist Total Theatre

Jean Louis Barrault was born in 1910 and died in 1994. He was an actor, director, mime artist and theatre trainer who refined methods of modernist physical theatre which he called Total Theatre. He initially studied as a painter before entering actor training with Charles Dullin from 1931 until 1935. He saw early that classical European theatre forms like the commedia dell'arte could be reformed when joined to Asian theatre forms and the ideas of Artaud's 'Theatre of Cruelty' and Edward Gordon Craig's concepts of a symbolism total theatre where the actor was a like a marionette. His work as an actor, director and theatre trainer saw actors portray not only human characteristics but also the characteristics of animals and inanimate objects using mask work, found spaces, rituals, incantatory sounds and hieroglyphic forms of physical and facial expression.

Barrault's debut as a director happened in 1935 with a stage adaptation of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. The production used 'total theatre' with chorus chanting, drum beating, dance drama, exaggerated movements, dance-drama and movements of human, non-human and inanimate objects. This was followed in 1937 with a rich movement-based adaptation of Cervantes's The Siege of Numantia. In 1940, he joined the Comedie Francaise where he directed plays using vocal orchestration. Around this time, Barrault started to stage the plays of Paul Claudel which many people thought unstageable. His staging of Claudel's verse play The Satin Slipper used mystical overtones using mime, vocal musical orchestration and stylistic movement. 

In 1945, Barrault left the Comedie Francaise and he and his wife, the famous actress Madeleine Renaud, formed the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault.