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Figures of Style and Counterweights in Etienne Decroux's Technique
"Everthing weighs.
How does one give a bit of flesh to this statement ? Everything is not round, but everthing weighs. Not everything is pointed, but everything weighs. Not everything is tender, but everything weighs." -Etienne Decroux
We are very happy to announce the next workshop with Thomas Leabhart in Paris : Figures of Style and Counterweights in Etienne Decroux's Technique which will take place:
December 12 to 22
Hours: Monday to Friday 9am to 1:30pm
40 Hours / Cost: 330 €
Location : Studio Philippe Genty, 40 rue Sedaine, Paris, 75011
Limited places / advance reservations highly suggested
telephone : Won +33 (0) 6 71 61 93 94
e-mail: won@pasdedieux.com
Figures of Style and Counterweights in Etienne Decroux's Technique
Decroux began with the observation of man during his habitual activities or environments, at work, at sport, at leisure, dreaming, among others. He also explored human movement, from the more primitive, and the more simple, to the more sophisticated.
This research was based on observation and certainly, later, on practice on his own body. Besides many pieces, his work resulted in the "categories", or styles, or "categories of play", created for pedagogical purposes.
These categories are valuable for teaching, because they facilitate a physical understanding on the basis of the visualization of types. Of course, the pieces created for each of the categories are not clichés. They are stylizations following the rules appropriate to the category to which they belong.
Decroux declared that, even though he disliked scientific terms, his study could be qualified as "historico-economic" taking into account the relationship it maintained with the survival and evolution of the human race. For him, these categories were the following: - The Sportsman comprised of three sub-categories, the Laborer, the Artisan, the Man of the Islands; - The Man of the Salon; - The Mobile Statuary; - The Dreaming Man.
THOMAS LEABHART
Student of Etienne Decroux from 1968 - 1972, Thomas Leabhart is Professor of Theatre and Resident Artist at Pomona College, and member of the Artistic Staff of ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology). He performs and teaches regularly in France, and has performed and taught workshops at the Museum of Design in Zurich, The Austrian Theatre Museum in Vienna, the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, the American Center in Montevideo, Movement Theatre International in Philadelphia, and many other venues. Editor of Mime Journal, he has authored more than thirty articles and Modern and Post Modern Mime (Macmillan in London and St. Martin's Press, NYC, 1989) and Etienne Decroux, Routledge Performance Practitioners (Routledge Press 2007).
