Auto-cours: The necessity of a common language. 

In 2013 a production house from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia invited me to direct a project and do a performance. I had sixteen days to put together a show of an hour and I had a cast of 16 people from China, Korea, Malaysia, Belgium, Germany, Spain, and Iran - most of these being very far from my own culture.  Additionally, every artist that was in the cast was coming from different disciplines. I had musicians, Bali dancers, Malaysian dancers, - everybody coming from their own traditions, all very codified in and conditioned to their own art forms.  I had puppeteers from Peking Opera, the Iranian tradition of puppeteering and some European puppetry. The project was really a melting-pot of very different disciplines, cultures and languages. Strictly in terms of language, there were five or six people who did not talk at all any of the languages I speak. We had two different translators. People from Iran for example did not speak any French or English, they only spoke Iranian.  Similarly some of the Malaysian and Chinese people had poor English. This fact, that we had to always translate everything, while working on an only 16 day project, was already a big challenge. However, this constraint leads to one of the most interesting, the necessity for a universal, concrete, poetic theatrical language. The show was called Nama kamu atas perahu, or Your Name on A Boat in english. 

A very interesting risk to accept. I said yes, go for it. I will take this risk. It was going to be a big Auto-cours, because the only way that I knew how to accomplish this project was to put everything into the context of the experience that I had, yes, in pervious projects, but firstly the experience that I had during the school of Lecoq.  Here was the great challenge and I took it with a big pleasure and especially a big madness.  

I decide upon a theme which was a poem. It was about immigration and a man who decide to leave his own country on a boat to look for a better life.  He left his wife and everything he knew behind. This story is a tragedy about these people who are always looking for happiness and prosperity out there rather than looking for it their own home and land.  

The first thing I learned from Auto-cours in the school was that a common language needed to be established, that utilized the cast. As a researcher and creator, I look at the contributing artist, and from their human and artistic qualities I create a common language. For example I had two types of musicians, one was a very skilled Luthier from the Iranian tradition, the others were percussionists from Malaysia performing with Indonesian Gamelan music (with metallic drums).  To put these two type of musicians together at the service of one story in sixteen days perfectly exemplifies the challenge. I had to be very concrete. To do this I had to have a language on the space, on the physicality and on the story, that could be easily communicated across cultures through action.  

I had the same situation with the puppeteers. There was a puppet player from the tradition of Peking Opera, which is a notoriously codified art form. As far as I understood this art form for many years had not been going out of its own patterns and their own language. Next to this I had other puppeteers with a more European orientation, and one from Iran - a completely different perspective again. To approach this story and then to put their skills at the service of our story was like to put water with oil.   They had difficulties understanding why they had to give up their own tradition and many issues dealing with serious cultural taboos, that at times caused a lot of distress for some. To work around and through this took time. In this project, time was an issue so the creation of a common language was direly important. This is one of the things I discovered in the school while working on auto-cours. The things that are permanent, and universal must be drawn upon in order to communicate with in the creation process, but also with the audience.  These universals are for example the space, the push and pull, fixed point, the forces that govern our physical behaviors.  This is everything that can build a poetic language and a dramatic space.     

Another thing I discovered in the auto-cours that I have found to be fundamental in my work is the spirit of collaboration, which is for me the most difficult but exciting thing to communicate in all the projects and stage directions I have done. 

I find it very important to create in the group the feeling that we are not important but rather the story is important. Yet at the same time there is the feeling that everybody owns the story. They are the authors of this story, which is another element we experience at the school of Lecoq. 

What I did was to put everybody in Auto-cours. I created a very simple story structure, in which I knew what had to happen in each scene dramaturgically. I gave the cast a very simple sentence or told a short story, then I invited them to create some kind of a sketch of the story using the established common language.  By the end of each day they would have created a small segment of the show we could later refine.  This is more or less what we did in the school.  

As a director I was interested in promoting and respecting the culture of everybody, their language and their skills. As we progressed as an ensemble, while different styles and skills and viewpoints were brought to the table, they eventually came together to form one single picture or tableau in the story. 

While they were working I could observe which direction they were taking in their creation and how they were understanding the language and the space and from outside I could start to visualize about costumes, ambiance, lights, etc, so that it was really like an organism that was quickly taking form. The style of the piece was arriving. 

The great pleasure and risk was to arrive and discover the people, the space and just having two weeks to create a show. As the director of the project I was always trying to keep myself open to be questioned by the cast. Which is something necessary in Auto-cours at the School of Lecoq.

We didn’t work in a pyramid. Even if I was taking the last decisions by the end of the day. I could watch them work and create, and at the same time I could start to compose.

Over my theatrical carrier after the school I constantly faced the lessons I learned in the Auto-cours in the School. I learned how to put differing techniques together at the service of one story.  Forced by the necessity to translate in the creation process, I found universal truths that came from the laws of movement, not cultural cliches. These are universal laws that guide us to built common theatrical languages. I realized that playfulness and joy is the key for collective creation and creation in general.  Auto-cours at the school was an implication that there is such a thing as our own theatre, a theatre of today. This is what I understood from Jacques Lecoq’s Auto-cours: ‘get together and play as children would do’.

Enquete: Discovery of the unseen 

One of the projects that I want to do next year in New York is called New York Lands. I will be doing it with 12 actors, plus visual artists, designers and musicians. I have decided to approach this project as an enquete (investigation) of the city that will host the project. 

We are assigned the enquete at the end of the first year of the school of Lecoq. We choose a theme in the city, then we immerse ourselves in researching this subject for several weeks.  We observe everything then return to the school and transpose what we observed into a dramatic language and tell the story of this observation. 

The enquete is an approach to create a piece. Its main principal is the concrete observation of life. For me it is a way to bring to light things that we don't see at a glance.  For example the tensions on the space between different buildings or the dynamics of lighting that creates lines. The interacting dynamics that create urban architecture, rhythms, sounds, smells and behaviour is the observable material that will then be transposed onto the stage.   

My interest in using an enquete approach is to mix fluidly the concreteness of real life and the abstract nature of what I just described in order to tell stories that concern people of today. I search to understand the craftsmanship behind the observable material on the street; the mechanisms behind ordinary life in order to discover their stories. I think that the city of New York is a fantastic territory, and playground to do an investigation like this.

For every enquete you find a style or way to tell a story that you did not know before, so a new theatre appears. To do this you must be available to see the world upside down. This is Lecoq’s provocation; to see life with a different eye. 

The permanences that Jacques Lecoq talk about (i.e. the fixed point, push and pull, vertical, ...etc.) are fundamental because when thinking about creating a show starting with an enquete, I see that the painters use three primary colours and perspective, these are permanencies. They always use the same things to create their universes. If you look to architects they think of the system of forces, the vertical, the diagonal, the materials, etc, and these are their permanences. For whatever you are going to build as an architect, you pass by those permanences.  What we learn at the school of Lecoq is that those permanences for the actors and theatre makers exist as well. 

Probably nowadays, it is important to make an enquete observing the languages that exist in our daily life which belongs to cinematographic and technological universe. What I am interested in is transposing an enquete of this nature onto the stage without using technological machines, on the stage. I think New York city will be a rich research grounds. For example how we can transpose in an empty space the big screens that we can find in broadway, or the use of the smartphone in the subways. What is the impact of TV culture and technology in the spaces of the city and thus the dramatic space on stage. 

Commande: A lifelong provocation

Solo dell’Arte is a solo show I created using the masks of Commedia dell’Arte. The title of the show is a commande I gave to myself. Lecoq would give each student a phrase at the end of the Second year of the school that was to be your commission (commande). From this phrase you had to independently create a show, without any supervision from the teachers. 

My commande in my second year was a very big failure. My sentence was “le dire ce n’est pas forcement le faire”  (this what we say, is not necessarily what needs to be done). 

I tried to do what I try to do now with the Sollo dell’Arte, which is to tell a story while adding many different layers. At the time, I was already starting my investigation of the tragic depth in Commedia dell‘Arte, (a research Lecoq provoked me to start earlier that year after an Auto-cours performance of mine). So what I did for my commande was to select a story that was a tragedy about a young woman who is going to be raped. 

Then I took all the elements that I thought were related to Tragedy (cliches), and the same for the Comedy. I took a very big ladder and put someone singing on top, another big ladder was a violinist, with a white dress several meters long, and on the floor was a little platform with a dancer in all white.  Then I copy-pasted and put three guys with half mask of Commedia dell’Arte.  They entered to steal something that was very precious and then during the  very animal grotesque theft of a necklace for example - the symbol of this young beautiful girl, she died.  All this happened at the same time. It was three minutes and a half. It was expected to be around 7 minutes.  The feedback that I got was essentially “what the hell did you do”. My commande in the school was probably the worst that year. It was a very big risk, but also a very big failure. 

The multilayer combination of tragedy and comedy and the elements of space etc, was a big failure for me in the school, however after years of researching, Sollo dell’Arte, “only the art of the actor” is now my commande that I gave to myself, and I can deliver on stage the tragic depth that exists in Commedia dell’Arte. 

I took the exercise of doing a commande to continue my research and made the show Solo dell’Arte but also over the years I developed my own pedagogic approach to masked play and also mask as a concept for mis en scenes involving masked and unmasked players. I framed this lifelong research in what I call today Manifesto Poetico, my International Laboratory for Theatre Research and I contribute with my research with Pascale Lecoq at the Laboratory of Movement Study (LEM). 

Solo dell’Arte is composed firstly of a prologue that summarizes what I want to say with this show, which is a brief explanation of the tradition of Commedia and the importance of it’s spirit in the contemporary theatre of our time. This is regardless of whether or not the players are masked or unmasked in this theatre, rather it is about reinforcing the importance of the actor as the main element of the theatre phenomena.   

And secondly, the prologue is followed by two tragic stories that I wrote. The first, happens in a village in the south of Spain during the night. It is set at a big party wherein a man and a married woman end up alone together by the river. The second takes place in Paris, where a man is in love with a prostitute. The night he decides to declare his love for her, she commits suicide.   

I play the prologue in keeping with the popular Mediterranean tradition. The key here being popular, that is to say, a theatre for and with the audience. It is a way of being with the people and telling the story like a jester would have done - this belongs to an oral tradition that I saw in the way my father and my grandfather use to tell me stories. This we can see in Dario Fo for an example, who has been a big influence on my work. 

Then the following two stories are performed masked. 

The big question is how to play with masks without falling into cliches of a Commedia dell’Arte that doesn’t work any more. This was Lecoq’s provocation for me. How to make a Commedia that lives today? I understood this, that copy-pasting does not work, because of my big failure at the end of the second year. 

I could not play a character behind a mask, which is how it was done in all the Commedia I saw, but rather the mask had to be understood as a musician understands his instrument.  I had to understand the engine or inner structure of each mask. To approach this it was clear that I had to start from zero and go into an abstraction of each mask.  

Another layer will be the abstraction of, one, the imaginary space where the story takes place, and two, the awareness of the concrete space where the performance is about to happen.  

While performing I essentially do not move out of a one square meter area. Here I play gestures, movements, attitudes, and voice so that the audience can see the story with their imaginations. 

With this I deliver an abstract space. For example one moment my character is in the center of a square in the middle of the party, then all of a sudden I send a diagonal through a gesture, then my character sees the top of the stairs of a very big church, where his friend Antonio is. Then all of a sudden I send a horizontal in the opposite direction of the church, and my character sees many people. The crowd separates forming a corridor and Maria the friend arrives pushing in a different rhythm. These gestures allows the audience to construct the space of the story in their imaginations. 

All of a sudden this whole story is made by one vertical on the right side, a diagonal towards the audience, a horizontal on the left, a full vertical for the fireworks and a parallel horizontal for the river. These four or five lines are the abstraction of the space, that help the character and the actor tell the story.  As a painter sketches on the paper, the mask sketches on empty space. The goal is that the audience finishes the painting. 

I’m interested also in how to approach a text. In one of the stories from Sollo dell’Arte I took inspiration from a poem of Federico García Lorca. It is about a man who met a woman who did not tell him she was married and then they had an affair in the night at a party. 

Rather than interprete this story myself as an actor or director, I pass through the point of view of the mask to tell the story.  The mask is going to show to the audience what we do not see in the poem, everything that is left un-described: the atmosphere, the intensions of the characters, and the suggested actions.  All this is passing through one interpreter, which is the mask - its system of forces, not its psychology.  

This is part of my research that I started to touch upon in the LEM. It is to view the story and the mask from an architectural perspective. In the LEM we look at opposites, forces involved in the body and its movements, fix points, constructive forms, dynamics, vanishing points, - this leads to the uncovering of the forces that are involved in the story itself.   

It is this analysis of movement and structure that the telling of the story passes through. This is what I mean when I say the mask and its structure are the sole interpreter of the story that is being delivered, not culturally bound theories of psychology. This is for the audience to fill in.  

For me the commande is not just a sentence but a big provocation. It was a very big lesson. And I guess for all my classmates, the commande was also a provocation. For me the great thing of the commande is how over the years, you can keep provoking yourself all the time, and giving to yourself challenge to not sit down in what you already know, or into the established things, and get comfortable with a way of doing things. We have to keep searching: collectively as we do in auto-cours and looking to the concreteness of real life as we do in the enquete.

I think Lecoq’s provocation still alive in what I do and hopefully it will stay alive the rest of my career, allowing me to keep exploring and discovering new artistic challenges.