Jacques Lecoq

Jacques Lecoq is regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential teachers of the physical art of acting. He was born 15 December in Paris, France and participated and trained in various sports as a child and as a young man. During World War II he began exploring gymnastics, mime, movement and dance with a group who used performance to express their opposition to the German occupation of France. After the war, Lecoq then studied mime with Jean Daste, (a former pupil of the acclaimed teacher of mime, Jacques Copeau) who introduced him to masked performance and Japanese Noh theatre. He left Grenoble and spent six months teaching mask work in Germany, before accepting another teaching position at the University of Padua in Italy. He spent eight years in Italy teaching and working as a creative practitioner and discovered the traditional and popular Italian theatre style of commedia dell'arte as well as the tradition of masked chorus work developed in Ancient Greek tragedy. He returned to Paris in 1956 and opened his own school, the Ecole Internationale de Mime et de Theatre which has had many homes in Paris over the years but has continued to attract large numbers of students from all over the world. Lecoq also toured with demonstrations of his physical art of the actor and periodically conducted classes in Britain that had an enormous impact on the development of British theatre. He was awarded the prestigious Legion d'Honneur in 1982 and continued to take classes at his school right up to the day before his death on January 19, 1999.