ABSTRACT
Etienne Decroux’s had deep and abiding belief in what he called the Cathedral of Corporeal Mime, a project he imagined would consume, like the great cathedrals of France, the lifetimes of many workers Graduate students in Italy, France, and Spain. His appearance in the Performance Practitioners Series places Decroux accurately in a line of influential twentieth-century theatre reformers, helping to rescue him from years of oblivion and benign neglect. During his career, Decroux acted in twenty films, the best known being Marcel Carné’s celebrated Children of Paradise. This project touched the lives of its actors in powerful and unexpected ways and, in particular, proved pivotal for the careers of Etienne Decroux and Jean-Louis Barrault and in the development of Corporeal Mime. The Asian strand in Decroux's work finds its origin in a version of a Noh play, Kantan, which, when performed by students at the Ecole du Vieux-Colombier, touched Decroux deeply.
