ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author considers the playing of the nonhuman as it is theorized and enacted in the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq and proposes that it stand as a guide for acting instructors who are developing approaches to teaching that are responsive to our overall environmental crisis. Attempting to perform the other-than-human may form the logical antidote to the usual practices of theatre, the most anthropocentric of all the arts, its subject always and continually the human. The pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq is full of excursions of the “imagining body” into realms of other-than-human representation: it has always entailed performing as animal, substance and weather phenomenon. However, these have been enlisted in the task of representing human characters; the author argues that such practices be undertaken as ends in themselves.
