ABSTRACT
Decroux's true pedagogical intentions reveal themselves over time: to train radical actors to overthrow the prevailing theatrical paradigm and replace it with a new one giving actors more authority. Parallel to his long career teaching and performing mime (about 60 years), Decroux successfully infiltrated the enemy lines of commercial theatre. As an actor, his underdog position had taught him well what it meant to lack power; nevertheless, he maintained a career as a stage, radio and film actor, operating within an entrenched hierarchy he ultimately wished to upend.
Whereas his teacher Jacques Copeau famously promulgated a bare stage while keeping authors, directors and other members of the text-centric chain of command in their traditional privileged places, Decroux, envisioned exiling the lot, leaving the actor—almost naked and all-powerful—on Copeau's legendary bare stage. In sum, he proposed overturning the director and playwright-centered theatre of his day in favor of the actor-centered one that he imagined for the future. Might we make a case that Copeau's early twentieth-century experiments are bearing fruit 100 years later in today's penchant for devising and collective creation?
Decroux blew up some of the grand idées reçues of European theatre traditions: the belief that theatre is first of all literature; that acting entails saying the author's words accompanied by appropriate gestures; that you write a play before rehearsing it; that theatre is “about something,” in the traditional narrative sense.
