ABSTRACT
In Nicolas Philibert's 2010 documentary, Nénette, an unidentified voice refers to the quality of “just being fully there”—words that take me back to my years at Decroux's school that included 200 lessons in improvisation. And memories of those rich, contradictory, frustrating and ultimately rewarding events, bring to mind Nénette, a Bornean orangutan who has lived at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris since 1972. She exemplifies many of Decroux's aspirations for stage presence/absence, a crucial aspect of the actor art. Decroux didn't teach —so much as create the conditions in which we could learn—how to empty our minds of quotidian thoughts (to relax) so that there could be room for “God to live there”; how to occupy space and not disappear; how to remain immobile, yet pulse with contained energy; how to move with asymmetrical rhythm to better portray the movement and sudden interruptions of thought, while allowing the audience members to project onto our screen-like faces and bodies. He taught us a kind of inner vibrato comprised of micro-movements: alternations of muscular tension and relaxation that bestow a luminosity.
Jacques Copeau and Suzanne Bing's scrutiny of animal movements regenerated their own and their disciples’ work. Michel Saint-Denis for example brought this influence from the Vieux Colombier School to conservatory training programs in Strasbourg, Montreal, New York and London. Copeau and Bing aimed not at performing clever imitations of animals for their own and others’ amusement, but instead discovered how the human animal needed to remember immediacy, a certain state of grace, so evident in Nénette, in children, in the person on a tightrope, and in “our teacher the cat.”
