ABSTRACT
On a wall in the basement studio of Etienne Decroux's brick cottage in Boulogne-Billancourt, students encountered a photograph of one of the most celebrated statues in the Louvre Museum, the Winged Victory of Samothrace. In this black and white image, displayed alone against the aqueous blue cement, the headless, armless, larger-than-life goddess moves forward on one leg as the other trails behind in a swirl of cloth. French diplomat and amateur archeologist Charles Champoiseau unearthed the Victory in 1863 on the Greek isle of Samothrace; a century later, her image found its way into Decroux's underground workspace. Her theatrical stance inspired Decroux's subterranean research, linking his High Modernist experiments to ancient Greece.
Religion of Failure: the following story demonstrates one example of Decroux's belief that commercial success and artistic accomplishment were incompatible. Jessica Lange's 1976 film success, King Kong, provoked a flurry of publicity worldwide, even winning a full-page color photograph on the cover of a popular French weekly depicting her in the clutches of a gorilla run amok. Once the neighborhood shopkeepers read that the megastar had earlier studied with Etienne Decroux, they began showing greater respect for Madame—the butcher, for example, saving her the best cuts of meat. After all, her now-famous-by-association husband was but one embrace removed from King Kong and cinema immortality. Ironically, the shopkeepers’ belated deference stemmed not from the ascetic doctrine that Monsieur taught in his blue basement, but from its contrary—his student's cinematic fame and fortune that he disdained and against whose passionate and constricting gorilla-like embrace he vehemently warned his students.
Verticality. Decroux asked rhetorically: “What is man? You see a person on the horizon. Before we can discern a man or a woman, a Chinese or a Norwegian, we first detect a stick, like a Giacometti sculpture.” A stick, he argued, best represents man: not a sphere, not a cube, not a pyramid—a vertical and not a horizontal element. Part of his decades-long project consisted of articulating that verticality, creating the maximum number of distinctly moving parts while reimagining, from the living material of his own and his students’ bodies, a new actor-marionette for the twentieth century.
