ABSTRACT
Decroux's working class background served him well in his discovery that pushing and pulling constitute the actor's primary activity. In order to survive, animals “dance” as they respond to the gravitational pull. We have only to stand briefly on one leg to discover the constancy of these micro-readjustments. The human body, even in repose or asleep, perpetually plays with gravity, reeling itself in, letting itself out, resisting or giving in, never completely adjusting. The actor's project entails transforming this sometimes invisible, small-scale play into a more visible and coherent one for the audience, all the while preserving the movements’ organicity and “truthfulness” (actual engagement of weight rather than pretending). For Decroux, this engagement represented a constant Promethean struggle, whether on a larger or smaller scale. One could push or pull with the whole weight of the body (in commedia dell'arte or corporeal mime) or distill that effort to a small area as in cinema acting where a gaze or a barely moving hand or sternum could push or pull. An actor might expend the same energy in breaking open a door or pointing his finger.
As a child and young adult, Decroux moved through the teeming gas-lighted streets of Parisian working class neighborhoods. There he keenly observed workers deformed by manual labor—men and women he respected and admired, but whose subjection to a difficult life he wanted to escape. In that oppressive world, Decroux imagined man as a worm, half smashed onto the sidewalk, the other half reaching toward the sky. This, for Decroux at his most pessimistic, comprised the human condition: aspirations, hard work and intellect reaching toward the stars as his all too miserable human flesh, and the working class into which he was born, kept him firmly anchored to the earth. The theatre enabled Decroux to escape from his own decade-long career as a laborer while imagining a new life, one nonetheless enriched and informed by a worker's values.
