ABSTRACT
In a basement in the proletarian outskirts of Paris, Decroux invoked the name of Jacques Copeau (1879–1949) practically daily; likewise, Decroux gave it a prominent place in his book Words on Mime. Above ground, however, during many of the years of Copeau's retreat from full-time company directorship and after the demise of his research group, Copeau was less than a central figure—all but forgotten. Decroux based both the technical and the improvisational parts of his teaching on Bing and Copeau's techniques for building the actor's scenic presence through a process of emptying out in order to fill up.
Many years after my first encounter with Decroux, I realized that his project involved the construction of idealized bodies that could support neutral or noble masks. Decroux also encouraged certain attitudes of thought to correspond to the faces from the temples at Angkor, those sculpted heads at the Musée Guimet. The ever-changing articulated planes of the corporeal mime's body became the equivalent of facets and rounded surfaces of noble masks, refracting light in alternating sudden bursts and slow unfoldings. The mask exercises at the Vieux-Colombier taught Decroux how the nearly nude body could move to achieve maximum presence—the unadorned state, an embodied equivalent to Copeau's bare stage. The architectural lines Decroux then constructed through the body heightened its visibility, creating a moving surface on which to splash colorfully varied dynamic qualities. Finally, that nearly nude body on a bare stage glowed with an inner light when the actor succeeded in “emptying out the apartment” for “God to come to live there.”
Copeau's mask work required but also facilitated the actor's altered consciousness. Decroux bestowed on that inner work the emblem of an ancient dreaming Cambodian face, uniting it with an extra-quotidian articulated body, the two functioning as a head-to-toe living mask. This marriage of elements constituted the cornerstone of a new-old actor-centered theatre.
