ABSTRACT
Twentieth-century practitioners have left us a bounteous repository of evidence documenting their research into theatre-making. Phrasing silence as well as speech, these “wooden actors,” [See Chapters 1 and 5] in all their various approaches, found internal coherence in kata and theatrical life in fixed movement sequences—in the conscious musical-corporeal articulations of time and space.
In Decroux's articulated actor, the entire body became a face once it was covered with a veil or a mask. And, while Henry Irving had to articulate and polish his own face into a (metaphorical) mask, Decroux's corporeal mime (often interchangeably referred to in the early days as “The Mask”) would require the same detailed articulation, but for the body. In Decroux's fashioning of a new actor for his revolutionary theatrical paradigm, the actor's face became a mask and her body a marionette.
The transformation of face into mask and of body into marionette took place in a world colored by Henry Irving's magnetic acting and Edward Gordon Craig's mysticism [See LeBoeuf]. These influences travelled through Irving and Craig, culminating in Decroux's corporeal mime where they distilled into “muscular respiration.”
