ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that Ecole Jacques Lecoq's conceptualisation of acting technique is implicitly congruent with the principles of embodied cognition, and often explicitly forecasts its precepts. It gives a brief overview of some of the relevant principles of embodied cognition and will then relates these to key themes of Lecoq's pedagogy. The influence of Jacques Lecoq on modern theatre is significant. Lecoq's guiding principle was 'Tout bouge' – everything moves. His rigourous analysis of movement in humans and their environments formed the foundation for a refined and nuanced repertoire of acting exercises rooted in physical action. Lecoq's use of the mask to train actors is prescient of the discoveries of cognitive science in many ways. Lecoq's idea of 'the laws of movement' refers to the affordances and constraints of the typical able-bodied human anatomy and its relation to the physics of movement in the material environment.
