Breadcrumbs Section. Click here to navigate to respective pages.
Chapter

Chapter
Mimicry and the urgency of differences
DOI link for Mimicry and the urgency of differences
Mimicry and the urgency of differences book
Mimicry and the urgency of differences
DOI link for Mimicry and the urgency of differences
Mimicry and the urgency of differences book
ABSTRACT
This chapter explains Jane Goodall's lead and position two actor-training programs as sites for reflecting on how performance habituates both attendants and performers to ways of perceiving. The urgency of differences only arrives after students try to divest themselves of difference and fail. Jacques Lecoq separated pantomime from mime, at least partly to recuperate "mime" from the clutches of the pandemic of buskers inspired by Marcel Marceau's "Bip". More important to him was the attempt to take seriously the dynamics suggested by corporeal mimicry. Goodall's project was in part inspired by her uneasiness with the "curious orientalist tendency" that pervades the Western discourse on stage presence. The neutral mask offers a face that is "balanced, which proposes a physical sensation of calm", and there are two versions, a "male" and "female". Similar to the magnetic pole that is not the northernmost point, Lecoq charged students with finding a neutral that was not neutral.