Everett, Lynn Maree

Kiernander, Adrian

2001

The Ecole Jacques Lecoq is an international theatre school that was founded by Lecoq in 1956. The school offers a movement-based training, teaching the principles of performance through improvisation, the creation of original theatrical material, and through the study of a repertoire of performance styles including melodrama, bouffon, commedia dell'arte, tragedy and clown. The Lecoq school has had a profound influence on theatre training and practice in many parts of the world, including Australia. Approximately fifty alumni of the Lecoq school have lived and worked in Australia as actors, directors, writers and teachers of theatre. These include theatre practitioners such as Geoffrey Rush, George Ogilvie, Nigel Jamieson, Isabelle Anderson, Heather Robb and Therese Collie. As with their international counterparts, Lecoq alumni in Australia have helped to forge new directions for theatre training and practice, challenging and undermining the dominance of text-based realism and contributing to current trends in physical/image/circus/dance theatre forms. Through an examination of the work of these alumni, the thesis traces and maps the influence of the Lecoq school on Australian theatre. The research strategies employed in the study are based on oral history methodologies, using extensive interviews with alumni as the primary data. The study finds a theoretical basis in post-modernist approaches to history and, using these as a model, attempts to position the influence of the Lecoq school on Australian theatre within its relative socio-cultural, historical and ideological contexts. The thesis problematises the term 'influence' , offering the concepts of 'diaspora' and 'leavening' as complementary alternative terms for understanding 'influence' as it might be applied specifically to the study.

https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/18219

en

The Influence of the Lecoq School on Australian Theatre: An Oral History Based Study

Thesis Doctoral

Publication