From Paris with Love: The Lecoq Influence on George Ogilvie's Directing

Abstract

In an interview on the Arts Today radio program earlier this year, George Ogilvie was asked about the influence of his Lecoq training on his work as a director. He replied: "I think you have to talk about Lecoq's influence through his students. I was with Lecoq in the 1960s, so I was one of the first Australians at the studio and when I returned to Australia in 1965, of course no-one had yet heard of Lecoq. But gradually through my work as director of the Melbourne Theatre Company and the South Australian Theatre Company as well as workshops with the Australian Performance Group, Lecoq's [...] practice for the actor began to take hold. Of course, with Lecoq being my mentor, and he always has been, he influenced virtually everything we did." George Ogilvie speaks here of one of the key relationships at work in any theatre industry: the relationship between pedagogy and practice, between theatre training and theatre making. In this paper I would like to explore that relationship within the particular context of the links and ruptures between George Ogilvie's training at the Lecoq school and his directorial practice in Australian theatre. I would like to propose that theatre-making in Australia has benefited from Ogilvie's practical application of Lecoq's pedagogical principles. The material for this paper comes from my PhD research into the influence of the Lecoq school on Australian theatre.