Everything movesâJacques Lecoq 1
This is the heart of the concept of enaction: every living organism enactsâJohn Stewart 2
This book puts the theatre pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq in conversation with the cognitive scientific paradigm of enactivism. While these approaches to theatre making and understanding cognition come out of different theoretical and practical traditions, they share fundamental commitments to embodiment and action. Because of this commonality, Lecoq pedagogyâshot through enactivismâcan be understood in a different way, and aspects of enactivismâilluminated by Lecoq pedagogyâcan be examined anew. While I will propose some of the ways that Lecoq pedagogy might invigorate concepts and practices in enactive research, the core of this project is to present an enactive explanation of how Lecoqâs commitment to movement in his pedagogy has little to do with physical accomplishment in actor training. Rather, Lecoq implicitly casts his training as first and foremost a project of cognitive development. To illustrate this, I use principles from enactivism to demonstrate how Lecoq pedagogy induces a cognitive change in the actor and at a deeper level, how enactivism allows us to see the more profound ramifications of the Lecoq-trained actorâs creative agency.
When I invoke Lecoq pedagogy, I refer to both the work of Jacques Lecoq during his life (1921â1999) and the work anchored in his pedagogy but carried out within the vast Lecoq pedagogical diaspora around the world. Lecoq remained the leader of his school, LâĂcole Internationale de ThĂ©Ăątre Jacques Lecoq , 3 throughout his lifetime. His team of teachers was made up, in large part, of his own students. He offered a pedagogical year of training to some of his students who wished to learn about how to teach the approach he developed over the years. Some students went on to open their own schools and offer Lecoq-based training and pedagogical programs. Other students (who may or may not have completed the pedagogical training) still pass the work on to their own students in a variety of contexts such as workshops or training programs in which Lecoqâs may be one among many of the approaches offered. Certainly there is diversity in the way this work is taughtâLecoq himself developed and changed his work over time. While Lecoqâs work was never frozen or monolithic, there are certain principles and exercises that tended to reoccur in his teaching and continue to appear in thework of his students. It is this collection of enduring principles and exercises that I consider, for they continue to be transmitted in studios throughout the world. When I use the terms âenactivismâ or âenaction,â I refer specifically to the cognitive scientific ideas emanating from, or consonant with, the cognitive scientific interdisciplinary paradigm of enaction that has been inflected by fields such as neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and phenomenology. Also not monolithic, the enactive approach is highly polyvocal, and is still in the process of development. To clarify my engagement with enaction, I subscribe to the general outlines of this paradigm as sketched by John Stewart , Olivier Gapenne , Ezequiel Di Paolo , and fellow contributors in Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm of Cognitive Science . 4 I will explain the details of these outlines in later chapters. Acknowledging the complexities, instabilities, and processual natures of both Lecoq pedagogy and the paradigm of enaction, I rely on certain coherencies of their main practices and principles to see how they might provide new insights into each other and into the nature of embodied cognition in theatre. I will highlight their respective coherencies and connect the dots between them as I detail both Lecoq pedagogy and the enactive framework.
Situating This Lecoq-Cognitive Science Encounter
This book aims to contribute to conversations already taking place between cognitive scientific approaches and theatre studies. 5 In the discipline of theatre studies, scholars have written important studies on dramatic literature, spectatorship, and acting. Book-length discussions of acting include the work of Rhonda Blair , John Lutterbie , and Rick Kemp . Blair âs book, The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience , reframes Stanislavsky -based acting in terms of cognitive neuroscience to propose how the actorâs entire process does multifaceted, deep, and broad cognitive work. Lutterbie âs Toward a General Theory of Acting: Cognitive Science and Performance deploys Dynamic Systems Theory to offer a fresh articulation of overarching principles across a variety of acting traditions in the West. Kemp âs Embodied Acting: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Performance considers how body-based approaches to actor training resonate with principles of embodied cognition and how actors might take advantage of that resonance to improve the practice of acting. While both Lutterbie and Kemp discuss Lecoq pedagogy, Kemp âs interest in Lecoqâs focus on the body shares aspects of my own interest in Lecoqâs prioritization of movement in actor training. My approach to understanding Lecoq pedagogy in relation to cognitive science is distinct from Kemp âs in three ways: where Kemp is most interested in its practical ramifications, I focus on epistemological and ontological ones; where Kemp âs practical interest in improving actor training largely focuses on the executional level of actor training and performance, my more theoretical interest focuses on the foundational level of Lecoqâs training ; and where Kemp considers a number of cognitive scientific principles alongside Lecoq pedagogy, I work with the enactive approach in particular. Through a sustained investigation of two specific approaches, Lecoq pedagogy and enaction, I consider how they both offer a conception of what embodiment is, what it can do, and whereâbeyond creativity and cognitionâit can lead us.
The main thrust of embodied cognition (within which are a variety of perspectives, disagreements, and investments) is that cognition is not located in the organ of the brain only; the mind is not âembrained.â Rather, embodied cognitive approaches suggest that the entire human body participates in making cognition. Enaction also takes embodiment as a foundational principle, but emphasizes cognition as a dynamic process. For enaction, an organismâs whole body is always already embedded in its environment and âbrings forth the world in which it existsâ [italics in original] (Stewart 3). 6 This change in inflection shifts embodiment from static state to process, and helps to account for the organismâs interconnected relationship to its environment . A strong notion of embodiment in enaction suggests that, in some cases, focusing on neural activity might veil an embrained-mind approach. Explaining the bodyâs role in cognition by tracing links between physical and neural activity can suggest that neural functions, maps, and representations point to neural causes of, rather than correlations in, cognition. On this view it follows that the rest of the body is only cognitively useful for feeding data into neural functions for processing. The logic in this neural-focused perspective leads to the idea that the brain needs an intermediary mechanism to process information from the body and the worldâthe homunculus fallacy. 7 For enaction, these two issues are vestiges of mind/body dichotomies and computational models of cognition and representation. An enactive approach replaces the issue of how cognition represents the world to us with how organisms enact their worlds. Even when Kemp demonstrates how Lecoq pedagogy and other acting approaches might bear upon neural function, he issues a warning about analyzing with the results of brain-imaging technology :
An important caveat needs to be mentioned about these studies: the images that they produce show correlations between brain activities and psychological states, and they do not necessarily show that the brain activity is responsible for the psychological state. While brain imaging offers us much more information about cognitive processes than was previously available, conclusions drawn from the process about brain mechanisms are necessarily broad. (âLecoq, emotion and embodied cognitionâ 201)
To chime in with Kemp , I clarify that my line of thought is not to suggest that neurons do not exist or function in ways that neuroscientists think that they do. I merely point out that methods of assessing phenomena are inherently laden with priorities and hence, philosophical values. While we may be careful in drawing only broad conclusions about âbrain mechanisms,â we must also beware not to attribute any causation to such evidence and inadvertently endow the brain with priority, agency, and distinction from the rest of the body.
My shift toward enaction also permits a differently inflected perspective on the nature of embodiment in Lecoq pedagogy. While my project is born from the body-based work of Lecoq pedagogy, it moves through the practical ramifications of the training into epistemological and ontological realms. Kemp details the way in which overtly acknowledging the parallels between Lecoq pedagogy and embodied cognition allows the actor to better apply the pedagogy to her acting. I am interested in the way that a Lecoq-enactivism conversation proposes new ramifications for the agency of the actor-creator âthe ideal figure forged through Lecoq pedagogyâand the role of movement in cognitive agency as a whole. Since enactivism sees cognition as embodied and context-specific, different practices, even under the same banner of embodied cognition, do different things. Kemp acknowledges that Lecoq pedagogy does not primarily seek to produce actor-interpreters for psychologically realist text-based work. However, his proposals are mainly for psychological realist performances, and most of them text-based (Kemp , Embodied Acting 13). This makes sense considering Kemp âs work aims to improve actor training and most of these programs need to equip their students with tools for mainstream theatre that islargelycomprised of text-based work. Because Lecoq pedagogy i...