french version
THE SEA HORSE PROJECT
A YEAR OF CORPOREAL MIME TRAINING
CORPOREAL MIME
TRAINING
TIMETABLE
INSTRUCTORS
PROGRAM
WORDS ON DECROUX
CORPOREAL MIME
Developed by Etienne Decroux, Corporeal Mime stems from the theatrical
experiments of the early 20th century (Appia, Craig, and Copeau). Its
objective is to place drama inside the moving body, rather than to substitute
gesture for speech as in pantomime.
Both sculptor and statue, the mime must apply principles that are at the
heart of drama to movement: pause, hesitation, weight, resistance, and
surprise.
TRAINING
The Seahorse Project’s objectives are to enable the actor to become
more autonomous in creating metaphor-based physical theatre pieces, which
may include text, but are not based on text, i.e., to give the actor greater
access to physical metaphors in work in traditional plays, and to increase
the actor's strength, agility, flexibility and imaginative powers.
Hippocampe is offering a year-long corporeal mime training program in
2005-2006. In addition to the training program, there will be opportunities
for work demonstrations and public performances.
The training program is open to adults aged 18 and over. No experience
in the field of performing arts is required.
TIMETABLE
Classes:
Corporeal Mime Class with Luis Torreão
Classes starts on October 4th
Monday and Wednesday from 2pm to 5pm
Tuesday and Thursday from 10am to 1pm
Fees:
110 € /month (2 classes/week)
190 € /month (3 classes/week)
Workshops:
Workshop with Thomas Leabhart
From june 14th to june 25th 2010
Classes: Monday to Friday from 2pm to 6pm
Fee: 310 euros
All classes at :
Théâtre de la Terre
1 passage du Buisson Saint Louis - 75010 Paris
M° Goncourt ou Belleville.
INSTRUCTORS
Luis Torreao
Began his study in Corporeal Mime in 1994, before becoming assistant to Thomas Leabhart in 1997 in Paris and in California. Taught at the Seahorse Project (Hippocampe) in Paris since September 2000. Currently, directs the Hippocampe company. As an actor and choreographer, created: Of Men and Women (2005), Traçado (2004), Labyrinth – Prototype (2003), Koan (2002).
Stephanie Cadoret
As a young artist and animation film maker, Stéphanie Cadoret
uses new media to link and unpart traditionnal formats. She seeks a way
to reuse traditionnal animation techniques, but in live and through performing
arts.
After an art cursus at the school of decorative arts of Strasbourg where
she could explore drawing, painting and then video, she followed a training
in animation at EMCA, in Angouleme. The fine art school being right in
front of it on the other bank of the Charente River, it would have been
a shame not to take advantage of it to satisfy her curiosity for new media.
She discovered Max MSP, a program allowing to build interactive installations,
and she took part in Sliders, a collective project on interactive cinema
that took them more particulary to Gent, in dutch Belgium, (Update Festival),
to Montreal, Quebec (Hexagram laboratory), where they could meet the most
active artists and institutions on numeric arts. Building on these experiences,
she currently makes narrative researches on traditional movie making as
well as transdisciplinary experiments in art and scenography.
Thomas Leabhart - Honorary Instructor.
Student of Etienne Decroux from 1968 - 1972, Thomas Leabhart is Professor
of Theatre and Resident Artist at Pomona College, and member of the Artistic
Staff of ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology). He performs
and teaches regularly in France, and has performed and taught workshops
at the Museum of Design in Zurich, The Austrian Theatre Museum in Vienna,
the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, the American Center in Montevideo,
Movement Theatre International in Philadelphia, and many other venues.
Editor of Mime Journal, he has authored thirty articles and Modern and
Post Modern Mime (Macmillan in London and St. Martin's Press, NYC).
Thomas Leabhart teaches regularly at the Seahorse Project (Hippocampe).
PROGRAM
Back Exercises:
A combination of yoga, Pilates, Lessac and Feldenkrais, this series
of exercises has been developed by Thomas Leabhart over a period of thirty
years as a preparation for the practice of corporeal mime. Each exercise
is tailored and adapted to the opening of the back, the articulation of
the vertebrae, the activation of the area around the sacrum, and the improvement
of alignment for the physical actor's optimum performance.
Corporal Mime Technique:
Scales:
Decroux's scales place the external geometry of stage architecture inside
the actors' body, making these clear articulations of the body simultaneously
luminous and legible. Scales and related segmented movements can be performed
on the lateral plane, forward and back, in rotation, and in combining
two or three planes. From these basic scales and segmented movements come
more complex configurations: undulations, compensations, re-establishments,
etc.
Counterweights:
For Decroux, counterweights (work movements) were most distinctive in
differentiating mime from dance. This apparent and amplified struggle
is the basis of mime. Weight and resistance, posed by gravity and matter,
are external forces against which, the actor is continuously and dramatically
struggling. Decroux noted that pushing heavy thoughts may entail the same
counterweights (and the same physical effort) as moving heavy objects,
and that a certain physical gravitas is necessary to depict a corresponding
moral state.
Dynamo-Rhythms:
A slap and a caress use exactly the same body parts, and the same trajectory.
It is only the contrasting dynamic quality which distinguishes the two.
Dynamic exploration was for Decroux an important part of the actor training,
which can be applied in any area of corporeal mime, improvisation, and
creation of new works.
Figures of Style:
These mini-compositions, many of which are based on paintings and sculptures,
help the student to begin to think and move in a dramatic way.
Improvisation:
Decroux taught that the mime must begin like a cinema actor and finish
like an acrobat. His improvisation exercises help the actor to have more
presence while at the same time exploring a greater range of physical
expressivity.
Composition:
The Seahorse Project will encourage creation of new work through a series
of composition exercises, which help the actor in creating complex and
potentially expressive pieces.
Repertoire:
While the Seahorse project will focus on the creation of new works,
certain repertoire pieces by Decroux (Washerwoman) and Leabhart (Table,
Chair and Glass, among others) will be taught.
WORDS ON DECROUX
"Etienne Decroux: At last a creator in the theatre, from the theatre.
I have travelled a lot in Europe...but until now I've never seen anything
comparable to this effort." E. Gordon Craig.
"Someone told me that a journalist asked Charlie Chaplin to define
mime in a word or two, and Chaplin responded: "Mime is immobility."
...I think that Chaplin did not accurately state his own thought. He should
have said: 'Mime is stasis,' or better yet, 'movement in place.' ...A
man who is thinking is immobile. And when he seems to be mobile, he is
transporting his immobility. When the seahorse is not moving, he is a
thinker, his head bent down. This is what we do when we work, and above
all when we analyze. The act of analyzing makes us look down, not up.
We look up to see the totality, a panaroma; but if we want to understand
something, know it, dissect it, we want to take it in our hands, up there,
and put it on the table in order to change it, to know it better, to analyze
it, or as they said in the eighteenth century, to divide it. The seahorse
seems to be looking at something, and we feel that the back of his neck
continues to his forehead” Etienne Decroux
TO CONTACT US :
Hippocampe - Association pour la Recherche en Mime Corporel
2, Passage de la Fonderie 75011 Paris
Tel: (33). 01.43.38.79.75 (France)
E-mail:info@hippocampe.asso.fr
"There is one thing that Man has not yet been able to master; one
thing whose existence he does not even suspect, but it is ready to be
approached with love, invisible and yet always present, magnificently
seductive and fleeting… It is nothing other than Movement. "
Edward Gordon Craig
“Etienne Decroux is perhaps the only European master to have elaborated
a system of rules comparable to that of an Oriental tradition."
Eugenio Barba
