Imagining Bodies in Performer Training: The Legacies of Jacques Lecoq and Gaston Bachelard

This book is a practical and theoretical exploration of the embodied imagining processes of devised performance in which the human and more-than-human are co-implicated in the creative process. This study brings together the work of French theatre pedagogue Jacques Lecoq (1921–1999) and French philosopher of science and the imagination Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), to explore the notion of the imagination as embodied, enactive, and embedded in the devising process. An exploration of compelling correspondences with Bachelard, whose writings imbue Lecoq’s teaching ethos, offers new practical and theoretical perspectives on Lecoq’s ‘poetic body’ in contemporary devising practices. Interweaving first-hand accounts by the author and interviews with contemporary international creative practitioners who have graduated from, or have been deeply influenced by Lecoq, The Imagining Body in Performer Training interrogates how his teachings have been adapted, developed, and extended in various cultural, political, and historical settings, in Europe, Scandinavia, Asia, North and South America. These new and rich insights reveal a teaching approach that resists fixity and instead unfolds, develops, and adapts to the diverse cultural and political contexts of its practitioners, teachers, and students.