< The Times, 1 April 1988 >

Unearthly movement at large

Jacques Lecoq
Queen Elizabeth Hall

What Nadia Boulanger was to modern music, Jacques Lecoq is to the modern stage: an immensely influential teacher, seldom seen in public, but known to the world through generations of dazzling pupils.

He is often described as a pantomime specialist, but that term is far too narrow, and too Gallic, to convey his comprehensive and international mastery of the art of movement.

Pantomime, he says, is the theatre's "lost child", which loses its name whenever the stage undergoes a revival in physical skills. Last night's programme (alas, the only one), launching the ten-week International Workshop Festival, is his acknowledgement that Britain is experiencing such a revival.

The title, Tout Bouge, tells you everything. A lifetime's observation of body language is packed into 90 minutes, starting with the way we walk, and ending with comic and tragic masks. Lecoq, a thick-set figure in a business suit, strides on as a lecturer and then leaps right out of his skin in a deliriously funny scene showing Colombine giving Pierrot the brush-off.

That is the last we see of pantomime blance. Illustrating the body's three motor centres, he presents a spectrum of walking styles, from the cowboy to the mannequin, from Texas to Japan. There are internationally contrasted expressions of farewell (Italians embracing the visitor, the French shooing him away); and the timing of speech to handshakes.

The same gesture from the hips means the opposite when delivered from head level; and a slow verbal response to a slap means that the hurt is moral, not physical. Different ranges of movement are derived from the four elements (one of the rare instances where he departs from the French academic rule of three); and there is a marvellous railway station bestiary, with milling crowds of waiting horses, searching mice and snobbish giraffes.

With masks (which, he points out, transfer attention from the eyes to the head) he goes instantly into character: generating a sense of the unearthly as he links the posture of the discus thrower to the archetypes of tragedy, and shows each mask containing its own counter-mask. A great artist.

Irving Wardle