Tag: Ecole Jacques Lecoq
From my friend the inimitable Julia Pearlstein comes this intriguing news item: FX cable tv has contracted to produce ten episodes of Baskets, co-created by Louie C.K., Zach Galifianakis, and Jonathan Krisel, and starring Galifianakis as an aspiring clown who flunks out of “a prestigious Paris clown school” but lands a job working for a rodeo. Perhaps not coincidentally, I know that Louie C.K. came to Avner “the Eccentric” Eisenberg’s one-man clown show in NYC last year and loved it. Avner, by the way, did not flunk out of Lecoq’s.
It takes more than a little bravery to tell an audience outright that you are going to explain to them how comedy works and that you intend to make them laugh a lot in the process, even suggesting that they don’t have much choice in the matter. But if they don’t laugh, you lose on two counts. And it takes a lot of talent, training, and practice to pull it off as well as Jos Houben did Tuesday night in New York at an evening hosted by the Alliance Française as part of their Crossing the Line performance series. Yes, lots of laughs and a standing ovation.
The notion that physical comedians and other movement artists might have something to teach traditional actors goes back at least a century, when such innovative directors as Jacques Copeau in France and Vsevolod Meyerhold in Russia hired accomplished clowns and variety performers as guest instructors. In the United States, this became a trend in the 60s and 70s as “experimental” theatres sought to break the confines of the fourth wall and Stanislavski method acting to forge more theatrical performance styles.
During my March visit to Paris, the Louvre was hosting various groups doing performances and other events around the art work each Friday night. The evening I visited, there were about half a dozen groups of students from the École Jacques Lecoq doing movement pieces in the Richelieu wing in front of glorious Renaissance tapestries and related art work. I thought the evening a great success, bringing new life to a museum that, though indisputably great, can still benefit from more dynamic ways of engaging art.
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Workshops & Other Events
My first book (1976)
My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.
My second book (2015)
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin