Etienne Decroux (19 July 1898 Paris – 12 March 1991, Boulogne-Bancor) was a French theater actor and mime artist. He is known for his mime technique and school of thought called Etienne Decroux’s Corporeal Mime.
About Etienne Decroux
Etienne Decroux studied at the Jacques Copeau School near the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris. After graduating he was accepted into the band of Charles Dullin, where he acted for many years. He also worked under the direction of Antoine Artaud and Louis Jouvet and starred in several of the films of Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert. His growing interest in body language and its expressive abilities led him to cease his activities as a professional theater actor to devote himself entirely to the art of movement.
As a student of Charles Dullin, Decroux became interested in a new doctrine of pantomime and later developed a personal, original style of movement. His early style as a “statue-like pantomime” (Mime statuaire) was reminiscent of Rodin’s sculptures. He later created more plastic forms of expression that he called “mime corporeal”. As a theorist, he based his physical training partly on what modern dancers called “isolations”, in which body parts move in a pre-dictated sequence, and partly on the physics of compensation required to maintain the body’s balance with its center of gravity tilted to the side.
Decroux asked to recruit other students for his mime group in the band but was denied. When the Vieux-Colombier Theater closed in 1924, Decroux taught at his teacher’s acting school, Charles Dullin – the Atelier – where Jean-Louis Barrault also arrived in. In a two-year collaboration between Decroux and his first student, Barrault, the two were able to find a new artistic technique that Decroux called “the dramatic body pantomime”. Barrault and Decroux created different acts of mime designed for a single mime artist or a pair of artists.
Beginning in the 1940s, Decroux set up his studio in Paris, to which many artists from all over the world flocked to study. Decroux was then invited to teach at various drama institutions such as Giorgio Strehler’s Piccolo Teatro della Città di Milano and the New York Actors Studio. He came to New York around 1957 and taught morning and evening classes there in the studio on Eighth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Avenue and eventually formed his band “The Mime Theater” which toured throughout the United States in the 1950s.
His students pledged to devote full days to rehearsals that preceded the aforementioned theater performances. Performances performed at The Cricket Theater in the Village included “The Factory”, “The Trees”, “All the City Works” and “Evil Spirit”. Among Decroux’s students at the time were Sterling Johnson, Sonia Swanson, Marjorie Walker (whose last name at birth was Opletka), and Joel Walker, who taught at the time Decroux returned to Paris.
On his return to Paris in 1962, Decroux opened his school in Boulogne-Bancor, where he taught his ” Etienne Decroux Technique” almost until the day of his death. Many hundreds of students passed through this school and a new generation of mime artists continued its search. The art he developed in those years was completely different from what was known as a traditional mime. He did not develop an art of silence, but a real art of dramatic movement. As a result, in the end, his revolutionary art is often considered a “classical” pantomime.
Etienne Decroux Technique
Decroux’s main contribution was the artistic form, repertoire, and technique of the pantomime of the body.
He also worked as an actor, for example with Barrault in “The Children of Paradise” (in French: “Les Enfants du Paradis”), where he played Anselme Deburau, the father of Baptiste Deburau, played by Jean-Louis Barrault.
Etienne Decroux Technique influenced artists such as Barrault, Marcel Marceau, Rene Bezina, Shaike Ophir, Thomas Leibhart, Joel Walker, and Daniel Stein, although each later went his own way. Few artists among Decroux’s students continued to teach and develop the art of “body pantomime” as invented by their teacher. Decroux’s students later formed their schools and bands in Spain, Italy, Belgium, and England. They took the style in new directions and created encounters between their own technical and artistic background and those of other artists.
Decroux was called the “father of modern mime”, although he created his style of pantomime of the body. Decroux himself would have attributed the “paternity” of the modern mime to Jacques Copeau while declaring that he had only raised the child. Apart from Decroux’s style, there were and still are other styles of modern pantomime unrelated to his own.
In addition to his contribution as a teacher, Decroux’s influence on Barrault and Marceau created an extraordinary impetus for the art of pantomime in France, from which it spread to the world. His work continues to attract and inspire mimes even today.
Decroux is considered, among other things, as the inventor of the moon walk, which became popular thanks to Michael Jackson.
Etienne Decroux’s Corporeal Mime
It was on the body, and the body alone, that Etienne Decroux used in his aim to redesign the profile and the form of the theatre of tomorrow. The work was a colossal utopian project, and yet Decroux, by the end of his life, was successful in giving his art a precise technique, that forever will be known as the Etienne Decroux Technique. The foundations of this technique were based on corporeal articulation, rhythm, interpretation, and counterweights to make use of a physical dramaturgy to return to the origins of the most essential human theatricality. His art, the only physical theatrical technique developed in Western theatre, made Decroux an inspiration to a large part of the contemporary gestural theatre.
Today, when a great cross-fertilization between dance, theatre, circus, music, and singing all return somewhat to the fundamentals of the body, Etienne Decroux’s technique is an important tool for any artist, actor, or dancer to improve their physical potential on stage.
His school of movement is also a school of thought which reflects upon this innovative and revolutionary physical method. Freeing it from the anecdotal, he pushed his art towards a universality where the human in movement expresses an essential human drama, much like the Abstract mime.
Etienne Decroux Demonstrating The Theory
In this edited footage shot by Gordon Wilkison of Austin, the praised French pantomime Etienne Decroux performs his signature corporeal mime routines at the Baylor Theater in Waco in the 1960s. Decroux, credited as the “father of the modern mime,” redefined the modern art of pantomime in the second half of the twentieth century with his theory of corporeal mime. He founded his own pantomime school in France during the 1940s, acted in several French films, including Children of Paradise (1945), and published his theories of corporeal mime in his book Words on Mime.
The full performance can be seen here.