Imagining Bodies and Performer Training

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, Imagining Bodies in Performer Training interrogates how his teachings have been adapted, developed and extended in various cultural, political and historical settings, in Europe, Scandinavia, Asia, and 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.

Ellie Nixon is Director of Film and Performing Arts at Norwich University of the Arts, UK, and an actor, director and co-founder of La Mancha Theatre Company and La Mancha International Theatre School of Image and Gesture in Chile.

1. Jacques Lecoq and Gaston Bachelard: Towards a Training Paradigm for the Embodied Life of Imagining 2. AIR: Imagination as a Worldly Process 3. FIRE: Inflaming the Imagining Attitude 4. EARTH: Penetrating the Depths of the Resistant World and the Will to Action 5. WATER: Co-poiesis and the Will to Expression 6. REPERCUSSIONS: Eco-futures for Imagining Bodies