Etienne Decroux and Corporeal Mime: A Theatre of the Body Alone

Etienne Decroux wanted an actor with no words, no props, no music and, often, no face. What was left was the body, taken apart and rebuilt as a language. That language, corporeal mime, travelled from Jacques Copeau’s school in Paris to New York and the Bay Area, and it is not the white-faced pantomime most people picture.

From Copeau’s masked exercises to a new art (1921 to 1925)

In 1921 the director Jacques Copeau founded a theatre school at his Vieux-Colombier in Paris. Annette Lust writes that Copeau introduced “mime exercises with a mask,” and that “Decroux trained with Jacques Copeau between 1923-25.” The scholars Kathryn Wylie and Maarjana Kurkinen suggest that Copeau’s 1924 Noh experiment, Kantan, shaped Decroux’s stylised movement, and Decroux himself called it significant.

Corinne Soum, a former assistant, says that of all the actors who came out of Copeau’s school, “he was the only one to develop the idea of a physical theatre with a unique, precise, transcultural, and autonomous technique.”

The grammar of the body

Articulation and counterweight

Decroux called articulation “The essential aspect of my art.” It made the body, in Lust’s phrase, “analogous to the piano keyboard,” a set of parts that could be played one at a time. The Decroux technique adds counterweight, which Karl Toepfer describes as “a balancing of weighted and counter-weighted pressures (pushing and pulling movements) within the body.”

Mobile statuary and the veiled face

Sculpture was his model: he “regarded mime as a kind of ‘mobile statuary’.” In early demonstrations “Decroux wrapped a thin veil around his head,” and in Les Arbres four performers wore white body stockings and veils, “the face never having any importance in his aesthetic.”

What Decroux banned

His studio rules, as Karl Toepfer’s history of Decroux and postwar mime gives them: “This space contains no scenery, no costumes, no masks, and no props; the lighting is always flat and even; music is unnecessary and obtrusive; texts have no place here.” One aphorism sums it up: “The mime is no longer a mime if he uses music.”

Barrault, Marceau and the 1945 programme

Lust calls Decroux the “teacher of both Marcel Marceau and Jean-Louis Barrault.” He and Barrault had worked together since 1933, and the walk on the spot was “famously developed with Jean Louis Barrault.” On June 27, 1945, the two, with the students Éliane Guyon and Jean Dorcy, presented corporeal mime at the Maison de la Chimie in Paris: “eight pieces followed by Decroux’s lecture on the theory of corporeal mime.”

By then Decroux had his own small school in Paris, opened in the 1940s (Toepfer gives 1947). Marceau went another way: “In 1948, Decroux forbade another of his famous students, Marcel Marceau, from entering his school, because Marceau had cultivated an interest in pantomimic characterizations.” Dorcy remembered a hard master: “he was less pliable than a steel bar. He was intolerant, despotic.”

Year	Event
1898	Decroux is born
1921	Copeau founds the Vieux-Colombier school
1923-25	Decroux trains with Copeau
1945	Programme at the Maison de la Chimie, June 27
1947	His own small school in Paris, per Toepfer
1948	Bars Marceau from the school
1957	Eight weeks at the Actors Studio, New York
1959-62	School in New York
1963	Publishes Paroles sur le mime
1991	Decroux dies

Corporeal mime vs pantomime

The Atelier des Mimes in Berlin defines Decroux’s form as “mute drama play using the expression of the body as a whole,” distinct from “pantomime in the style of Marcel Marceau (grimaces, gestures, imaginary objects, illusions).” The Atelier des Mimes’ page on mime corporel dramatique calls Decroux “the grammarian of mime.”

Aspect	Corporeal mime (Decroux)	Pantomime (Marceau style)
Face	Neutral or veiled	Expressive, with grimaces
Text	None: texts have no place	Silent
Music	Unnecessary and obtrusive	Often used
The body	Articulates and counterweights the whole body	Draws imaginary objects and illusions

Silent theatre took other forms again, as in another silent company, Mummenschanz.

Decroux in New York and his students in the Bay Area

In 1957 the Actors Studio in New York invited Decroux to teach for eight weeks. “In 1959, he returned to New York, opened a school, lectured at ten universities, and taught a course at New York University.” He went back to Paris in 1962, and in 1963 published his only book, Paroles sur le mime.

R.G. Davis went to Paris on a 1957 Fulbright to study with Decroux, then founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Leonard Pitt, of Berkeley, sailed to Europe in the early 1960s: “I got taken right away and spent four years with him. Six days a week!”

Geoff Hoyle studied with him in Paris before becoming Mr. Sniff at the Pickle Family Circus in the early 1970s.

Student	With Decroux	In the Bay Area
R.G. Davis	Paris, on a 1957 Fulbright	Founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe
Leonard Pitt	Four years, from the early 1960s	Berkeley; a Decroux purist into the 1980s
Geoff Hoyle	Paris	Pickle Family Circus, as Mr. Sniff

A different silence: Antenna’s masked actors

Antenna Theater’s early stage plays also used masked actors who did not speak, but they moved to exactly what Decroux shut out. In Vacuum, Antenna’s 1981 masked play, Bernard Weiner wrote that Ernesto Sanchez’s “performance is remarkably precise, and even while wearing a full mask, he is able to convey a variety of emotions, by expert physical maneuvering.” Peter Magnant praised “the movements and gestures so sharp.”

In Russia (1985), Will Torphy saw “mimed episodes and voices from taped interviewees,” and wrote: “Just as in Noh plays, we are strangely distanced intellectually, yet emotionally drawn toward the magic of the nuances.” Weiner was harder on the movement, faulting “the repetitive, imprecise choreography.”

Decroux hid the face and banned text and music so the body alone would speak; Antenna’s masked actors moved to taped voices and scores. No source connects Antenna or its performers with Decroux or his students, so the comparison is the Journal’s own. Antenna’s masks are covered in the wider history of mask theatre, from Noh to Lecoq.

Frequently asked questions

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