Home : Book details : Book description

Description of  Copeau/Decroux, Irving/Craig: A Search for 20th Century Mime, Mask & Marionette (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)

In this series of essays, Thomas Leabhart presents a thorough overview and analysis of the roots of Etienne Decrouxs artistic genealogy. After four years apprenticeship with Decroux, Thomas Leabhart began to research and discover how forebears and contemporaries might have influenced Decrouxs project. Decades of digging revealed striking correspondences that often led to adjacent fields--art history, philosophy, and anthropology, forays wherein Leabharts appreciation of Decroux and his "kinsfolk," who themselves transgressed traditional frontiers, increased. The following essays, composed over a thirty-year period, find a common source in a darkened Prague cinema where people gasped at a wooden dolls sudden reversal of fortune. These essays: investigate the source of that astonishment continue his examination of Decrouxs "family tree" consider how Copeau's and Decroux's keen observation of animal movement influenced their actor training record the challenging and paradoxical improvisations chez Decroux and recall Decrouxs debt to sculpture, poster art, sport, and masks. Read more