This is a photo of my first trip to the circus, right around when Lecoq passed away.
why the circus?
Clowns are like butterflies.
In the 1960s, Jacques Lecoq clowned to counter fascism. What Jacques understood was this: how we move our bodies is conditioned.
Usually, we understand body movement as a set of motor skills - from ‘fine’ facial movements to ‘gross’ full-body movements. In clowning, these skills become the poetics of mimes and the grotesque.
It is only through breaking down such ‘skills’ and mimicking the movement of elements and animals that we begin to approach a ‘neutral’ somatic flow.
He saw that something as seemingly simple as lifting and dropping your arm (long-practiced in modalities such as Qigong) could “loosen up” fascism.
Most importantly, one slight change in movement can change everything.
How we move our bodies is also conditional.
Lecoq also understood that movement is based on its conditions - contact with the world beyond the body.
To move - among and with - bodies, energy, spaces, traces, and knowledge differently is to create different conditions of possibility.
We start here.
