Not Finding Neutral: Adapting Lecoq Technique for the Inclusive Movement Classroom
By Clara Kundin
As a theater-maker, educator, and researcher, a focus on disability justice is at the heart of all of my work. When I begin to design a syllabus I think of ways to make my course policies and assignments accessible for my students. I consider attendance and late-work policies, quantity of work, timelines for due dates, and availability of course materials. Until recently, however, I rarely considered course content, believing that modifications in instruction were all it would take to make any content accessible. This belief was challenged in a new way during my first semester teaching an introductory actor movement course for undergraduate students at Arizona State University.
I developed my syllabus around core movement techniques grounded in Lecoq technique, butoh, and Viewpoints, based on my own training and expertise. In the second week of class, we began a two week exploration of Lecoq’s concept of “neutrality,” a physical technique of developing neutral body movements based on his work with the neutral mask, and I immediately realized my commitment to inclusive pedagogy was being challenged by this content. How can I teach a technique whose name alone is ableist, indicating a belief that a body can in fact be neutral? In The Moving Body, Jacques Lecoq describes the neutral mask as having a face that is “perfectly balanced” to “produce a physical sensation of calm” (36). The goal of neutral mask practice is to “enable one to experience the state of neutrality prior to action, a state of receptiveness to everything around us, with no inner conflict” (36). I usually taught this method without using the neutral mask, instead focusing on finding neutral body movements to achieve Lecoq’s goal of the actor finding “a state of perfect balance and economy of movement” (38). All of these goals feel at odds with teaching that embraces students’ unique bodies, particularly students with physical disabilities. As I reflected back on my time studying at the Lecoq school, I remembered the standardization with which every technique was taught as if every body moved the same. And indeed, myself and all of my classmates were able-bodied.
While I used the concept of neutrality for years in my own practice, this course marked my first formal experience teaching it for an extended period of time to others. I worried about immediately alienating my students due to the ableist language, yet I did not feel comfortable discarding this training entirely. My time training at the Lecoq school made me a more versatile performer, one who could take on and off the physicality of new characters due to neutral body work, and I wanted to pass on the strengths of this training to my students. I made the decision to continue teaching the concept of neutrality by transparently acknowledging the concept’s flaws and emphasizing the impossibility of neutrality.
To begin, we unpacked the concept of neutrality. What does it mean to say a body is “neutral”? Historically, that might have meant a white, thin, able-bodied cisgender male, so we acknowledged that the concept of neutrality needs to evolve beyond that default of neutral. Expanding our understanding of what bodies could constitute as neutral, however, did not allow us to ignore the many ways in which we interpret people based on their bodies. Humans naturally form opinions based on the way people look, for good or for ill, so we had to retrain ourselves to make observations of neutrality while eliminating judgment from our observations. To reinforce this notion of observing without judgment, my students heard me repeatedly say, “There is no good or bad, just neutral or not neutral.” This skill of being able to look at each other and make observations without judgment based on the movement of the body is tremendously difficult but incredibly valuable for a theater performer. It teaches the why behind how we respond to a movement. Why does one way of walking feel more neutral than another? How is our understanding of neutrality influenced by culture and background? What are the specific emotions that are created from certain movements? Students learned to recognize the ways that they unknowingly tell stories with their bodies simply by walking into a room in a certain way.
Throughout our experience working on neutrality, my students and I came to understand that neutral is not the same as uniform. Lecoq understood that “the idea that everyone is alike is both true and totally false. Universality is not the same as uniformity” (40). The quest for neutrality is a paradox; we are searching for universality while remaining open to the differences in the physicalities of different performers. We realized that every student had their own neutral. The adjustments one student might need to make to appear more neutral were not the same as another. The work was incredibly individual, and in that way, inclusive. All people have physical habits; some are required of our bodies to function and some are not.
The following example of my practice illustrates how I attempted to demonstrate individuality in neutrality. When we began searching for our neutral walks I used myself as a model. I explained that my scoliosis prevented me from ever having a fully straight spine, meaning that I carry tension in my hips when I walk, tension that I cannot eliminate (except with invasive surgery perhaps). Students observed me walking while I highlighted where this tension affected my walk. I then demonstrated that I could adjust my gait to try to offset some of the visible effects of the tension in my back, an adjustment that allowed audiences to read me as more neutral. I also noted where my movement patterns remained constant due to tension I could not offset. This demonstration showed students the difference between movements that are within and without our control, and demonstrated how incredibly specific and individualized body adjustments toward neutrality might be.
Additionally, by modeling the concept in my own body, and practicing transparency about my own physicality, I created a space where students understood that they weren’t “getting it wrong” if they couldn’t make their bodies move in a certain way. Instead, I emphasized the impossibility of neutrality. We turned questing for the impossible into a game that invited failure because everyone would fail. This was perhaps the most radical departure from my training at the Lecoq school. During my time there, I generally understood that there was a right and a wrong way to do the exercises; our teachers were always positioned as the experts who passed judgment on if we were successful in an exercise or not. I remember a student created a beautiful exploration of a concept in which she used her hands as the primary activated body part. The teacher remarked that it was beautiful but not right. She was not successful because her performance did not subscribe to their understanding of how the exercise should be done.
In my classroom there was no wrong way to do an exercise. We all worked together to try to make adjustments toward neutral but we recognized that ultimately we would all fail because the concept of neutral itself was flawed. This meant that a student with cerebral palsy affecting his gait could be just as successful at questing for neutrality as a student without a physical disability. Moreover, the quest toward the impossible made the work fun! The invitation to failure alleviated the pressure of performance from my students, allowing them to relax and enjoy their experience. Often school is structured so that students are expected to be able to succeed in their tasks, and indeed, good pedagogy usually indicates that assignments should be achievable. In this work, however, we had not only the opportunity to fail, but the expectation to do so.
Even after this experience, I continue to wrestle with the language of neutrality. Am I teaching a concept that is ableist and no longer helpful just out of habit? Some might say yes. For now though, I argue that the skill of learning to observe body movements both in yourself and others is tremendously useful as an actor. Being able to strip your body of habits within your control allows you to make conscious choices of how you want to move as a character or performer. And for that reason, teaching Lecoq’s concept of neutrality feels important to actor training. So for now I continue to quest for the impossible neutral, but with a holistic approach to what a neutral body can be.
Works Cited
Lecoq, Jacques. The Moving Body. Routledge, 2001.
Clara Kundin is a theater-maker, educator, and current M.F.A. candidate in Theatre for Youth & Community at Arizona State University. She received her B.A. in Theater & Gender Studies at St. Olaf College and studied physical theater at the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Her research focuses on the intersection of theater and learning disabilities, devising methods, and performances of motherhood.
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