Étienne Decroux

Étienne Decroux (born July 19, 1898 in Paris, France – March 12, 1991 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France) was a French actor who studied at Jacques Copeau's Ecole du Vieux-Colombier, where he saw the beginnings of what was to become his life's obsession–corporeal mime. During his long career as a film and theatre actor, he created many pieces, using the human body as the primary means of expression.

Career

Enrolled at the Vieux-Colombier in 1923, as a student of Charles Dullin, Decroux began to envision a newly defined vision of mime, and later developed an original, personal style of movement. His early "statuary mime" recalls Rodin's sculptures. Later, more plastic forms were called "mime corporeal" or corporeal mime. An intellectual and theoretician, his body training was based in part on what modern dancers call “isolations”, in which body sections move in prescribed sequence, and, in part, on the physics of compensation required to keep the body in balance when the center of gravity is shifted.