Introduction

This Autumn, we moved to Paris. We came because we had questions in search of answers - questions that could only be answered by uprooting ourselves, by purposefully getting lost in a new city and a new language, and by submitting ourselves to the peculiar, wonderful ordeal of training at the Jacques Lecoq school.

Our courses - called the ‘Course Pro’ and the ‘L.E.M. (Laboratoire d’Etude du Mouvement)’ respectively - are two separate, complementary rhythms. They inform one another and we are studying them apart in order to better inform one another - to uncover something unknown through this collective experience, to specialise in order to deepen our interdependence.

The training of the Jacques Lecoq School consists of moving and drawing and performing and observing. In classes, we enter into present moments to discover what is true, real, and striking inside them. We do not stick them in books like butterflies, but chase them with our hands, entering into the game and following it wherever it leads. Taking notes is forbidden during class.

But we know that a page can also be a garden and each word a butterfly flying. 

A core component of the Cours Pro is the ‘autocours’. Each week, the students are given a theme from which to make a new performance in groups. It is obligatory to present -  no excuses will be accepted. The purpose of the ‘autocours’ is to deploy the knowledge we learn in the school’s other classes (improvisation, movement, mask work, etc).

The posts that follow on this digital scrapbook aim to do something similar, in writing and in images. They are private autocours, delivered from one of us to the other on a monthly basis and uploaded here on our blog. We decided it is obligatory to present. No excuses will be accepted.

These scrapbook entries are not finished, complete products (maybe we would never publish them if they were). They are ways of working things out, documentation of our learning, chronicles of our shared adventure in a new city, butterfly chases through the wet grass.

EW & DW

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