Jacques Copeau

Practical Performance Proposal

Research

IB Theatre HL

Candidate Name: Feras Wahab

Candidate Number: 001294-0054

Word Count: 3698

May 2015

Part III: Philosophical Rationale:

Throughout the above section I have made numerous choices detailing all manner of things from stage to movements to costumes. These choices were not made haphazardly, they have been inspired by the work of Jacques Copeau and seek to impact audiences in a manner similar to how Copeau would have.

As to why I have chosen Jacques Copeau as my theorist for Outer, Copeau worked with theatre as communication between the audience and the director, with the characters and actors acing as a medium for the poet’s message to take form. Diane Arbus in her photograph is making us (the audience) look through her lens to see what she wants us to see in her boy with his hand grenade. Similarly, the stage is Copeau’s lens, and through the stage lies the message of the performance.

Masks as well would feature in Copeau’s work. Masks here are used in the metaphorical sense as the ingroup actors carry with the m the masks of suitability and fitting-in, and when they slowly begin to take in the outgroup personas, they are peering behind each mask of each outgroup individual and assessing, assessing their similarities, what can be ignored and what can be overlooked. He rejected the naturalist's idea of theatre as presenting an objective worldview and sought to break down the barrier between audience and actor, something Arbus attempted to do with her photography, to break down the barrier between the audience and the subject, and by extension, the meaning behind the photograph.

Throughout his career and unlike his contemporaries, Copeau would always center his attention on his texts:

The central principle of Copeau's work is the emphasis which he places on the drama itself, in its actual text and action. With him the play is, indeed, the thing; the intention of the dramatist rules supreme. The work of the actor, the scenic artist, architect and decorator must be completely subordinated to the meaning of the poet, must release that meaning without diverting attention from it by independent merits of their own (Theatre Magazine).

This is related to the concept of characters in Outer. Whereas some productions give power to the characters to the point that the characters become the central focuses of the performance in the minds of the audience, Outer’s characters are symbols themselves, to give attention to them is to give attention to the performance.

Even more so, the dividing of the actors into two groups, ingroups and outgroups, gives little chance for the innate acting talents of any single actor to shine above the rest. This in turn leads to increased cohesion between the actors and thus remains true to Copeau’s visions for his plays “As for the Boulevard theatres, they belong to the great "stars" who force their directors to make ruinous expenditures, throw stage-productions out of balance, attract the audience's at-tention to themselves rather than to the play, and cheapen the playwright's talent by using their play only as vehicles for their own stardom” (Jacques Copeau, Critiques d'un autre temps, pp. 243-46).