1. Jacques Lecoq, with Carasso, Jean-Gabriel and Lallias, Jean-Claude, The Moving Body (Le Corps Poétique): Teaching Creative Theatre, trans. Bradby, David (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2011), 22Google Scholar.

2. Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 9Google Scholar.

3. By using the term “register” I am referring to its musical sense. Musical instruments inhabit distinct musical domains: the tuba can work within the lowest register, whereas the piccolo can work within the highest. By applying this term to the realm of theatrical performance, I am using it to describe the discrete (yet interconnected) domains in theatrical performance including the emotional, the intellectual, the psychological, the physical, and the imaginative.

4. For a useful description of the “inside-out” versus “outside-in” debate in relation to neuroscience see Kemp, Rick, Embodied Acting: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Performance (New York: Routledge, 2012), 93–128 Google Scholar.

5. Varela, Francisco J., Thompson, Evan, and Rosch, Eleanor, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

6. Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, ed. Stewart, John, Gapenne, Olivier, and Di Paolo, Ezequiel A. (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2010), 3Google Scholar. For a conversation between acting and early concepts of enaction, see Zarrilli, Phillip B., “An Enactive Approach to Understanding Acting,” Theatre Journal 59.4 (2007): 635–47Google Scholar.

7. Lecoq, Jacques, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, ed. Bradby, David (New York: Routledge, 2006), 94Google Scholar. Lecoq's first book, Le Théâtre du geste—an edited collection and collaborative effort with several other authors in 1987—includes the word “acteur-auteur,” but its placement in an introductory section makes it unclear whether this is Lecoq's invention, or the invention of another of the editors, or of the writer of this section, Jean Perret. This can be directly translated to “actor-author” in English, which clearly signals the larger scope of Lecoq's ideal figure. See Lecoq, , ed., Le Théâtre du geste: Mimes et acteurs (Paris: Bordas, 1987), 107Google Scholar. As far as I can determine, the term “actor-creator,” however, was coined by Bridget George (cofounder of Touchstone Theatre, a Lecoq-influenced American company) along with Deborah Sacarakis (Zoellner Arts Center), and Augustine Ripa (Lehigh University). The team came up with the term for the 1994 Lehigh–Touchstone event that brought both Jacques Lecoq and Lecoq-based companies to the United States, “Theatre of Creation: A Festival Celebrating the Work of Jacques Lecoq and His International School of Theatre.” They coined the term for the festival because they saw a need to communicate better the nature of Lecoq's actor in English (Bill George, e-mail message to the author, 22 December 2016). I agree that this term is useful in English to clarify what Lecoq means. He writes, “the school pays more attention to creative than to interpretive work” (Lecoq, Moving Body, 172). The term has subsequently been used by English-speaking Lecoq-influenced performers and trainers. Other artists in different theatrical traditions have also used it in their own contexts to signal a broader agency, but here I use it specifically with respect to the Lecoq tradition. Thanks to Amy Russell for help in finding the term's US origin.

8. For more information about the history of Lecoq and his pedagogy, see Murray, Simon, Jacques Lecoq (London: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar; and The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq, ed. Evans, Mark and Kemp, Rick (New York: Routledge, 2016)Google Scholar.

9. Lecoq, Moving Body, ix,104.

10. For an explanation of the development of cognitive science leading up to enaction, see Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

11. Note that “representation” can mean different things in a variety of fields. Since enaction makes use of an array of disciplines, defining this can be thorny. Here I am referring specifically to representation as an intermediary step or process between biology and cognition. For a strong antirepresentational enaction, see Hutto, Daniel D. and Myin, Erik, Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

12. Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Marieke Rohde, Hanne De Jaegher, “Horizons for the Enactive Mind: Values, Social Interaction, and Play,” in Enaction, ed. Stewart et al., 33–87, at 37 (italics in the original).

13. Ibid., 39.

14. For enactive accounts of the self, see Kyselo, Miriam, “The Body Social: an Enactive Approach to the Self,” Frontiers in Psychology 5 art. 986 (2014): 1–16 Google Scholar.

15. This synchronizes with Kemp's description of an actor on the stage: “It all happens at once. It has to. The impulse, the breath, the speech, the gesture, the walk, the awareness of the guy in the second row who's nodding off” (1).

16. I first developed the notions of “foundational” and “executional” in “Language and the Body,” in Routledge Companion, ed. Evans and Kemp, 260–7.

17. Kyselo applies Hans Jonas's notion of “needful freedom” as a “self” created “through and from a world.” Kyselo, 8 (italics in the original).

18. This is in the sense of Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, The Primacy of Movement, 2d ed. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011)Google Scholar.

19. Important touchstones include the work of Bruce McConachie, Rhonda Blair, John Lutterbie, Amy Cook, Evelyn B. Tribble, Naomi Rokotnitz, Nicola Shaughnessy, and Rick Kemp.

20. Blair, Rhonda, The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (London: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar.

21. John Lutterbie, Toward a General Theory of Acting : Cognitive Science and Performance (New York: Palgrave, 2011).

22. Kemp, esp. 21–62.

23. A conversation between Dario Fo and Jacques Lecoq:

Transcribed and translated (subtitles) from Les Deux Voyages de Jacques Lecoq, dir. Roy, Jean-Noël and Carasso, Jean-Gabriel (Paris: La Sept ARTE, On Line Productions, and ANRAT, 1999), 46 + 49 minGoogle Scholar; DVD (Paris: Scérén-CNDP, On Line Productions, and Pôle Théâtre, 2006), disk 1 at 40:07.

24. Coined by Marvin Minsky and cited in Clark, Andy, Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7Google Scholar.

25. These include Étienne-Jules Marey, Georges Demenÿ, and Georges Hébert. For more information on their influence see Mark Evans, “The Influence of Sports on Lecoq's Training, ” in Routledge Companion, ed. Evans and Kemp, 104–11, at 105–6.

26. Bruce McConachie, “Jacques Lecoq and the Challenge of Modernist Theatre, 1945–1968,” in Routledge Companion, ed. Evans and Kemp, 35–42.

27. Pardis Dabashi, “Literature, Lecoq, and the ‘Nouveau Roman,’” in Routledge Companion, ed. Evans and Kemp, 79–86, at 80.

28. Ibid., 85.

29. How can I (subject) know and/or represent the world (object)?

30. For a detailed explanation of the development of enaction and conceptual binaries within the history of cognitive science, see McGee, Kevin, “Enactive Cognitive Science, Part 1: Background and Research Themes,” Constructivist Foundations 1.1 (2005): 19–34 Google Scholar.

31. Varela et al., xv–xx, 127.

32. Clark, 140.

33. Lecoq, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, 98, 107.

34. Fay Lecoq, “Afterword,” in Lecoq, Moving Body, 186. Fay herself died in 2012.

35. Lecoq, Moving Body, 17.

36. McGee, 20.

37. Gallagher, Shaun and Bower, Matthew, “Making Enactivism Even More Embodied,” Avant 5.2 (2014): 232–47Google Scholar.

38. Gallagher, 24.

39. See Kemp for the “‘conscious competency’ model” that proposes four stages of how conscious effort can give rise to unconscious competence (32).

40. Gallagher, 35.

41. Ibid., 38.

42. For Kemp's analysis of the body schema and intention with respect to Anna Deavere Smith's work and how the body schema contributes to proprioception, see 132, 137–8. For Sofia's explanation of body schema with respect to the actor–spectator relationship see Sofia, Gabriele, “The Effect of Theatre Training on Cognitive Functions,” in Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being, ed. Shaughnessy, Nicola (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 171–80Google Scholar, at 175–8.

43. Morasso, Pietro, Casadio, Maura, Mohan, Vishwanathan, Rea, Francesco, and Zenzeri, Jacopo, “Revisiting the Body-Schema Concept in the Context of Whole-Body Postural-Focal Dynamics,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9, art. 83 (2015): 1–16 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, at 1.

44. Lecoq, Moving Body, 75–6. While Lecoq does not explicitly mention the two-step process of first inviting students to explore contracted–expanded movement and second, demonstrating it, this approach is something I learned from Lecoq-trained teachers at the London International School of Performing Arts (LISPA).

45. Even though Kemp focuses on the character-creation aspect of Lecoq pedagogy, he acknowledges that it is not just for character creation and gives a nice example in the “waving goodbye” exercise (85–8).

46. Menary, Richard, “Introduction: What Is Radical Enactivism?,” in Radical Enactivism: Intentionality, Phenomenology, and Narrative—Focus on the Philosophy of Daniel D. Hutto, ed. Menary, (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006), 1–12 Google Scholar, at 3. For more on autopoiesis and operational closure see Varela et al., 139.

47. Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 35–9,

48. See ibid., esp. 35–74, for the scientific details and the full debate.

49. Ibid., 1.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., 120.

52. Lecoq, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, 4.

53. Ibid., 1.

54. Jon Foley Sherman suggests that in Lecoq's pedagogy, encountering and miming an other is not an attempt to “own” the other, but rather a relation that creates possibilities (Jon Foley Sherman, “Space and Mimesis,” in Routledge Companion, ed. Evans and Kemp, 59–66). In the preceding quotation about children, Lecoq uses the word approprier in the original, which does suggest ownership and appropriation (Lecoq, Le Théâtre du geste, 16). I don't think that these are necessarily mutually exclusive. I think that Lecoq is pointing to the way that children grow to possess life, and the possibilities rendered through encounters with the other are part of life. I do think, however that there is a certain productive tension, in Lecoq pedagogy, with the attempt to take something within oneself and to possess its physical dynamics through embodiment, even if it is ultimately impossible.

55. Felner, Mira, Apostles of Silence: The Modern French Mimes (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press [Cranbury, NJ: AUP], 1985)Google Scholar, 149.

56. Ibid.

57. Lecoq, Moving Body, 22.

58. Gallagher, 95.

59. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999)Google Scholar. Kemp discusses the Containment image schema to propose how the notion of inside-versus-outside acting might have arisen and how it hinders actors (99–101).

60. I replicate the convention of capitalizing image-schematic structures to clarify that I am not referring to the general concept.

61. Johnson, Mark, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)Google Scholar, 136.

62. Ibid., 137.

63. Ibid., 145. In this context “natural” language means the verbal languages spoken to facilitate communication in local communities.

64. Ibid., 137.

65. Lakoff and Johnson, 45–59.

66. Ibid., 53 (italics in the original).

67. Johnson, 137.

68. Lecoq, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, 4. Kemp writes about “push/pull” in relation to Michael Chekhov's work, within the context of Rudolf Laban's efforts, and as a central exercise in Lecoq pedagogy, 48–53, 79–82, 126, 210.

69. I am using “push/pull” in relationship to image schemas as a foundational conceptual unit understood and applied as a result of physical experience. To see an analysis of how push/pull relates to nonverbal communication (particularly in relation to Laban), see Kemp, 21–62.

70. Kemp, 50–61.

71. Di Paolo et al., 39.

72. Leder, Drew, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar, 34, 83.

73. Ibid., 33–5. Leder cautions that incorporation is not a one-way street: “incorporation is the result of a rich dialectic wherein the world transforms my body, even as my body transforms its world” (34).

74. Fusetti, Giovanni and Willson, Suzy, “The Pedagogy of the Poetic Body,” in The Paris Jigsaw: Internationalism and the City's Stages, ed. Bradby, David and Delgado, Maria M. (New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 93–101 Google Scholar, at 96.

75. Lecoq, Moving Body, 38.

76. Ibid., 54.

77. Felner, 157.

78. Lecoq, Moving Body, 39.

79. Gallagher, 37.

80. Ibid., 32.

81. Lecoq, Moving Body, 21.

82. Ibid., 38.

83. That is, except for any subtext (cultural, racial, or otherwise) unintentionally embedded in the mask's structure. Neutral mask work warns against performing any psychological subtext of the character.

84. Eldredge, Sears A., Mask Improvisation for Actor Training and Performance: The Compelling Image (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 60Google Scholar.

85. Kemp, xxi.

86. Krasner, David, “Strasberg, Adler and Meisner: Method Acting,” in Actor Training, ed. Hodge, Alison (New York: Routledge, 2010), 144–63Google Scholar, at 150. “Sense memory,” a common American Method practice, was inspired by Stanislavsky's interest in “affective memory” after psychologist Théodule Ribot's work. It is where the actor seeks to trigger real emotions from a heightened moment in her life. To do this she does not access the emotion directly, but rather calls upon the sensory material of the moment, such as the sights, sounds, tactile sensations, smells, and tastes of the context in which the emotion occurred. Although sense memory employs external sensation, note that the most direct focus is on creating the emotion of the actor, not the space or the audience.

87. Such thematic phrases are commonly used in the Lecoq classroom as part of a larger exercise called “the fundamental journey,” in which the masked actor moves through a series of varied landscapes.

88. Johnson, 139.

89. Kemp suggests, and I agree, that Lecoq pedagogy is in resonance with principles of embodied cognition that embrace a notion of a holistic body-mind (64).

90. Lecoq, Moving Body, 8.

91. For a history of the body, Western philosophy, and cognition, see Lakoff and Johnson, 551–68.

92. Gallagher, 81 (italics in the original).

93. Lecoq, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, 5.

94. I am indebted to Véronique Havelange's work for finding an articulation of this idea: Véronique Havelange, “The Ontological Constitution of Cognition and the Epistemological Constitution of Cognitive Science: Phenomenology, Enaction and Technology,” in Enaction, ed. Stewart et al., 335–59.

95. “Tout bouge” was the title of Lecoq's lecture-demonstration (Moving Body, x, 187).