LEM

PRESENTATION

As an extension of the courses given by Jacques Lecoq to the architect students at the Paris School for Fine Arts (Ecole Nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts), Jacques Lecoq create in 1976 a stage design department, the L.E.M. (Laboratory of Movement Study) with the architect Krikor Belekian who directed it until june 2011. The L.E.M. is now run by Pascale Lecoq, architect and stage designer, with Emmanuelle Bouyer, architect and plastic artist, and a team of teachers from the school.

This year, the L.E.M. is being rebuilt. For more information, please contact Pascale Lecoq at the following address: apemlem@free.fr.

The LEM is the school’s department for experimental scenography, exclusively dedicated to the dynamic research of space and rhythm through a structural form.

The students, all with different artistic backgrounds, meet and share a pedagogical journey,
based on movement analysis which enables them to feel the surrounding world in their body’s. The dynamic and drama comes from the body. To study its movements helps to understand the forces organising the space.

This learning goes through the analysis of simple movements and their transpositions into
structures in a workshop situation. The student, in direct contact with the material, creates forms and puts them in motion to discover their rhythms.

All the everyday life observations gathered by the miming body are transformed into a structural and architectural language through basic materials: paper, cardboard, wood-sticks, wire, clay, etc.

What the sensitive body has gathered is put together in the working space through the
creation of experimental objects that can be put in motion (portable structures, masks and
dynamic costumes).

The LEM journey is a practical experience that cannot be replaced by written explanations. Each class is a real organisation of urgency. This experimental approach leads to creativity based on feelings rather than reflexion. It is the stucture put in motion that reveals its inner truth.

The pedagody is based on the following states:

  • the neutral or calm state
  • the balance of forces
  • the economy of physical actions
  • transfers

These references are a necessary attempt to understand movement, they are not to be seen as an absolute.

Teaching creativity is nothing else than to teach while creating. This is a pedagogy of discovering the unpredictable.

This dimension of risk and rectification of errors is one of the basis of the LEM pedagogy. It implies that the student’s creations are not judged on a particular aesthetic but through a global interpretation by the group.

The LEM is not a transmission of a recipy or a technique, but it gives the student a reference to enable him later to find his own touch as a creative artist towards a poetic dimension when advancing into the unknown.

PORTABLE STRUCTURES