Lecoq’s Mime and the Process of Identifications: Enacting Movement, Selfhoods, and Otherness

Abstract

Murphy focuses on Lecoq’s understanding of mime and one of his main exercises, identifications. She explains the central pedagogical tenets of Lecoq’s mime and outlines how they engage notions of selfhood and otherness. This chapter describes how Lecoq’s practice of identifications induces a corporeal-imaginative reckoning of self and other as key to both the creative development of the actor-creator and access to creativity in general. In order to propose a shared ground between imaginative exercises in the studio and an enactive reference to actual bio-cultural processes in life, Murphy offers a cognitive view of ways in which understanding and imagination share the same cognitive mechanisms. This chapter also addresses the pitfalls of neural-centered explanations that may permit Cartesian dualism even in embodied accounts of cognition.