Le Théâtre Corporel by Yves Lebreton

A student of Étienne Decroux from 1964 to 1968, Yves Lebreton belongs to the generation of artists taught directly by the founder of corporeal mime before pursuing their own research into the actor’s body. His career notably took him to Eugenio Barba’s Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, where he developed and shared his work on physical theatre. OpenEdition Journals

Collected under the title Le Théâtre Corporel, these three volumes explore the sources, technique and development of this research.

Volume 1, Sources – Naissance du Théâtre Corporel traces Lebreton’s artistic journey and the influences that shaped his practice, including Étienne Decroux, Jacques Copeau, Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba. Originally published in French as Sources. Naissance du théâtre corporel, the book also offers valuable firsthand testimony about the years he spent with Decroux. Fnac

Volume 2, Étienne Decroux – La Statuaire Mobile et les Actions focuses more closely on Decroux’s technical legacy, particularly the conception of a body articulated and sculpted in space that forms one of the foundations of corporeal mime.

Volume 3, Principes, méthodologie et pratique continues this transmission by approaching physical theatre as a living discipline: a movement technique and a tool for the actor’s training, creation and research.

Together, these books offer a particularly interesting link between Étienne Decroux’s original teaching and the developments pursued by one of his direct students. For anyone seeking to understand corporeal mime beyond its best-known images, they complement Decroux’s own writings.