Jean guy lecat biography of donald

What is most important is that these spaces be full of life. Removing the proscenium stage, Lecat replaced it with a platform that juts out into the audience. The Harvey became simpler, more compact and more cubic, with better acoustics, and so more universal. My challenge was to transform this theatre to give a beautiful object to Peter—and then to create a space that was good for everybody else after.

I pushed the gravity center outside of the arch-proscenium. The geometric center of the stage is the center of nothing; it is just a place to be. I worked with a view of the future—and not only for The Mahabharata and Peter. Theatre for a New Audience must be a theatre for one company. That company has a certain size, a certain reputation, a certain way of working, a certain desire.

Jeffrey and I worked on the quality of the materials to give the space life. His pronouncements, as a result, can sound oblique and sibylline. And he is an inveterate flaneur—his favorite mode of teaching is to walk and watch and observe. In one workshop in Romania, he and the students just walked down the streets for five days and looked at the sky, the houses and the people.

In Barcelona, he conducted an exercise in which he asked designers to cast the roles of King Lear by taking photographs of regular people in the streets. But every visit has unique features.

Jean guy lecat biography of donald: Jean-Guy Lecat is a

I just try to be good and simple. What happens when you want to be original? If the ideas are magnificent, okay, maybe we will get something. Pitzi, F. Marthouret, M. Benichou, S. Lorenzi, W. Litch, R. Forman, J. Carlson, O. Krejca, G. Marini, T. Kantor, K. Gruber, D. Warner, D. Donnellan, J. Benite LisbonneL. Ronconi, J. Vincent, T.

Suzuki, A. Serban, P. Beck and The Living Theatre, S. Becket, J. Barrault, R. Blin, ………and P. The French designer Jean-Guy Lecat ponders the living intricacies of space, design and performance. By Randy Gener. After 25 years of devoted but largely unsung work—during which Lecat helped Brook convert into full fledged theatre environments such found spaces as a rice silo in Arles, France; a slaughterhouse in Vienna; a boathouse in Zurich; a cloister in Lisbon; and a tram depot in Glasgow some of which, like the depot, have lost their ephemeral character and become permanent theatres the Paris-based Lecat radically altered the circumstances of his life.

We have no comma in between us. You have been left in his shadow. And although he never thought of himself as a teacher, he is frequently engaged by schools, international festivals, design competitions and world theatre organizations to educate student designers, directors and. There they examine the interdisciplinary dynamics of space, environment, dimension, design and live performance.

We live in a society where people have to react very quickly. People today change jobs three or four times during their lives. We have to help young people gain a wider education—not just to learn how to work in a little theatre box. After stints as a fitter-model maker, a draftsman in a Paris factory Thomas-Houston and a stage technician beginning at age 23Lecat apprenticed for Claude Perset, a set designer and architect who specialized in theatres in France, while working variously as a flying machinist, props man, set constructor and stage manager.

From that period, until I met Peter Brook, which was about 10 years later, I realized that there are a lot of connections between architecture and theatre. Unfortunately in the schools, the teachers miss the architecture dimension. What happens when you want to be original? If the ideas are magnificent, okay, maybe we will get something.

But if they are poor, you kill the whole play. A play can move closer to the audience, Lecat adds, not necessarily physically but through the imagination. To exist, a light needs a spot. You can see light on an actor, on the set or on the floor. For instance, a color like red becomes very close to black by changing the light. I love gold, because gold can be very bright and very dark at the same time, and the set can disappear completely.

This is what theatre people do: When there is a new technology, they immediately jump to use it.

Jean guy lecat biography of donald: The Further Adventures of Monsieur Space.

Because theatre is very difficult, the directors, designers and architects think they can be helped with the new technology. Of course, this is not true. The technology creates a new situation that is different, but all the questions and all the difficulties of the theatre stay the same. The question is: Do we need it? On the occasion of the.

I also think we teach too much form. What has your relationship and collaboration been like over these 25 years? Jean-Guy Lecat : Very good. I left the company five years ago, after 25 years, for several reasons. One was that we no longer had conversations with Peter Brook. On the other hand, there is a risk of reproducing the same old things and not being creative anymore.

For me, and in my age, if I work to this company until the end, it will be much more difficult to change and do something different. No one really knows me.

Jean guy lecat biography of donald: As someone who has only been

Everyone thinks that Peter Brook has thought up everything by himself. J-GL : Yes, that was my idea. In your case one could say that by choosing a place, you create the scenography; you create a whole visual world. What do you have to say to that? J-GL : The answer is very simple. J-GL : Yes, but that is a different matter. First, we naturally need an idea.

Once we have the idea, we need a text to express this idea. Then the text has to be performed by actors and received by the audience. So we need at least an idea, a text and an audience. Right after that we need costumes.