Five Tools: A Corporeal Mime Perspective on the Roots of Expression in the Body

This Research Note discusses the working techniques surrounding five practical physical theatre tools developed by Dean Fogal. Fogal studied in Paris with Marcel Marceau and Etienne Decroux and assisted Thomas Leabhart at the University of Arkansas before returning home to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he researched and taught corporeal mime over the course of fifty years. Fogal explains how actors can use ropes, poles, elastics, chairs, and umbrellas to muscularize their impulses and intentions and thereby embody the connected truth between themselves and their characters, themselves and their space, and finally themselves and their audience. A studio-based researcher, Fogal’s Note explores theatricality and performativity beyond the traditional contexts of text-based theatre and drama, revealing his understanding of corporeal mime as the root of the actor’s craft. The piece is edited by Fogal’s daughter Claire Fogal, who, in her dissertation, describes her father’s research as a “diagonal transmission” of Decroux’s work, faithful to the innate principles of corporeal mime but extended and transformed in relation to Western Canadian culture and Fogal’s own focus on ensemble development, the actor’s well-being and agency, and the grounded belonging fundamental to great performance.