In developing Corporeal Mime, Decroux constructed a new actor, akin to Craig’s ubermarionette, by reimagining, recontextualizing, rethinking and defamiliarizing the body. He broke the body into new units, and gave it a different way of meaning. Barthes reminds us, “our society takes the greatest pains to conjure away the coding of the narrative situation” as “bourgeois society and the mass culture issuing from it demand signs which do not look like signs” (Barthes 1977: 116). Decroux’s newly minted body purposely looked like a sign, a highly and visibly articulated one. Decroux wanted the sign to look like a sign so much that he said one had to perform as if slapping the audience to keep them awake.
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