We ask the child to be the source of what he does. We point out to him where he starts out but not what he does. He must discover this himself. The adult does not act in his place, but expects something from him. The child has resources, potentialities, hidden talents which expression will reveal to himself and to others.
The stage permits us to express the emotion, to find it in ourselves as a manifestation of our humanity. The song of tears, of smiles, and of laughter surely distinguishes us from animals as much as reason does.
Actually the expression is the last stage of an interior process. It is the mission of the artistic director to guide the child toward a true and personal expression, to make him discover this movement which comes from the depths of himself, to incarnate eventually in a sentiment that is translated into a gesture, a look, a sound, a word addressed to a public: it is not a question of copying but of expressing.
"At the Academy, they always ask me to start from myself."
Caroline
"One has to be oneself in creating an emotion
because, otherwise, it’s not true and the public sees through it."
Bérénice
Even if it obeys precise laws this process is not a technique. It demands presence to being, in oneself and in the other, entering into an authentic exchange in which the words “I”, “you”, “we” take on meaning and consistency. This experience of interior opening is not the prerogative of some children more gifted than others. It is within the reach of all.
“Starting from myself”, as Caroline says, is to go much further, to go beyond what I know in order to discover something else, something new. Expression is an invitation to decenter myself from myself to go toward the encounter with the other: the one who is acting with me on the stage, the spectator who is looking at me, hidden as he is in the half-light, but whose presence I notice, and the personage that I incarnate.
Technical apprenticeship, text, diction, position of the voice, are necessary but secondary and relative to that one and only experience capable of giving it some meaning.