Frederique Lecomte - Workshop

There was a constant musical soundtrack to Frederique’s workshop, music for warm-ups, as underscoring for exercises, and in order to change the mood for devised scenes, subverting the existing mood, pulling the response away from easy empathy, and working as a ‘contrapuntal force’. This phrase offers elucidation of much of Frederique’s methodology and philosophy of practice, shaping content to rejoinder received wisdom, to dismantle sentimentality, and to encourage iconoclasm against easy binaries of victim and perpetrator. The second workshop in the week’s schedule, she controlled the room with pitch-perfect provocation and humour, sometimes so quiet that we would all have to lean-in to hear her instructions, and at other times, hollering at us to wail more, cry louder, suffer more than the person next to us…

Whilst playful and maverick, her work is deeply influenced by sociological and philosophical ideas, Frederique cited Roland Barthes frequently through this workshop, alighting on the ideas of ‘studium’ and ‘punctum’ to open apart scenes, and find ways to shape and reconfigure the scene around the ‘pricking point’. Frederique was dogged in her pursuit of good practice in the workshop, asking our students to repeat and repeat exercises in order to effect the change or shift she perceived possible, and in being resolute about the quality of the work she was able to articulate her drive for artistic integrity in all her professional theatre making, whether in a commercial theatre in Belgium, working  in community settings in Brussels, or in a soccer field in Bujumbura.