I am offering a rose that does not exist. The exercise belongs to what Jean Asselin calls figures of courtesy: I must look at my partner, shift my weight, allow the body to transform, and present the form without thrusting it toward him like a blunt object. Everything seems almost right. Almost. Jean asks to watch Alexandre and me, then identifies what my movement is missing: more offset. My heel must remain rooted; my weight must move more decisively to the outside; an imaginary plumb line should pass through the form and cross near my ankle.
The correction seems minute. It concerns neither my emotion nor my overall intention. Jean does not ask me to be more generous, more present, or more convincing. He gives me coordinates. I begin again with a clearer axis, a less constricted amplitude, and a better-placed hinge. The offering becomes more legible because the body stops approximating the action. It is not merely more beautiful. The relationship with my partner becomes clearer: my movement reaches toward him without invading him.
I often return to that moment when I try to explain why Jean is, in my eyes, an exceptional teacher. His knowledge is immense, but that is not what strikes me most. What strikes me is his ability to see the tiny inaccuracy that clouds everything, to name it, and to show what it changes dramatically. With him, a few centimetres can contain an entire lesson in the actor’s craft.
After several decades of practice, Jean could easily settle for impressing us. He could demonstrate an inaccessible virtuosity and leave his students to measure the distance between themselves and him. That is not what I received from his teaching. I received knowledge patiently broken down, a language that makes work possible, and a patient, generous eye that constantly connects form to dramaturgy… That is where my admiration comes from.
A Correction That Contains an Entire Method
Many acting notes are phrased as desired results: inhabit the scene more fully, engage your body, take up space. Such notes can sometimes provoke something, but they rarely tell us how to recognize the path that leads there. Jean works differently. He observes where the movement begins, its direction, the segment that carries it, the weight that supports it, and the parts of the body that should remain still. He distinguishes what the actor intended to do from what the actor actually made perceptible.
That distinction is fundamental. A precise correction can be understood, repeated, and eventually transgressed. It does not depend on the luck of a good attempt. If I know that a gesture began too early in my arms, that my pelvis lost its verticality, or that my face has already announced the scene’s conclusion, I can perform the action again with an understanding of its cause. Later, I can also choose to break the rule, but I no longer confuse freedom with approximation.
Jean never reduces acting to an external mechanism. Mechanics interest him because they produce meaning. In one exercise, he shows us the difference between inclining the trunk toward someone and translating it toward that person. The general direction may look similar, but the relationship changes completely. Inclination can feel conciliatory or offered; translation can become confrontational, even without aggression. Technique begins to speak. It does not replace the imagination: it gives it nuances an actor would not necessarily find through a psychological instruction.
A Life Devoted to the Body of Theatre
The depth of that way of seeing is rooted in a lifetime of research. According to the official history of OMNIBUS, Jean Asselin and Denise Boulanger began exploring a popular form of mime at La Roulotte in Montréal in 1965, under the influence of Paul Buissonneau. OMNIBUS was founded in 1970. Then, from 1972 to 1977, the two artists worked in Paris with Étienne Decroux. They moved from students to assistants in the master’s teaching and dramaturgical research.
That lineage is essential, but it is not enough to define Jean. The page devoted to Ils regardent autre chose recalls that in 1976, at Decroux’s school, Jean and Denise were already the performers and creators of a work overseen by Decroux. Back in Montréal, their work was not limited to preserving a technique learned in France. They had to create, teach, administer, build spaces, and inscribe the body within Québec’s theatrical landscape. In 1980, OMNIBUS joined forces with the Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental and Carbone 14 to found Espace Libre.
Jean has continued that work ever since as an actor, director, teacher, and builder of institutions. As I write these lines, OMNIBUS describes him as the company-school’s cofounder, executive director, and co-artistic director. His body of stage work moves through radically different forms, from pure mime to Shakespeare, Proust, and Larry Tremblay. That range matters: it shows that corporeal grammar is not designed to produce a single style of performance.
We must also recognize the distinctive nature of his work in formalizing the technique. The concepts of segmentation, organs, dynamo-rhythm, and causality come largely from Étienne Decroux’s body of work; Jean does not present them as inventions born out of nowhere. But for decades, he has recorded, organized, tested, and made them teachable. The encyclopedic project Le corps à l’ère des lumières, developed with Sylvie Chartrand from this didactic corpus, gives a sense of the scale of that undertaking.
Preserving a tradition does not mean embalming it. It means retaining enough precision for the tradition to remain useful in creation.
Mime Is Not Merely the Art of Silence
The popular image of mime is still often that of a white-faced performer trapped inside an invisible box. The image is not entirely false, but it is far too narrow. Pantomime can replace a sentence with a gesture or make an action recognizable without words: opening a door, pulling a rope, drinking from an absent glass. Dramatic Corporeal Mime asks a broader question: how can the body become a language, with its own grammar, accents, silences, and contradictions?
The true subject, then, is less muteness than the actor. Weight, resistance, shifts of axis, the way the actor occupies space, and the organization of an action all become dramatic materials. The body does not merely illustrate what the text has already said. It can reveal a power relationship before the first line is spoken, make visible a hesitation that is never named, or bring an object into existence without crudely drawing it in the air.
OMNIBUS summarizes this position by asserting that “the actor is the primary and substantive material of theatre”. The statement may sound radical, especially to a writer in love with words. I do not hear it as a war against text. I hear it as a reminder: before speaking, the actor is already there—visible, weighted, oriented, in relationship. The body has already begun the scene.
Learning a Grammar Instead of Accumulating Poses
To make this material legible, Jean begins by mapping the body. In particular, he distinguishes three major blocks: the head, the chest, and the pelvis. Between them are more mobile zones—the neck, the waist, and the legs—that allow the blocks to move or articulate. In this vocabulary, an “organ” is not understood medically. It is a unit of movement. Several organs can also form a composite: the bust, the trunk, the torso. There is nothing gratuitously abstract about dividing the body this way. It allows us to see precisely what moves, what initiates, and what resists.
Segmentation grows out of this map. Instead of allowing the entire body to begin at once, we can isolate the head, hold the chest, delay the pelvis, or let the action travel from one segment to another. That propagation becomes a succession. It can move from top to bottom or return in a different order. Movement acquires a syntax: it has a beginning, relays, punctuation, and an end.
Jean also organizes space around three axes. The zenithal axis lets us think about rotation; the sagittal axis, laterality; the coronal axis, depth. The words take some effort at first, but they prevent vague corrections. They give the body cardinal points. When a movement meant to remain in the lateral plane slips subtly forward, we can finally name the escape instead of merely saying that something looks off.
Inclination and translation offer a particularly clear example. In an inclination, the organ changes angle around its articulation. In a translation, a block is displaced by the mobile zone supporting it while retaining its verticality. Jean has us work on the difference in front of the mirror. During a translation of the bust, he watches the level of the shoulders: if one rises or falls, the imaginary water they contain would begin to spill. The image is simple, but it immediately transforms my understanding. I no longer try to look right; I know what I must preserve.
Then come the curves of the torso, transfers of weight, grounding, controlled imbalances, and counterweights. None of this is intended as an athletic feat. Weight is a dramatic fact because it reveals what costs effort, what holds back, and what threatens to fall. Counterweight makes a push or pull credible by giving the audience a sense of resistance, even when the opposing force is absent. The training can be physically demanding, but its value does not lie in difficulty for its own sake. It lies in accuracy.
Causality becomes just as concrete. In an exercise in which the bust launches the arms, Jean corrects our tendency to activate the torso and arms simultaneously. For the audience to perceive a cause and its effect, the impulse from the bust must precede what it sets in motion. A fraction of a second is enough. Here again, the technical detail contains a dramatic idea: if everything happens at once, the action flattens; if one part provokes another, the movement begins to tell a story.
Dynamo-rhythm adds force and time to this organization. A movement can accelerate, soften, resist, hover, petrify, or explode. Stillness itself ceases to be a void. It can become a sustained action, the moment when something continues to act without visible displacement. For an actor, that idea is precious: not moving does not mean waiting for the scene to begin again.
The Fictive Body: Becoming Other Without Becoming False
Jean uses the expression “fictive body” to distinguish the everyday body from the body in performance. The term may suggest a false or fabricated body. It is almost the opposite. A fictive body is transformed by choices precise enough to make it legible in a different way. It no longer simply reproduces my habits; it belongs to the situation, the character, and the work.
One of Jean’s demonstrations helped me understand how modest that transformation can be. He does not need to multiply gestures. He can keep almost the entire body still and change only the action of the head; suddenly, the everyday body shifts into performance. The choice isolates one element, gives value to the stillness around it, and draws the audience’s eye. The fictive does not depend on large amplitude. It depends on organization.
This idea speaks directly to my work as an actor. Building a character physically does not mean attaching a spectacular gait or posture to them. It can begin with a slightly displaced centre of gravity, a neck that resists, a chest that withdraws, or a gesture originating somewhere other than where it usually does. The character becomes other because their choices are no longer the ones my body produces automatically.
The Space Outside and the Space Within the Body
Jean distinguishes ambient space—the space surrounding the actor and existing between partners—from physiological or intracorporeal space, bounded by our visual, tactile, and muscular perceptions. The two never remain separate for long. The floor alters my balance; a partner’s distance changes my muscle tone; an imagined direction reorganizes my gaze. Conversely, the way I look and carry my weight gives a particular quality to the space.
One exercise wonderfully captures this circulation. Jean asks us to suggest that we are gazing into the distance at the horizon of the Ionian Sea. Some gestures draw too much, as though the arm had to trace the line for the audience to understand. Jean brings the attention back to the gaze. An absent horizon can become perceptible without being shown literally, provided the actor knows where it is and organizes the body in a way that allows others to share it.
I understood something simple and demanding: the audience does not need a complete illustration. It needs to be able to enter the actor’s imagination. If my gaze drifts or my body contradicts the distance I evoke, the horizon disappears. If my coordinates are clear, a few signs are enough. This economy is just as useful in front of a camera as it is onstage.
The Neutral Face and the Partner’s Freedom
Neutrality of the face is probably one of the most disorienting exercises for an actor. Jean pairs us up and asks us to look at one another for about thirty seconds without expressing anything. The instruction seems almost impossible: as soon as two people look at each other, something happens. We try to appear welcoming, wary, amused, or impassive, and the face begins to comment.
Jean then clarifies the paradox: expressing nothing does not mean thinking nothing. Thought remains active, but the face does not immediately impose its interpretation. If I announce anger, fear, or compassion before the relationship has had time to develop, I confine my partner to an emotional territory. A more available presence gives the partner greater freedom and also leaves a place for the audience within the scene.
The lesson reaches far beyond mime. On camera, the face is so powerful that it can overwhelm everything else. A smile, a frown, or tension around the eyes becomes enormous. Neutrality is not an absence of emotion; it is the discipline of not underlining. It allows movement, text, and the partner to contribute to meaning instead of preceding them with an explanatory grimace.
Rigour as a Doorway to the Imagination
Physical techniques are sometimes accused of producing mechanical actors. The danger exists if we confuse the form we have learned with the artistic result. Yet Jean never gives me the impression that technique is an end in itself. He asks us to inhabit it, give it an intention, and place it in relationship. The vocabulary must become integrated enough that it no longer looks like an exercise.
In an improvisation restricted to a single plane of space, the constraint initially feels severe. We cannot do everything; each movement must remain within the chosen territory. Yet characters and relationships begin to appear. An angle of the head suggests mistrust; a pelvis that moves without carrying the upper body produces an unexpected audacity; a movement into back depth gives rise to withdrawal or inaccessibility. Movement feeds the imagination, then the emerging image calls forth another movement. The exchange becomes a mutual causality.
That is where rigour becomes fertile. By removing certain reflexes, it forces the actor to discover other paths. It guarantees neither poetry nor truth; no technique can. But it broadens the palette and makes choices more conscious. Spontaneity is no longer merely the rapid repetition of my habits. It can arise from a body that possesses more possibilities.
What This Teaching Changed in My Work as an Actor
I remain an actor deeply drawn to words. I write, I read, I analyze, and my first instinct can be to look for the scene in thought before looking for it in the body. Jean’s teaching did not erase that inclination; it counterbalanced it. He taught me to ask what my body is already telling, often before I have spoken a single line.
I perceive the origin of a gesture more clearly. Is the hand deciding, the bust initiating, the weight forcing the displacement? I notice parasitic movements and facial commentary more readily. I can search for a physical architecture for a character without accumulating tics. Most importantly, I have a vocabulary for diagnosing what is not working. A direction such as “give me more forward depth” can instantly alter a character in an audition without requiring me to invent an additional emotion.
Transferring this work to the camera obviously requires a change of scale. The large forms of an exercise cannot be carried unchanged into a close-up. But their logic survives: axis, causality, weight, point of origin, availability of the face. Playing small does not mean playing vaguely. A correction of a few millimetres can become even more important when the camera sees everything.
Corporeal Mime does not solve every problem an actor faces. It replaces neither listening, textual analysis, understanding of the situation, nor the surrender that acting requires. It can even become another means of control if we cling to it too tightly. But it offers a rare tool: the ability to make a thought visible without demonstrating it. It helps us choose what must move, what must resist, and what can remain silently active.
Why Study at OMNIBUS
Training at OMNIBUS is not a promise of instant transformation. You must accept repetition, the mirror, technical vocabulary, minute corrections, and confrontation with your own automatic habits. You must also accept a period of discomfort: as soon as you begin consciously observing an action that had previously felt natural, you may temporarily become less skilful. The body is searching for new bearings.
That is precisely what makes the process useful. OMNIBUS’s current training programs bring technique and improvisation together around space, time, identity, and otherness. They are generally led by teams of instructors, so I cannot assume that Jean will personally teach an upcoming workshop. The school is for actors, but also for dancers, circus artists, puppeteers, directors, and artists who want to deepen their physical presence.
I would recommend it especially to those who feel that their body arrives after their thoughts, to those who underline their intentions, or to those who lack the words to understand what they are doing physically. You should not go there merely to learn a few mime effects. You should go there to learn how to see. The most lasting benefit may not be any particular figure, but the ability to observe a movement with enough precision to transform it.
The Teacher Who Makes Knowledge Available
After several decades of practice, Jean could easily settle for impressing us. He could demonstrate an inaccessible virtuosity and leave his students to measure the distance between themselves and him. That is not what I received from his teaching. I received knowledge patiently broken down, a language that makes work possible, and an eye that constantly connects form to dramaturgy.
That is where my admiration comes from. It comes from the teacher who sees that a pelvis has lost its verticality, that an arm has taken command too soon, or that a face has already decided for the partner. It also comes from the man who has devoted much of his life to gathering, testing, organizing, and transmitting an art whose precision might otherwise dissolve into vague formulas.
I return to that invisible rose and the plumb line that was meant to cross near my ankle. Nothing spectacular: a rooted heel, weight carried more accurately, a more pronounced offset. Yet that one correction already contained space, relationship, causality, form, and meaning. Jean taught me that an actor does not think only with the head. The actor also thinks with a direction, a resistance, an immobility, and a few centimetres of truth.
