François Delsarte
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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François Alexandre Nicolas Chéri Delsarte (November 11, 1811, Solesmes—July 20, 1871, Paris) was a French musician, born in Solesmes, France. He was a pupil of the Conservatoire, was for a time tenor singer in the Opéra Comique, composed a few melodies, and wrote several romances, but is chiefly known as a teacher in singing and declamation. He went on to develop an acting style that attempted to connect the inner emotional experience of the actor with a systematized set of gestures and movements based upon his own observations of human interaction. This “Delsarte” method became so popular that it was taught throughout the world, but particularly in America, by many teachers who did not fully understand or communicate the emotional connections behind the gestures, and as a result the method devolved into melodramatic posing, the kind that Stanislavski would later develop his inner psychological methods in response to.