François Delsarte

Who was François Delsarte?

François Alexandre Nicolas Chéri Delsarte was a French musician and teacher. Though he achieved some success as a composer, he 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 in response to which Constantin Stanislavski would later develop his inner psychological methods.