Mime into Visual Theatre

Just shut up, okay?

My investigation into mime as the foundation for "visual theatre" is not going so well. Expecting to find a well documented history of silent but deadly performance on the internet, I'm come up against prejudice (even Batman hates mimes), conflicting definitions (in the USA, they call it pantomime even though it doesn't have a dame) and a tradition that isn't exclusively physical. Since the word probably comes from "mimesis" or imitation, it doesn't necessarily connect with physical activity - and the contemporary stereotype of the mime is really just Marcel Marceu's Bip character.

I'm not willing to trace the mime's art back further than Jean Gaspard Deburau who used the Pierrot, star of a thousand sentimental choreographies, to solidify the look of the mime sometime between 1819 and 1825. Deburau toughened up this character from the Commedia dell' arte and is an early example of the bad-boy celebrity: just like OJ Simpson, he was the defendant in a murder trial.

Even back then, mime was regarded as a little out of the respectable mainstream: when Deburau performed at a more up-market theatre, he was hissed. And from descriptions of his personal life, he spent the rest of the time pissed, either up or off. But his reputation as a consummate performer got him fans in the poetic classes, and the long association of the mime and doggerel began with him.

None of these are very good reasons to decide on Deburau as the starting point for contemporary mime - although his celebrity made him an inspiration for later generations and his interpretation of Pierrot allowed the character to stand forth from the cast of the Commedia. But they do place him in a tradition of using stylised gestures as a form of communication and make the development of mime follow the evolution of classical ballet, which was shaping up in Russia into the form recognised today.

Like ballet, mime took a turn for the better at the turn of the century - a former critic, Jacques Copeau, used masked to train his actors and inspired the work of Étienne Decroux, who would write the first major book on mime. 

Through these three artists, all based in Paris, a simple narrative emerges: mime moves away from its populist roots (the Commedia is frequently mentioned as an influence on the British pantomime, and despite Deburau's fame, he never quite managed to break into the more intellectual theatres) towards something more challenging. Copeau was concerned with reinvigorating French theatre, and rejecting the commercialism of the Right Bank: Decroux went further, and saw mime as a revolutionary force to rescue theatre from the script. 

Marcel Marceu studied with Decroux, so this radical programme quickly entered the mainstream. However, it is his Paroles sur le Mime that set out the ideas that could be a foundation towards a more visual theatre.

Decroux declaimed theatre for lacking invention, and proposed that stopping the avalanche of words in the average script could rescue performance. He estimated that thirty years ought to be enough to give the actor a chance to reclaim their skills from the writers: after this, words could come back. He also attacked the idea of scenography, encouraging a bare set. The illusion of "real life" was rejected. Instead, the actor needed to start using their body. Even when words were allowed back in, improvisation from a text would replace the classic script. 

In France, this was even more unlikely than in the UK: Shakespeare might be poetic, but French theatre loves language. Even his contemporaries like Sartre and Anouilh wrote some verbose plays - Anouilh's Antigone gestures towards the classical Greek format and Sartre was more excited by theatre's possibilities for an illustrated lecture than for rediscovering bodily language. 

Yet the ideas that might eventual get their own wikipedia entry are beginning to arise...