IN DEFENSE OF MIMES

Despite what the photograph implies, I was not taken hostage by a band of rogue mimes back in the early 1980s. Yes, that is me in the center of the picture surrounded by four white-face actors grinning silently. But it’s not what it looks like. I was there voluntarily.

For a few summers decades ago, my favorite place was in the back of a van filled with talented street performers. There is nothing quite like the thrill of guerilla theatre, where buskers earn their living nickel by nickel purely on their ability to entertain people passing by. Imagine yourself earning your daily bread that way – no salary, no coffee breaks, no healthcare plan. Whatever your viewers toss in the hat determines how much you are worth. And unlike musicians, jugglers or magicians -- mimes do it all without saying a word. Then they get up the next day and do it again.

I know I couldn’t cut it on the street, but I loved being on the support team. My job was part groupie, part stage manager, part press agent and mascot. Sometimes I passed the hat or sold the black T-shirts that read YOU SHOW ME YOURS on the front, and I’LL SHOW YOU MIME on the back.

Mime bashing has become all too fashionable of late. Children openly mock those wearing the classic uniform -- striped shirt, beret, ballet slippers, black pants and suspenders. A whole line of "I hate clowns" merchandise has sprung up on the Internet. If a mime shows up in a comedy film these days, pulling on an imaginary rope or leaning against an imaginary post, he’s likely to get stomped.

But those usually are not mimes at all, just people pretending. Real mimes work really hard to hone their craft. I once saw a guy in Quebec City painted to look like a marble statue. Each day he walked into the heart of the tourist section carrying a little stool and wearing a hat. Without saying a word, he placed the hat on the ground and stepped on to the stool, struck a formal pose and remained motionless for up to an hour at a time. He didn’t swat flies. He didn’t move a muscle.

Crowds inevitably gathered and people would begin to taunt the performer, trying to get him to react in any way. Eventually someone threw a few coins into the hat, and at the sound of the clicking coins, the mime raised his thumb slightly and winked one eye. That was it. Each contribution elicited the same reaction and nothing more. Eventually one group would grow weary of the act and move on, but new people always arrived and the process began again.

The human statue guy was likely trained as a "corporeal mime", a student of Etienne Decroux, the "father of modern mime", or possibly a follower of Jacques Lecoq. This highly disciplined and stylized form of mime involves an almost scientific approach to using the body as a form of expression and is as demanding as the art of ballet. Some mimes draw their inspiration from the commedia dell'arte traditions that rely heavily on masks and specific comic characters like those freaky figures wandering around in any Cirque du Soleil performance.

The troupe I tagged along with did major theatrical shows based on comic pantomimed stories, much like Marcel Marceau. You remember him from the Ed Sullivan Show. Marceau was a student of Decroix, but broke from his Jedi-Master to form his own comedy style that is the source of the typical mime we know today. Students of that style often honed their skills in the street, sometimes involving members of the audience spontaneously.

My favorite routine was called "The Backpack". In it, one mime in the troupe plays a backpack, loose and empty. The second actor fills the backpack with supplies, flings the first mime onto his back and hikes among hundreds of audience members, stopping to consume the items in the pack until it is again light and deflated. The illusion was amazing and physically demanding for both performers. For the record, the mime playing the backpack weighed exactly the same throughout the sketch, but you would swear she gained and lost 50 pounds. I never tired of seeing it, or the reaction of audience after audience.

Early in the 1980s there was a Mime War. It didn’t make the news, except among mimes, who are not a talkative group. The fundamentalist Decroixians and Marceau-followers and other splinter groups were duking it out over when it was okay to talk, whether on not to wear white-face, and other critical details. There was a lot of juggling for power, a little swordplay, some pretty wild puppetry. A whole new "post modern" style was born. It got pretty ugly.

Somewhere in the middle of the Mime War the van stopped suddenly, the door slid open, and I found myself alone in the street without even a prop hat. Then the van sped away. Maybe it was something I said, or didn’t say – I never knew. But to this day, I cannot put on a backpack without a chuckle and a tear. And sometimes, when no one is looking, I imagine myself trapped inside an invisible box, or, just for grins, I take a little walk against the wind.

Copyright © 2007 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.