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Oct. 5, 2007
Master of speechless expression
Marcel Marceau was the Western world's most renowned – and
beloved – pantomime.
EUGENE KAELLIS
Have you ever longed for silence – a time without seemingly
incessant chatter, traffic, airplane noise and boom boxes or stereos
playing rock music at the highest volume? You don't have to be a
Buddhist monk to reap its benefits. Sound is only one of the ways
in which people communicate. Other methods may be more effective
and more intimate.
Referring to his own unmatched career in stage pantomime, Marcel
Marceau said, mime is "an attempt to capture love, life and
beauty before the supreme moment of death."
In mime, talk is normally supplemented by facial expressions, gestures
and body language.
For Marceau, such movements totally displaced words. The internationally
renowned French mime died last month at the age of 84. He was not
only the world's top pantomime; he was largely responsible for the
resurgence of this art form. Today, there are many schools teaching
mime and it is considered an intrinsic part of the training of actors.
Marceau, whose father was killed at Auschwitz, was attracted to
silent expression when he discovered how difficult it was for Holocaust
survivors to talk about their experiences.
Aside from his artistry, there seemed to be something personally
fetching about Marceau. He gave the impression of being a real mensch:
a person who took his art, his association with others, his principles
and his family seriously and sincerely. He cared about the world
and its people, lessons he had in large measure absorbed from his
parents' Jewish humanism.
The art of mime goes beyond the nonverbal. It involves the understanding
and ability to portray human activities, without props, and to do
it convincingly. In his familiar Bip role, he sported white-powdered
aquiline features, with short, dark hair and a battered top hat
too small for his head, wearing a striped shirt and stovepipe pants.
In this get-up, he was reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin in appearance
and, like the Little Tramp, he always attracted his audience's sympathy.
Marceau was able to convey his precise intentions and meaning to
audience members simply by studying an action, like going up the
stairs, and then doing it so perfectly, no one would doubt that
there were invisible steps beneath his feet. His limbs reflected
the shift in weight from one foot to the other as he "ascended
the stairs," the movement of his arms trying to keep his centre
of gravity and balance constant.
Marceau moved his body and used his face so expressively that the
absence of a stairway itself seemed part of the illusion. He could
lean totally convincingly against a nonexistent mantelpiece, cantilevering
his weight so that he showed no strain, although his muscles had
to work mightily to make up for the lack of support and a centre
of gravity that had to be shifted to outside his body.
In the early part of his career, Marceau had a cliquish following
of enthusiasts. It was not until 1951 that his Paris production
of Gogol's Overcoat and his preferred character, Pierrot
de Montmartre, achieved the requisite fame to tour Europe and Israel.
His first North American appearance was in Canada when, in 1955,
he performed pantomime sketches at Ontario's Stratford Festival.
In the same year, he won critical acclaim while performing in a
small off-Broadway theatre in New York. It was, as one critic put
it, "visual poetry." He immediately became a hit with
his audiences and his later appearances were sold out.
Marceau was born in 1923 in the Alsatian city of Strasbourg, a city
which, after the First World War, was once more French, following
40 years of German rule. He grew up in Lille, near the Belgian border,
where his father was a butcher. From childhood, he was determined
to be a mime, imitating whatever he saw around him: plants, trees,
birds and people. His parents loved what he did and encouraged him
to pursue his evident talent.
During the Second World War, following the Nazi conquest of France,
Marceau's father was seized as a hostage and deported to Auschwitz,
where he perished. His mother and the family fled to Limoges, which,
until the Allied invasion, was a part of Vichy France. Since the
Vichy government was more than co-operative with the Germans in
ferreting out Jews and handing them over to the Gestapo, his family
changed its name from Mangel to Marceau to help conceal its Jewish
identity. Marceau and his older brother joined the French Resistance
and forged documents to help Jewish children escape to Switzerland.
His first performance as a mime was in 1947, in Paris's tiny Theatre
de Poche, as the character Bip, which became his trademark. After
that, he toured Western Europe, returning to Paris to organize a
mime company.
Pantomime has a venerable history, beginning with Roman drama, achieving
popularity in the 18th century with the help of the Italian theatre
genre commedia dell'arte. It also figured prominently in the so-called
English "dumb-shows" and in the religious mystery plays
of the Middle Ages.
Pantomime has always had an advantage over regular drama in having
no language requirement and in being clearly visible, especially
in an outdoor setting, in circumstances where unamplified sounds
would be rendered indistinct by distance and echoes. Ballet, obviously,
has always had a close connection with mime.
It is not only an art form in itself, but a vital skill for an actor,
regardless of the medium, except for radio. Even TV news anchors
have to display the proper facial and body expressions to offer
some human response to the news they are announcing.
Marceau could walk into a strong wind, skate, act out the battle
between David and Goliath, catch a butterfly, engage in a tug-of-war,
do anything that requires movement, or simply be still, using his
expressive face, eyes and hands as the sole sources of action.
Marceau's performances were always at the human, personal and intimate
level and always had an element of humanistic politics, about which
he was very candid and deliberate.
"Mime," Marceau insisted, "is not a silent art. It
is the art of touching people."
Eugene Kaellis is a retired academic living in New Westminster.
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