Mime/Marcel Marceau

Marceau Technique.

Known to most as “pantomime”, “representational mime” or simply “mime.”

Marcel Marceau was actually a student and collaborator of Etienne Decroux, the father of twentieth century Corporeal Mime. Marceau’s innovation and genius lay in hybridizing Decroux’s cubistic, modernist style with the pantomime blanc – the white-face pantomime epitomized by the Pierrot of Jean-Gaspard Deburau in the nineteenth century.

What Marceau got from Decroux was geometric precision in space and the play of counterweight through and upon the body. Nineteenth century pantomime drew pictures with the hands. Marceau brought fixed points in space, geometry and counterweight and made invisible objects ‘real’ by making them act on him – his objects had force in space and three-dimensionality. Somehow by doing all this Marceau enlarged what it was possible for the audience to ‘see.’ In contrast to the old pantomime who was like an actor in front of a two-dimensional backdrop, Marceau was an inhabitant of an infinite world of objects and surfaces that surrounded him and continued beyond the stage in the audience’s imagination.

Marceau’s passion as a performer and gifts as a creator, his humanistic and accessible creations of archetypal characters and stories, brought him fame and brought popularity to the art of mime. Coinciding in mid-century with the rise of easy and widely distributable visual media – through offset printing, film and, most of all, television – Marceau’s innovation became the public’s idea of Mime and it remains so to this day.

Marceau’s white-face, silent style spawned many imitators both good and bad, on stage as well as in street performance. Unfortunately our collective culture remembers the bad better than the good. The silent and annoying mime, trapped in an invisible box, has become the cliché that most often comes to mind with the word “mime.”