In  February, 1999,  LE NEON theatre had a rare opportunity to produce a three-day workshop in the art of mime with Marcel Marceau.

LE NEON’s reputation made it possible to spirit Marceau away from his Ford’s Theatre venue for the event,
and our award-winning work also helped us locate a large, comfortable classroom space
at The Levine School of Music in Washington, D.C.

Our company members attended in force, but the workshop also enabled us to work together, side by side, with other theatre companies in the Washington area, most notably the Stanislavsky Theatre Studio
and  the GALA Hispanic Theatre.

Marceau’s generosity of spirit, and the fine work of his assistant Gyongyi Biro – a highly talented mime in her own right – ensured that all of us came away from the experience overflowing with the wisdom of this ancient craft.
 
 

The following essay appeared in a local Washington theatre magazine, Theatre Spotlight, and I hope other members from LE NEON can share their own observations on our site as well:

 Rule number one:   If you're going to entertain the world's most famous mime,
                               be sure you have an angle on some good sushi.

Now, this may look like a useless bit of trivia, but believe it or not there is a reason why Marcel Marceau, the internationally famous creator of Bip and a generous teacher of the ancient craft of mime, won't settle for just anything.

The key to sushi, you see, is the art that lies behind its creation. In Japan, food preparation and presentation isn't just the shortest distance between being hungry and getting stuffed; they are prized and practiced as art forms. Marceau, the consummate artist, clearly prefers to eat in a place where even the kitchen is regarded as a studio, a place where artists are at work.

To understand Marceau's attitude towards the performing arts, it helps to begin in a place as seemingly mundane as the kitchen. We take food for granted, and rarely appreciate the potential for art in our own daily feed. In the same way, we tend to take our bodies for granted when we go out to perform on-stage. Too many of us go about the business of acting under the illusion that the most important thing is to feel the part.

But as Marceau would point out, 'it is not enough to just feel the part, you have to give that feeling, communicate that feeling to the audience.'

A number of Washington-area artists gathered for three days this past February, to introduce ourselves to the fine art of mime.

Marcel Marceau uses his workshops to demonstrate the tremendous communicative potential of the human body. Through his detailed 'grammar' of mime he shows how the body, by itself, can reveal and communicate the full range of the human experience.

Each of us has the power to communicate without words, using a universal language whose roots run deep in every culture the world over.

The three sessions -- three hours each, and each of them all too brief -- were an introduction to mime as Marceau himself learned it, in his days as a student of the great Etienne Decroux. It was Decroux who revived the practice of mime in France in the early 20th century, and who drew his greatest inspiration from classic representational art.

Marcel Marceau usually performs in silence, or occasionally with musical accompaniment.

This may seem strange at first; and yet as he might remind us, when we look at a Picasso, a Greek vase, or a Michaelangelo, we need no words or music to understand what is being expressed.

In complete silence, we are able to marvel at what the painter and sculptor has presented us.  Marceau teaches us to appreciate what a finely tuned instrument our bodies could be, if we nurtured its wisdom and unleashed its tremendous power to communicate.

Marceau demonstrated how, when the body is allowed to speak for itself, 'there is no silence.'

Through his dedicated practice of mime, Marcel Marceau has developed a repertoire steeped in a physical wisdom of great depth and sincerity.

And in all honesty, I have to admit that this middle-aged student often felt like a pretty poor physical specimen, next to this seemingly ageless 76-year-old performer. Mime has not only given Marceau his livelihood, it has also made him eternally young.

Among the many wonderful memories of our workshop together -- the attitudes of the body for each emotion, the incredible variety of hand and head gestures he showed us -- perhaps the most vivid for me was his youthfulness and his enthusiasm for sharing his art, even its most spiritual aspects, with absolute beginners like me.