Marcel Marceau, the world’s most celebrated mime, practices an ancient art that moves in silence beyond the physical toward the spiritual.
That’s the way he sees it himself. Asked in a recent public television interview if his art is “metaphysical,” he answers “absolutely.” “I like to reveal the essence of our soul, the inside of ourselves.”
Now 76 years old, this dynamic Frenchman with frizzy hair, a face expressive of every emotion, and an amazingly lithe body continues giving over two hundred performances every year. Always his interest is to help audiences understand what it means to be enfleshed spirits.
In doing so, Marceau seduces everyone into silence.” I try to bring complete silence in the theater,” he says. When I showed the interview to a class of undergrads at Brandeis University three weeks ago, I was struck by the special quality of silence that reigned among them. It was an alive, dramatic quiet that spoke loudly of human souls deeply engaged.
Certainly Marceau’s family heritage gives him reason for understanding human life as both tragic and comic. His family home was in Strasbourg, the city that lies close to the border between Germany and France. Two horrendous world wars swept over this vulnerable place during the first half of this century.
In 1942, Marceau’s father was deported to Auschwitz and never heard of again. This happened while Marcel was still a teenager.
But growing up, he also did a kind of apprenticeship observing the great comics Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. From both of them he drew the subtle arts of dramatizing the human comedy.
When you see him do his famous “Bip” character, modeled on Chaplin’s “Little Tramp,” you understand how deeply Marceau has entered into the human condition. Part of that condition is solitude, being alone and left to one’s own resources.
Solitude, Marceau observes, is not in itself bad. It simply reveals what each human being really is. We are also beings torn between the comic and tragic elements of life, as he shows when struggling to get the laughing mask off his face.
“Are you religious?, a priest once asked him. The question makes Marceau uncomfortable. One thing he does know, however: “When I do the creation of the world, God is in me.” During this performance he has a sharp sense of a divine power at work in him.
More broadly, he feels himself part of a larger movement to recognize the glory of the world. Using the French word “la sacralisation,” (“making things holy”), he endows human gestures with the power to render everything sacred. Thus by the skilled use of his hands, he opens up the potential of a world that we are normally oblivious of.
As a person now in his mid-seventies, he also feels the power of age. Asked specifically about the impact of age upon his art, he answers: “It enables me to go deeper.” By bringing the perspective of long experience, he can penetrate closer to the core of things than he could when still young.
The gestures and movements on which this art depends are called by Marceau “the grammar.” They are the bare bones by which the magic works. The movement that audiences see is not mere bodily motion; rather it is filled with spiritual music and feeling. It creates a “stream of silence” that carries along people who watch it.
Asked about his hopes for an artistic legacy, Marceau takes satisfaction in knowing that mime has been accepted as a universal language. It has become part of American culture by now. We have become accustomed to seeing laughing and crying without words.
This great mime hopes that more people still will come to appreciate the meaning and power of human gestures used in this ancient art. The secret is a delicate balance, he says: “not one word, not one gesture too much.”
This artist in costume – long white pants held up by suspenders, striped shirt, sweater and white shoes – walking in place can serve as a colorful and memorable image of the spiritual searcher. He does his searching by reaching out with his bodily self upward toward the sublime and, at the same time, downward toward the depths of meaning.
Richard Griffin