Introduction: Mime and Pantomime

Abstract

The name Marcel Marceau has been synonymous with mime during recent decades, and, although he plays a small part in this book, it is thanks to his extensive touring since the early 1950s that much of the recent widespread interest in this ancient art is due. He and mimes such as the Mummenschanz company are the most visible elements of a return to expressive movement which has manifestations in the contemporary theatre of Grotowski, Mnouchkine, Peter Brook and others. These individuals and groups who command the attention of the theatre world derive from a tradition that is traceable to the early years of this century and the revolutionary work of French teacher and director Jacques Copeau, passing down from him to his pupil Etienne Decroux and to Decroux’s students Jean-Louis Barrault and Marcel Marceau. Teachers Jean Dasté and Jacques Lecoq derive directly from Copeau’s school as well. I shall have to distinguish between an earlier nineteenth-century silent pantomime tradition, by which Marceau is strongly influenced, and modern mime, which uses sounds and words as well as movement metaphor. As the better-known pantomime tradition avoids sounds and words, it will be useful to outline briefly the history of mime until the early twentieth century and Copeau.