Pantomime: The History and Metamorphosis of a Theatrical Ideology: Table of Contents

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From Mime to Movement Theater

Even though some American teachers who were students of Decroux, such as Jewel Walker (1926-2020) and Daniel Stein (b. 1952), have retained the term “mime” to describe their work, the perceived damage done to or by the word “mime” as a result of its appropriation by street performers or clown acts urged some artists elsewhere seeking a more serious approach to speechless performance to develop the concept of “movement theater.” But this concept should remain separate from other terms, like “movement for the stage,” “movement for actors,” “movement training,” and “physical theater,” improvisational, exercise-intense pedagogical regimes that have proliferated in theater education since the 1980s and may include acrobatics, fencing and stage combat, somatic training, dance, gymnastics, or commedia buffoonery, and often entail the total exclusion of anything resembling pantomime (cf. Potter 2011). Movement theater originated in The Netherlands with the founding in 1965 of the performance group Bewegingstheater (Movement theater) or BEWTH by Frits Vogels (b. 1933), a student of Decroux. But this group emerged out of tensions within the Dutch Decroux cult. In 1952, Jan Bronk (1928-1985), a student of Marceau, established the Dutch Pantomime Institute, which performed mime scenes similar to those of Marceau. Vogels, Rob van Reijn (1929-2015), a nightclub performer who modeled himself after the Dutch clown Johan Buziau (1877-1958), and Will Spoor (1927-2014), a student of Decroux for six years, joined the Institute in 1954. The Dutch Decroux disciples embraced more ardently than other disciples Decroux’s concept of the “Zero” or “neutral” state, a theoretical “nakedness,” in which the body no longer signified an individual or personality but became a symbol of humanity, as Decroux explained: “When I see the body rise up, I feel as if it’s humanity that’s rising up” (Langen 2017: 47-48). The Zero concept emphasized the torso as the dominant source of semantic value in the body while demoting the value of the hands, arms, and face, which too easily promise, conceal, and lie (53). This distinction supposedly separated mime from pantomime and enhanced the value of stillness, wherein it was possible to make visible the “movement of thought” or “mime thinking” (mime denken). In 1956, the Dutch Pantomime Institute produced a piece designed by Jan Bronk, Rood zien, in which performers used their bodies, without using their hands much, to create a larger abstract image. Baart (1982: 18) claims that this event marked the abandonment of pantomime by the Pantomime Institute and the inauguration of a Dutch mime aesthetic opposed to pantomime. Rob van Reijn soon left the Institute to pursue numerous opportunities in the entertainment industry (revue, film) primarily as a pantomime clown, and in 1967 formed the Pantomime Theater Carrousel, in which he developed the recurring comic character Mannetje Maccus. “I do not care for abstract mime,” he declared (Jeanne-Marie Jobse, “Een bijzonder mens moet het zijn geweest,” De Verdieping Trouw, 12 March 2001, Paragraph 11). Eventually he published a monumental novel, Voetlicht en vetpotten (2000), about the early Amsterdam pantomime Jan van Well (1773-1818), who devised and performed commedia ballet pantomime scenarios (as Pierrot or as Arlequin) for the Schouwburg Theater (cf., De Toneelkijker 1818: 88, 165, 213, 334). Meanwhile, Will Spoor, who came from a musical-theatrical family and was himself a violist, moved away from Decroux’s idea of the body as a symbol and toward the body as an instrument that makes “music for the eyes,” which, however, meant developing an absurdist image of the body. His attachment to absurdism derived not only from his appreciation for the work of French absurdist playwright Jean Tardieu (1903-1995), but from his own rather messy career. In the 1950s, he worked in Parisian cabaret with the French marionette producer Yves Joly (1908-2013) before performing comic cabaret pantomime duets with Bronk; he had a part in a 1961 cabaret act by the famous Toon Hermans (1916-2000). He tried to establish his own company and school in 1962-1963, but these failed, and he moved on to playing for a season the bumbling crook Snuitje in the clown duo of Snuf and Snuitje on the popular Dutch children’s TV show Pipo the Clown (1963). He found small parts as an actor or dancer in mainstream drama productions, then ventured into street theater for a while, before starting a new, four-person company in 1967. In Italy, he and his performance partner got arrested (1968) for performing a mime using artificial penises. The group moved to London to work in the avant-garde Arts Lab newly established by the American counter-culture impresario Jim Haynes (1933-2021). There he experimented with multimedia and with minute bodily movements and connecting movements of animals, plants, and insects to the human body, and these performances, The Art of the Fugue, became the subject of the film Moving Statics (1969), by the Australian experimental filmmakers Arthur (b. 1938) and Corrine (b. 1928) Cantrill. Unlike Decroux, he was not comfortable with solitary mime and continually sought to create ensemble mimes. In 1971, Spoor formed the Waste of Time mime group, which removed him from the ensemble in 1974, presumably because of his acute abstractionism: “I hate the actors theatre,” he said, “I try to make a science out of mime, instead of an expression of my most inner feelings. For nobody has anything to do with what I think” (Langen 2017: 84). He formed new companies, Stichting Inccoprodinc (1977-1992) and Onktheater Overal (1981-1984), while appearing occasionally in experimental, speechless films like Harpya (1975). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he appeared in or supervised numerous productions through these companies; his daughter Pepijn sometimes performed with him in mimes, but also for a while (1987-1989) operated her own highly abstract street theater, Witte Wiven, as seen in Maartje Seyferth’s (b.1945) experimental film Movimenti cantabile (1989), deposited in the Amsterdam Eye film archive, “in which a young homeless woman, a saxophonist, and a businesswoman stage a silent choreography amid a labyrinth of illuminated tiles” (Eye web page). Yet all this mime activity remains bereft of documentation or commentary that describes what it was. Marijn de Langen’s treatise on the Dutch “mime thinking” cult, which provides the most extensive commentary on Spoor, focuses entirely on his work in the 1960s (Langen 2017: 67-86). 

            Yet Spoor’s influence was probably greater than seems evident from the feeble historical record. Mime groups proliferated in The Netherlands (Mimetheater Kruimels, Mimegroep Oceaan, Mimetheater Mekaniek, Nieuw West, Suver Nuver, De Daders, Bewegingsgroep Bart Stuyf, Toneelgroep Carver, to mention a few), and these showed a similar disinterest in documentation. Some of these groups did not work exclusively in mime, but they did treat the body as an abstract form that did not require a story or a character to invest the body with meaning. In The Netherlands, mime nearly became synonymous with a hyper-modern use of the body to construct an abstraction of life rather than a representation of it, in contrast to postmodern dance, which concentrated on movement, rather than on the body, as an abstraction of life, for dance saw movement as something detachable from the body that performed it. The Dutch mime culture saw the mimed abstraction of life as a phenomenon that happened only in the moment of its performance and had no “life” outside of its performance: documentation was irrelevant, a contamination, and in this respect, mime continued to follow Decroux (86). This attitude toward mime created a great deal of mime activity, especially in schools, without building a large audience for mime. Spoor’s mimes showed the body “thinking” through movement. He liked to take a single movement, such as the pendulum motion in Pink Metronome (1968) for three persons, and show variations and reversals in speed, rhythm, rigidity, bodily position, and spatial relations. The act of initiating a movement from a “neutral” position of stillness preoccupied him and was a basis for the four-part Art of the Fugue (1968). The point of mime was to show the strangeness of any human movement, a point he amplified by miming minute insect movements in Bug Counterpoint (1968) (78). Unlike Decroux, he liked to explore the relation of the body to objects, as in Cardboard Column Canon (1968), in which three performers inside three large cardboard roles open hatches, release different objects, such as a banana peel, smoke, bubbles, and wrenches, and then gradually “break free of their packaging.” With this aesthetic, mime revealed the “universal” absurdity of humanity—humorous, perhaps, but never mistaken for a clown act (85). Spoor’s ideas about “mime thinking” produced widespread awareness of the body as an “instrument,” but as usual with those under the spell of Decroux, the ideas, the theoretical framework of mime, far exceeded in influence the evidence of performance itself. 

            The Dutch concept of “movement theater” (Bewegingstheater BEWTH) emerged as a response to the absurdist appropriation of mime as Spoor theorized it. Spoor was indifferent to the context of mime performance, which could happen anywhere—the studio, a theater, the street—without disturbing the “zero” foundation of universal “mimed thinking.” Like Spoor, Frits Vogels embraced Decroux’s concept of the body as a “zero” state of being, but unlike Decroux, he never thought of the body as a symbol of something other than itself: the zero state was a body free of all personality and any motive for acting, for making a movement (Langen 2017: 120, 126-127). Every movement or action is the process of the body returning to a zero condition of stillness (“stilstand”), a notion similar to the Roman pantomime idea of moving from one pose to another. This attitude toward bodily movement allows mime to draw insight from bodily representations in painting or sculpture. It was not a matter of mime copying visual images; rather, visual images clarified relations between movement/stillness and context: movement is a response to a particular context, a particular space, a particular physical environment, which of course may include other bodies. Whereas Spoor saw mimed movement as a thought issued internally from the body to make a corporeal “music,” Vogels saw movement as a thought stimulated externally by a particular location: mime was a physical response to a unique physical space and clarified the body’s relation to the space. With the sculptor and muralist Arnold Hamelberg (1931-2010), Vogels formed the Bewegingstheater BEWTH in 1965 in Amsterdam as a mime school, with, among others, Spoor and Luc Boyer (b. 1935), another student of Decroux, as teachers, but Vogels (like Spoor) became less interested in perfecting movement or in discovering the ideality of a movement than in revealing movements imaginable only in relation to a particular moment in a specific space. Unlike many mime teachers, including Decroux, Vogels (and Spoor) did not place great emphasis on exercises and the application of a rigorous technique; Vogels followed a more “open” and intellectual process of incorporating influences from the other arts (134-135). Indeed, the term “movement theater” arose because Vogels was not altogether sure he was doing mime as conventionally understood, and while he never repudiated the term, he needed another term to differentiate his idea of mime from an overdetermined public and pedagogic image of mime. He and his students began (1965) experimenting with “bizarre” movement in the school’s tiny Micro Theater (seating for thirty) and in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, where bodies formed aesthetic relations to abstract sculptures. In 1968, BEWTH captured widespread attention for its production of Bossche Bollen in an Amsterdam church that was now a youth nightclub, the Paradiso. The piece mimed actions depicted in the monumental painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1495-1505), by the late medieval Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516). As seen in the 1968 film made of the performance by Marcus van Hoorn (b. 1947), the piece involved eleven performers, seven men and four women, dressed in white knit body stockings, surrounded by the audience on a bare stage (dance floor); low-hung cross-lighting allowed the performers to cast long shadows. All the performers interact with each other, and no one leaves the performance space, but different combinations of performers interact in different parts of the space simultaneously, making it difficult for the camera, which functions as if it is in the performance, to see all the action occurring at the same moment. The performers continually form new configurations: duos, trios, quartets, and occasionally even larger groups; they dart and dash impulsively across the stage to form new bonds that last briefly before abruptly breaking up to form new relations. They crawl and slither toward each other; they pounce on each other. They jab, prod, kiss, fondle, carry, and wrestle each other. They form rings; they prance around; they build rolling sculptures out of their bodies; they pile up on each other; they simulate sexual acts, including male and female homosexual intimacies. One man seems to sprout an erect fur penis that goes through his male partner and comes out of his partner’s anus. Some members of the group briefly break away to do things alone, such as assume the pose of a crucified man or walk as if on a tightrope. A female performer seizes a man in a suit from the audience, pulls him to the ground, and aggressively overwhelms him with her sexual embace until she suddenly leaps off him to rejoin a group. The performers handle objects: a woman kneels holding a domed, wire cage over her body; a group lifts a platform on which lies a woman; men battle for control of a stick; three women play with a large toy fish. Especially notable is a moment in which ensemble members roll dozens of balls to each other and roll the balls over each other. Later, dozens of small balls fall from the ceiling, and yet the performers continue to perform their physical interactions as if a stage littered with many tiny balls made no difference. In the latter portion of the piece, the performers move from exuberance to a more sinister mood, presumably the “Hell” panel of Bosch’s triptych: some restrain, twist, toss, or stretch the bodies of others; some hobble about as if crippled; some convulse as if in pain; they all lie on the floor, holding hands, as balls bounce over them. The piece ends with a man leading another man. They kiss. Suddenly the leading man grabs his partner and shoves his head into a bucket of water. The man with his head in the bucket rolls over and lies still, as if dead; the other man stands over him, as if frozen in triumph: “Stilstand.” The music in the film accompanying these actions is eclectic: guitar, somber organ tones, avant-garde electronic sounds, rock and roll, folk tunes. But the final death scene is silent. Obviously a huge number of actions occur in about twenty-five minutes to create the mimed image of a community in which all members appear to have uninhibited access to each other’s bodies, and this access is simultaneously exhilarating and dangerous and more than one can see in the finite space. The performance fractures the spectator’s ability to “contain” space or bodies through vision, much like Bosch’s effort to create a fantastic scene of bodies that the viewer is unable to absorb all at once. None of the action is choreographed. Instead, performers follow a different logic: “I am doing A with f, but now it is time to do B with h, which includes e, who may do C, which may be unkown to me, until E.” The performance arises out of a collective trust in the bodies of the community, unlike, for example, dance, which arises from a collective trust in the steps, the choreography, the system of regulating bodies. An improvisational quality pervades the performance, as bodies move from one action to another, one “access” to another, impulsively, without being “told” to do so by any one member or a text or some invisible guiding force like a director or choreographer. The space creates the communal logic and infuses the performers’ bodies with the idea of access to other bodies as the governing motive for action. 

            With Bossche Bollen, BEWTH embarked on a lengthy period of developing performances—126 productions altogether—in manifold large spaces originally designed for other purposes: numerous churches, metal and machinery factories, a water pumping station, a shipbuilding works, museums, city halls, medieval castles, a horse riding school, abandoned warehouses, city plazas, government buildings, university lobbies, the roof of the Rijksmuseum. The company did not bring performances to the spaces; it built performances out of the unique properties of the spaces. Performances became increasingly complex with the incorporation of elaborate lighting designs, avant-garde music soundtracks, architecturally interesting props, and stylized costumes. The placement of audiences was often the most challenging question. Over the years, many people worked with the company, which changed “leaders” fairly often; Vogels never sought to maintain control over the company or any production, and for many years persons involved with the productions remained anonymous, never identifying their functions (Leidse Courant 11 May 1976: 5). As Vogels explained: “The theatre doesn’t want us? They aren’t interested in a new kind of mime, not even if we call it ‘movement theatre’? Our answer: The theatre has to escape from the theatre. No money for scenery? Then look for some place – monumental, if possible – and perform a piece in it, or about it” (Bakker 2004: 8). Audiences for any performance were never large, because of limits imposed by the architecture of even the largest spaces and because the audience was also mobile in relation to the performance. The Dutch government and various municipalities subsidized most of the costs of production, enabling the company to provide performances without charging admission. The Dutch government ceased its subsidies in 2005, which brought the end of the company. Unlike other groups in the Dutch mime culture, BEWTH was relatively diligent about compiling documentation of its production, partly because their performances made alluring photographic images [Figure 98] (cf., Schade 2005). Vogels started another mime company, Griftheater (1975-2003), which worked in more conventionally theatrical spaces, but constructed performances out of architecturally unusual sets and props. Often the company developed pieces in a manner similar to the Bosch production by miming bodily relations depicted in artworks by such modernists as Man Ray (1890-1976) and Max Ernst (1891-1976), which allowed bodies to interact within surrealistic spaces, although in the gloomy Op de rand van een vrouw (1993), with “mimography” by Vogels, one sees bodily “access” tropes and interactive patterns similar to those in Bossche Bollen, indicating the presence of a style of performance imposed over the ostensibly collective creation of the piece. In the latter part of its life, Griftheater began exploring the possibilities of “landscape theater,” whereby the group built performances in response to specific geographic or “architectural” features provided by nature. 

Image of BEWTH performance at Pieterskerk, Leiden (1976), from Schade (2005: 89)

Although its work was not well known outside The Netherlands, BEWTH nevertheless exerted great influence in mutating perception of “mime.” For one thing, BEWTH showed implications and consequences of Decroux’s pedagogy that actually carried mime performance far from the doctrines of the master. Even more significantly, BEWTH showed how mime performance undermined borders between theater and other arts and allowed mime/theater to appropriate manifold spaces. “Movement theater” became a highly interdisciplinary activity that fostered an ambiguous intersection of theater with other arts to produce hybrid modes of aesthetic corporeal messaging requiring new terms, like “movement theater.” 

Figure 154: Images of BEWTH performances. Pieterskerk, Leiden (1976), Raadhuis, Hilversum (1996), Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (1989), Pieterskirk, Leiden (1976), Ministerie van Social Zaken en Werkgelegenheid, The Hague (1994). Photos: Schade (2005: 89, 90, 151, 201). 

BEWTH emerged in a time of profound dissatisfaction with conventional, institutionalized organizations of performance and was concurrent with other experiments elsewhere in bodily performance, such as Fluxus events, Viennese Actionism, performance art, installations, happenings, and the “kinetic theater” of the visual artist Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019). But the company was unique in seeing mime as the foundation for a major reorganization of institutional resources for the performing arts in a national society (cf., Haan 2003). BEWTH established “location theater” as an activity worthy of taxpayer subsidy. Many new theater groups arose as “alternatives” to the established, pre-1968 theater, and the established theater soon became far more “physical” in the performance of texts. Theater came to mean a radical reimagining of how to use bodies in performance. Perhaps the most extravagant and popular of the speechless “location theater” groups was Dogtroep (1975-2008), founded in Amsterdam by Warner van Wely and Paul de Leeuw, along with other artists and musicians with no training in mime. Dogtroep began as a kind of carnivalesque street theater to “infiltrate” the public sphere and showcase bodily performance skills, stunts, and processions that required more space and freedom than conventional theater could provide. But in the early 1980s, the company focused on location theater, and its productions, involving a large staff, became enormous spectacles performed in vast, open air spaces, often empty fields that allowed the group to integrate the operation of heavy machinery and huge props into the performance; Noordwesterwal (1994) made spectacular use of a monumental canal and dyke complex. In a large Amsterdam studio, the group devised productions collectively, which included the ideas of the technicians and craftsmen who contrived the multitude of machines, video projections, bizarre costumes, and architectural structures that defined the Dogtroep aesthetic. The company was very imaginative in designing unusual towers, scaffolds, robotic platforms, giant wheels, pyrotechnic effects, costumes containing all kinds of surprising contraptions within them, collapsible sets, water tanks, mysterious lighting effects, eccentric projectiles, and strange vehicles, including the use of cranes to move objects and performers across the performance space. The obsession with props and contraptions spawned an athletic performance aesthetic built around a rapid succession of comic or grotesque stunts. The company attracted immense audiences, not only in The Netherlands, but in many European cities. The performers had to display considerable physical agility in dealing with the elaborate, even dangerous machinery of production, yet they remained subordinate to the idea of the body as simply a component of a larger, “absurd” mechanical apparatus. Dogtroep presented a hallucinatory, Boschian circus, the “infiltration” into contemporary society of a medieval image of humanity somehow transplanted and entangled in the machinery of modernity. In the 1990s, the company, while maintaining an enthusiasm for location theater, began to adjust its flamboyant productions to more conventional theatrical spaces, but in the twenty-first century this type of theater became difficult to sustain. It cost too much to maintain such an industrial-sized workshop, while suitable or available “locations” became scarce. Without the body as the fundamental sign of modernity, which Decroux struggled to articulate, theater was bound to run out of spaces big enough to accommodate Boschian visions of bodies as “instruments” of a communal belief in the inescapable (though carnivalesque) doom constituting, one might say, the cosmic “machinery of life” (cf. Boer 2008; Findlay 2016).

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Pantomime: The History and Metamorphosis of a Theatrical Ideology: Table of Contents

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The Spread of the Mime Culture

A major alternative to Decroux’s heritage of mime education came from the Parisian-born Jacques Lecoq (1921-1999), who never was a mime and never studied mime. His background was in physical education, and his thinking about physical movement derived in large part from his extensive study of gymnastics and training for various sports, especially swimming. The poetic qualities of athletic movement encouraged him toward theater, as did the actor Jean Dasté (1904-1994), Copeau’s son-in-law, who arranged for him to act briefly (1945-1946) with a company in Grenoble. Dasté introduced Lecoq to the mysteries of masks in performance, an experience that shaped his philosophy of movement education and compelled him, in 1948, to spend the next eight years in Italy working with the mask maker Amleto Sartori (1915-1962). With Sartori, Lecoq discovered much about the original commedia tradition that French theatrical practice had obscured. In Milan, he established in 1952 a school attached to the Piccolo Teatro established by the director Giorgio Strehler (1921-1997) and the impresario Paolo Grassi (1919-1981). He directed or choreographed numerous productions in various Italian cities until he returned to Paris in 1956, when he established his École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, which subsequently became famous for teaching so many people who became major actors and directors in theater and film (cf. Leabhart 1989: 88-101; Wright 2013: 72). But it was not a mime school; it was a school of movement education for students who wanted to be actors in the theater, not mimes. Mime was for Lecoq simply a pedagogical device to make actors more conscious of their bodies and consequently more expressive. Unlike Decroux, Lecoq was open to exploring relations between physical action and the other arts, including architecture. His pedagogic method relied heavily on improvised exercises or games in which students, individually and in groups, created through movement a scene given by the teacher. As is evident from videos documenting his classes, Lecoq displayed powerful imagination in coming up with practical situations that allowed students to respond with consistently effective theatrical solutions. The use of masks was an important part of the two-year course of study, although only 30% (thirty students) received admission to the second year. Students began with the “neutral mask” to free themselves from all identities that imposed constraints on their ability to move in relation to the given situation rather than in relation to a “natural” inclination. Students then moved on to masks derived from the commedia tradition, which had the effect of exaggerating movement for comic effect. Lecoq urged students to clown, to delight in the freedom of the clown, to accept clowning as fundamental to discovering the poetry of theatrical movement. But a significant consequence of this veneration of the clown, which has pervasively influenced theatrical productions since the 1970s, is that “theatricality” of movement has become largely synonymous with comic effects, with caricature, with the exaggeration of a character attribute, so that the actor (or director) adopts an exaggerated movement to signify a defining attribute of the character’s status, motives, or values and thus, as Brecht might put it, to construct in the audience a critical, humorous, or distanced attitude toward the character: it’s difficult for the spectator to take the character seriously. In any case, Lecoq kept mime within the commedia paradigm and Leabhart regards Lecoq’s teaching as “responsible in large measure for the renaissance of interest in commedia dell’arte” in the 1970s (1989: 100). Here as in other schools of mime, the actor-centered approach to performing evolves out of improvised exercises, games, situations, or sketches of few minutes duration, distinct from each other, and revealing, as Decroux would say, one thing at a time, one incident at a time. Mime schools, including Lecoq’s, do not study the sequencing of physical actions to construct large pantomimic narratives that reveal a dramatic reality otherwise obscured by speech or choreographed efforts to regulate the body; they study the sequencing of physical movements to show how the actor theatricalizes the body. To pursue a larger idea of pantomime, one needs a deep appreciation of the “verisimilar,” rather than “histrionic,” performance of physical actions, to use Pearson’s terminology regarding silent film acting, which means an acute awareness of how non-exaggerated or “natural” physical actions in sequence build the emotional involvement of the spectator with patterns of physical signification unique to the narrative rather than to the actor, unique to something observed outside the theater rather than to theatricality. 

Perhaps the most successful mime enterprise to come out of the Lecoq School has been the Swiss group Mummenschanz, founded in 1972 by Bernie Schürch (b. 1944), Andres Bossard (1944-1992), and Floriana Frassetto (b. 1950). Schürch and Bossard met while studying at Lecoq’s school in 1967-1969. In 1970, they collaborated on cabaret entertainments performing as a clown duo, Before and After. While performing their cabaret act in Rome, they met Floriana Frassetto, an Italian-American, who had studied acting at the theater academy in Rome founded (1957) by Alessandro Fersen (1911-2001), a Polish-Italian film actor, socialist functionary, journalist, dramatist, director of numerous plays in a rather expressionist vein, and practitioner of what he called “mnemodramma,” a process by which actors “abandon techniques” to reach a state of trance wherein “there are no more dams, psychological streams, which somehow curb and control their expression” (Fersen 1973: Paragraphs 6, 8). Mummenschanz began repeated tours of Europe and the United States in 1973, and in 1977, their show began an epic run on Broadway that lasted until 1980 and required the group to hire new performers to replace them, so that they could meet obligations elsewhere in Europe, South America, and Asia. A new show, launched in Zug, Switzerland in 1984, also toured the world with great success. As Mummenschanz absorbed new members, it developed new productions in 1989, 1993, 2003, and 2016, and made a movie in 1997, although in recent years the group has ceased to be the show business powerhouse it was in the 1970s and 1980s (cf., Bührer 1986; Garduño 1997). The company has built its performances around ingeniously designed masks made from a large variety of materials: Styrofoam, dough, Velcro, toilet paper rolls, violins, a suitcase, plastic containers, plastic membranes, and various kinds of fabric. In the 1984 show, Mummenschanz greatly expanded the number of masks that covered the entire body to produce, for example, a sort of giant slinky worm that manipulates a large red ball, a giant clam that opens and swallows things, a pas de deux involving two huge humanoid figures made out of inflated air bags, huge blob-like creatures that move slowly and gelatinously over platforms and ramps, enormous cloth hands. Although the company has its headquarters in Altstätten, Switzerland, it has spent much time in former industrial spaces in Zürich, Lugano, and St. Gallen that provided sufficient room to experiment with so many different materials, which required long periods of testing, rehearsal, and collaboration with materials manufacturers. Mummenschanz subordinates all movement to the mask, for the point of performance is to show how the body transforms the mask and makes the mask a dynamic, unstable sign of identity. A typical program involves a series of discrete scenes, usually three or four minutes in length, in which one, two, or three performers display their skills at manipulating their own or each other’s masks to describe their relations to each other, invariably for comic effect. In more recent productions, four performers appear on stage, which seldom contains more than a box platform and a ramp. Very rarely do music or sound effects accompany the action. Two bodies with giant electric plugs for heads meet and kiss by plugging their heads into each other; two bodies with violins for heads conduct a rather quarrelsome dialogue by plucking the strings of their faces until a giant metronome appears and gets the violin heads to pluck a tune together. In one of Mummenschanz’s funniest scenes, dating from 1974 at the latest, two performers sit on a platform with the goal of applying dough to their masks to make the masks more expressive and decorative. The figure on the right applies the dough with ceremonial precision and artistry to create a beautiful commedia mask. The figure on the left tries to emulate his partner, copying all of his gestures and applications, but succeeds only in making hideous but very funny messes of his mask. The exasperated artist “fixes” his partner’s mask by making it look like a woeful dog’s head. Left then sabotages Right’s mask by pushing his head into the dough plate. Right responds by transforming his mask into a menacing, predatory creature, while Left does likewise; they attack each other’s masks until they smash into each other’s faces and become one blobby mask. Yet even though no one disputes the ingenuity with which it constructs its masked mime performances, Mummenschanz has provoked criticism, even from Lecoq, that the group too readily seeks to please audiences with feats of cleverness that do not bring with them any larger understanding of relations between body and mask (cf. Bührer 1986: 40; Leabhart 1989: 105-106). The silent miming of the body conveys extraordinary plasticity on the mask, but this dynamism never creates any larger implication than that it is “fun,” a delightful revelation of the desire to transform mundane materials into something living, something human.

In the United States, the commercial viability of mime performance reached its most impressive manifestation in the 1970s through the duo of Robert Shields (b. 1951) and Lorene Yarnell (1944-2010). Without having any formal training in mime, Shields began performing on the street in Hollywood in 1969. Marcel Marceau saw him perform and offered him a scholarship to attend the Marceau school in Paris, but Shields left the school after less than a year because he did not want to become “a little Marceau.” He moved to San Francisco and began performing on the street. While appearing briefly in a 1972 Sunday morning children’s TV special produced by the puppeteering team of Sid (b. 1929) and Marty Kroft (b. 1937), Shields met TV dancer Lorene Yarnell, and she followed him back to San Francisco, where they married the same year. Shields was a gifted acrobat and dancer—and extremely handsome. On the street, he performed in white face and wore a kind of parade uniform while interacting with bystanders in San Francisco’s Union Square. Police arrested him several times for public disturbance, though bystanders found amusing his interactions and imitations of them, and thus his street performances brought him to the attention of news media and television producers. With Yarnell, he perfected a “robotic” style of mime, although it is more accurate to describe their characters as automatons. They presented their bodies as imperfect, sometimes malfunctioning machines that moved in a jerky, spasmodic manner, like marionettes with broken strings or toys whose springs or gears are out of synch. They applied their robotic style to the enactment of numerous characters and situations, such as a robot couple grocery shopping, a robot couple eating breakfast, a robot couple going to bed, automatons imitating Sonny and Cher, robots trying to kiss, or a human dancing a tango with an automaton. Their robotic style of mime was especially effective on variety television shows, where they did not have to present a whole program of mime sketches, and they appeared on many nationally broadcast TV shows. In 1977, CBS gave them their own variety TV show, which featured skits involving the robot suburban couple, The Clinkers, but the show lasted only one season. They continued in Las Vegas and as guests on numerous TV shows; comedian Bob Hope (1903-2003) included them on a tour of China in 1979. But in the 1980s, Shields and Yarnell began to develop separate paths as entertainers, divorcing in 1986, with Yarnell acting occasionally in films and on stage before moving to Norway with a new husband and Shields eventually pursuing ambitions as an artist and jewelry maker in Sedona, Arizona. Shields complained that bad miming had killed off mime altogether in 1980s, by which he implied that too many less talented performers had tried to imitate him or Marcel Marceau to the point that the broad public no longer believed that mime was capable of anything more than what Shields and Yarnell or Marceau had done with it (Shields and Yarnell “The Lost Tape” 2010). Indeed, in the 1980s, hostility toward mimes, especially street mimes, became a trope of popular culture and a persistent attitude within large sectors of the public. It wasn’t television that “killed mime,” but the idea of mime as a sort of “democratic” entertainment that invaded public spaces because apparently anyone could do it in the street as it was done on television. Mime in this mode became an emblem of craving for popular success that many people found pleasure in despising. 

However, the stigma attached to mime in much of popular consciousness, especially in the United States, did not deter the spread of mime schools or depress the desire of many young people to study or perform mime. But the stigma did spur efforts within the mime culture to broaden, redefine, or repudiate the term “mime.” The American Mime Theatre, established in 1952 in New York City by Paul Curtis (1927-2012) and Leslie Barrett (1919-2010), still remains the oldest mime company in the United States, although it has always been much more of a mime school than a production company. Curtis, who studied with Decroux in 1950, claimed to teach “American mime,” which meant performing without whiteface and in black body suits. The company has retained the word “mime” to refer to speechless characterizations mostly of a humorous nature vaguely reminiscent of vaudeville. But for a company that has existed so long, its work and aesthetic remain remarkably obscure, perhaps more deeply attached to the hermetic philosophy of Decroux than the word “American” might indicate. The San Francisco Mime Troupe, founded in 1959 by Ronald Guy Davis (b. 1929), another student of Decroux, used the term “mime” in the ancient Roman sense, as a form of comic political street theater that used speech and was never pantomime. The United Mime Workers (1971-1986), based in Urbana, Illinois, also included spoken dialogue in most of its comic satires on suburban middle class life, but occasionally it did construct pantomime scenes in which middle class types performed various actions, such as shopping, hanging clothes, eating lunch, cleaning house, working in an office, without talking to each other (United Mime Workers 2014). One of the company’s co-founders, Bob Feldman, living for many years in Singapore, went on to pursue an unusual application of mime skills to the training of corporate personnel in delivering more effective presentations at corporate and public events. Some American companies, beginning in the 1970s, rebranded speechless performance as “new vaudeville” or new forms of “circus” to include juggling, trapeze acts, magic tricks, acrobatics, and above all clown acts, which are not a theme of this book but which, nevertheless, reinforced public perception that mimes were thin, nimble clowns. In America, however, due perhaps to the tendency of mime performers (though not mime schools) to consider themselves heirs of silent film comedians like Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, mime became synonymous with comic speechless performance, and the idea of mime in a serious, emotionally turbulent mood was practically taboo (cf. Leabhart 1989: 123-127). To receive grants from public arts agencies or civic-minded donors, other mime companies or companies that once did mime (like the Milwaukee Public Theater) moved beyond the street or parks to perform in schools, healthcare facilities, prisons, or churches, which meant performances designed to accommodate “positive” (good-humored) civic or therapeutic messages (cf. Milwaukee Public Theatre 2017). The Montreal company Omnibus le corps du théâtre, founded in 1977 by Jean Asselin (b. 1948), a student of Decroux in the 1970s, as an adjunct to the mime school, has presented student productions that imaginatively use mime to reveal the bodily signification of sexual misunderstanding, romantic expectation, sexual harassment, female anxiety over body image, and deconstructed “sexy” poses, as in Rêves, chimères et mascarade (2009) and Misère et splendeur d’une courtisane (2013) (Omnibus Archive). But Asselin has moved far from Decroux: the school still offers courses in corporeal mime and productions of “pure mime” on contemporary themes, but since at least 1982 company productions often contain a great deal of speech that relies on texts by or adaptations of famous authors (Shakespeare, Racine, Proust, Faulkner, Lewis Carroll, Henry James) or on original texts by Asselin and co-director Sylvie Moreau (b. 1964). Within Omnibus, mime functions as movement for the stage, in a manner similar to Lecoq’s school, to develop an actor-driven kind of hyper-physical theater closer to Artaud than to Decroux. 

Two members of the original Omnibus Company, Kari Margolis and Tony Brown, both students of Decroux, founded their own company, MB Adaptors, in Brooklyn in 1984 and immediately attracted international attention with a piece called Autobahn (1984), a twelve-scene mostly pantomimic satire of American infatuation with pop culture images involving eleven performers: 

Three TV monitors glare out at the audience and remain ever-present through the evening, as much a constant as they are in American lives. At one spot on the crowded stage, a couple grills franks on an outdoor barbecue; at another, three men in astronaut outfits wrestle with a huge coil of metal tubing. Elsewhere nearby, a woman tending flower pots seems about to strangle herself in a garden hose; a sunbather lolls on a chaise, and other characters busy themselves with pets and infants. The sound track mingles Bach, birds and bees, and racetrack bugles. […] Among the most memorable images are those of the quartet of women with ironing boards, turning themselves almost literally into living dolls; the spectacle of a man at first terrorized by a microphone, and then, conquering his fear, using it to deliver a diabolical tirade in a mock-language that sounds like a fusion of Japanese and Swedish; a woman pitching erotic woo to a hair dryer, as four of her friends bounce their rumps on the floor; a platoon of red-eyed toy robots whirring and clanking across the stage as a woman croons “Let’s Bring Back WWI”; and a scene called “Executive Suite” paying homage to Kurt Jooss’ ballet, “The Green Table,” with corporate types tearing each other to bits over vested interests (Alan Kriegsman, Washington Post, February 19, 1988).

The company moved to Minneapolis in 1993 and then to rural Highland Lake in New York State in 2004, where the company offers summer workshops and improvisational exercise programs for training “actor warriors.” Brown and Margolis have presented their productions as “non-linear dreamscapes,” pantomimic satires of American obsessions with popular culture icons and of media-constructed models of consumerist behavior, such as American Safari (2001), in which a suburban everyman, having won a trip to Disneyland, travels across America in a toy Chevy convertible (MB Adaptors Archive). More adventurous perhaps was Vidpires! (1994-1998), a twenty-scene, twelve-person “comic, multimedia movement piece whose central characters are two vampires stuck in the boredom of today’s media culture which both fuels and mocks their sentence of immortality” (Basting 1998: 147-148). These two vampires, Desmodus and Diphylla, appear to “feed on film images to perpetuate their own immortality both on and off screen” (149). The production integrates film and television imagery with live performers who imitate this imagery, and their imitations then become film imagery, dramatizing the “inseparability of bodies and [image] technology” (156). Some of the imagery comes from silent films like The Son of the Sheik (1926), in which Brown and Margolis, as Desmodus and Diphylla, enact on film their sadomasochistic relation to immortality in the 1926 style of film pantomime with intertitles. In other scenes, performers manipulate screens that project clips from movies and TV shows: a man pulling an “almost medieval” cart filled with TV screens showing Mickey Mouse cartoons; Desmodus holding on his arm a TV set depicting the playing of a violin, so that it appears as if he is playing the instrument. “In the seventh scene, ‘The Body of Love Video,’ a male and female dancer stood to the right of the stage with their backs to the audience, their naked bodies washed in the hot light of hand-held video projections […] The video was another rapid succession of looted classic film images, this time of kisses rather than death scenes. As the performers moved slowly in unison, the film images contorted to the shapes of their bodies” (157). The guiding idea of the piece is that a culture built around a vampiric consumption of film images nourishes a sort of life-sustaining or, as Basting puts it, age-denying uncertainty concerning the distinction between “real” (mortal) and mediated (immortal) bodies. But despite its emphasis on voiceless performance, MB Adaptors has for a long time ceased to identify itself with either mime or pantomime, claiming that it is a “performance ensemble” which constructs its “dreamscapes” out of a collaborative process, as if mime and pantomime had lost all allure in describing a postmodern performance sensibility.

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Marcel Marceau

Yet the international spreading of mime school culture probably could not have happened without the enormously popular, commercial performances of Marcel Marceau (1923-2007), the most famous of all Decroux’s students. Marceau’s performances, many of which occurred on television, made the world aware of mime as a distinct genre of performance that justified motives for studying mime. Many of those who came to Paris to study mime in the 1960s and 1970s were residents of other countries; Leabhart says that most students in Decroux’s classes were foreigners (2003: 432). Marceau was born in Strasbourg. His parents were Jewish; he joined the Resistance in 1944, after the Nazis had murdered his father in Auschwitz. Though he spoke several languages, he developed an intense attachment to pantomimic performance while working for the Resistance, where he mimed the role of a scout leader while smuggling Jewish children to safety in Spain. He always regarded the silent films of Charlie Chaplin as the greatest influence in his life. In 1945, he enrolled in Dullin’s dramatic arts school, where he studied under Decroux. The following year, he appeared as Arlequin in Barrault’s production of Baptiste. This experience inspired him to produce his own “mimodrama” the same year, Praxitele et le poisson d’or, in which he introduced a prototype of the Bip character that became his lifelong performance persona. Marceau then appeared in 1947, at the tiny Théâtre de Poche, in a performance of several Bip sketches. The performance prompted Decroux to expel Marceau from the school, for Decroux felt that Marceau’s desire to entertain corrupted the goal of corporeal mime. However, Marceau’s goal was to produce more mimodramas in which Bip only occasionally appeared merely as one of several ensemble characters played by other actors. After presenting Bip in a rather somber mimodrama, Mort avant l’aube (1948), he formed (1949) a company to produce more mimodramas: Le Manteau (1951), an adaptation of the 1842 overcoat story by Gogol; Pierrot de Montmartre (1952), “inspired by the black Pierrot of Alphonse Willett”; Les Trois Perruques (1953), another comedy set in the 1840s; Loup de Tsu Ku Mi (1956), an archaic, Kabuki-like drama in an abstract Japanese setting; Paris qui rit, Paris qui pleure (1958), in which Marceau played a Parisian street newspaper vendor in what appear to be bygone days; Don Juan (1964), an adaptation of the 1630 play by Tirso de Molina (1579-1648). In all these works and others, Marceau collaborated with the actor Pierre Verry (1913-2009), also a former student of Decroux; and Etienne Bertrand Weil (1919-2001), who had photographed some of Decroux’s demonstrations, photographed Marceau’s productions, and later became notable for using multiple and time-lapse exposures to capture the movement of stage performers. While the narrative organization of action in Marceau’s mimodramas remains incomplete (he never published any scenarios), the photos of them show an investment in simple scenery and fairly complex period costumes, with the stage containing up to ten characters (Les Trois Perruques) [Figure 97]. Joseph Kosma was one of the composers who wrote music for the productions. All the productions, even Paris qui rit, Paris qui pleure, evoke a nineteenth century atmosphere. He also made a short film, Au Jardin (1954), shot in a studio with a rather elaborate set and accompanied by impressionistic orchestral music, in which he appeared as nine characters, only one of which vaguely resembled Bip, who visit or work in a city park. But after the Don Juan production, he stopped producing mimodramas, although when he opened his school in 1978, he called it the Ecole Internationale de Mimodrame de Paris Marcel Marceau. He said the reason he stopped producing mimodramas was because, despite his international success as a solo mime, he could not secure government subsidies for his company (Fifield 1968: 156). In 1955-1956, he toured Canada and the United States, performing his solo act featuring Bip. Audiences in cities across America responded euphorically, adoringly, and this incredible triumph propelled him to worldwide acclamation. From then on, he toured prodigiously throughout the world almost until he died. He performed everywhere on television and people everywhere who otherwise knew nothing about mime or pantomime knew of Marcel Marceau. Over the decades, his solo programs consisted of a series of “sketches,” each usually about three to five minutes long, in which Bip mimed his relationship to invisible objects against an empty background, as if he inhabited a space without any context. Bip changed only slightly from when Marceau invented him in 1946: in addition to the white face and Pierrotesque makeup, he wore white sailor pants, a white or dark half-jacket, a striped T-shirt, and often, though not always, a shabby opera hat with a large red carnation. The sketches presented Bip in a variety of activities: catching a butterfly, with his fluttering left hand simulating the insect, a lion tamer frustrated by the failure of his lion to leap through a hoop, a waiter serving a dish to a dissatisfied customer, Bip trying on different masks that distort his face, Bip dancing a comic tango, Bip playing a matador. Bip was not always in a comic mood and occasionally slipped into moments of pathos, as in a sketch in which he mimed the stages of life from birth, to childhood, to youth, to maturity, to old age, and to death; “The Cage” showed Bip attempting to break through invisible walls that surround him and finally sinking into apparently fatal resignation. Nearly all of the sketches dated from the 1950s, and even sketches produced after then remained faithful to what Bip was in the early 1950s. Bip’s immense popularity seemed to derive from his power to signify the unchanging, eternal solitude of “humanity” without speech, the charming and even absurd “innocence” of humanity when speech did not corrupt it. Yet Marceau was well aware that Bip entirely controlled his pantomimic imagination and prevented him from achieving much success outside of Bip, such as the mimodramas: “But I am a prisoner of my art. People do not want to see me as a character other than Bip” (Andriotakis 1979: Paragraph 7).

No one in the mime culture ever achieved the popularity of Marcel Marceau; it was as if the world needed no more popular or even equally popular mime artist than Marceau or needed any larger idea of mime or pantomime than that represented by Bip/Marceau. Bip projected a harmless, charming, friendly, congenially “segmented” image of solitary human innocence unencumbered by words or contaminated by any despoiling context. He was amusing, without being particularly funny, for to be funny, Bip would have to traffic in nasty caricatures, display some satiric bitterness, disclose people or situations worth ridiculing, reveal a disillusioned attitude toward life. The postwar theater and literary worlds assumed that audiences had no interest in seeing pantomime explore the sometimes demonic, sometimes grandiose, but always adventurous paths opened up earlier by the Austro-German pantomime culture, the silent film, or even the Cercle Funambulesque. Postwar ballet and modern dance could move into shadowy, disillusioning, or at least not “innocent” zones of human experience without losing their audiences, as seen, for example, in the work of Martha Graham, Jerome Robbins, Peter Darrell, or Dore Hoyer. It seems incredible that theater people everywhere could not imagine pantomime as anything more than the French idea of it as a very small scale, nostalgic, repetitive remodeling of Pierrot and Chaplin’s “Tramp” figure; otherwise, it was an activity left for schools to do as “preparation” for something more ambitious than pantomime itself. Marceau conveniently embodied the limits or summit of pantomime, which implicitly were the limits of the unregulated, speechless body in performance. The English novelist Mave Fellowes (b. 1980), the author of a novel, Chaplin & Company (2013), about a young woman who desires to become a mime like Marcel Marceau, has insightfully remarked that “after Marceau, there was nowhere left to go. I think he took his particular style—he was the best at it there could ever be. There was no room for further evolution, and no one has yet come up with another version of mime which is as appealing” (Hartnett 2014: Paragraphs 6-7). 

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Decroux

On June 27, 1945, with the success of Les enfants du paradis well affirmed, Barrault and Decroux, with two students, Éliane Guyon (1918-1967) and Jean Dorcy (1898-1978), presented a program of “corporeal mime” performances at the Maison de la Chimie in Paris, which was and remains a large lecture hall primarily used for scientific conferences. Leabhart (1989: 48) contends that more than a thousand persons attended the presentation, although the Maison de la Chimie website designates the hall as containing only 851 seats. The guest of honor was the English theater theorist and apostle of an abstract-symbolic theater, Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966), who had lived in France since 1931, having since then retired from any active involvement with theater. A purpose in inviting Craig was “to show up the doctrinal links from Craig to Copeau, from Copeau to Decroux, from Decroux to Barrault” (Leabhart 1989: 49). Craig had become famous in the early years of the century for promoting the idea of the stage director as the defining figure of theatrical performance, determining all production elements to create an emotionally powerful visual experience in which actors became scenic details, “marionettes,” within the director’s omniscient vision. It may seem odd that the actor-centered Copeau-Dullin school of theater would link itself to Craig, but Decroux’s ambition was to transfer the absolute authority over the actor from the director in the theater to the teacher in the studio classroom. The 1945 program contained eight pieces followed by Decroux’s lecture on the theory of corporeal mime. Several of these pieces, which Decroux devised in the 1930s, he and his students performed in sometimes slightly revised versions for decades to follow. Barrault performed his horse wrangling scene from Autour d’une mere; Decroux, Barrault, and Guyon performed a choral piece, “a panoramic evocation of famine, mass movements of population, revolution and finally peace”; the final performance piece was the Combat antique, performed by Decroux and Barrault, which the two had developed for a production of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra at the Comédie-Française earlier the same year, although Barrault and Decroux had worked on it since 1933 (Leabhart 1989: 50-51; Kurkinen 2000: 110). For Decroux, this single performance was more a demonstration of his mime technique, a “work in progress,” than anything one might call a theatrical production. Yet it is doubtful that, if Leabhart is correct about the attendance, Decroux ever again had such a large audience for anything he performed as corporeal mime. The event generated much publicity for Decroux’s pedagogic approach to mime, but this approach soon separated him from his greatest students. In 1946, Barrault produced, under the title Baptiste, a stage version of Cot d’Ordan’s Marchand d’habits pantomime from Les enfants du paradis, with music by Joseph Kosma (1905-1969); with the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, he revived the production in 1948, again at the Marigny Theatre. The production involved elaborate costumes and stage décor that emulated those in the film [Figure 150]. Decroux regarded Barrault’s use of pantomime as retrograde and trivial, while Barrault believed Decroux had become single-mindedly obsessesed with achieving an absolute purity of bodily signification that was antithetical to the pleasures of theatricality (cf. Dobbels 1980: 54). But after Baptiste, Barrault abandoned pantomime altogether and devoted himself to building a grand career as an actor and director in spoken drama and films. In 1948, Decroux forbade another of his famous students, Marcel Marceau, from entering his school, because Marceau had cultivated an interest in pantomimic characterizations, particularly his Pierrot-like “Bip” character, which he had introduced with great success to Paris at the Théâtre de Poche in 1947 (Benhaim 2003: 266). Meanwhile, Éliane Guyon “perfected the creations of Decroux, L’usine, L’esprit malin, La statue,” but in 1949, while touring with Decroux in Switzerland, she met her future husband, the painter and scene designer Jean Monod (1922-1986), and quit Decroux’s ensemble. She and Monod went to Rome with an actor, Marcel Imhoff (1922-1979), to do movement research at the Alessandro Fersen Theater Academy. There, she, Monod, and Imhoff began constructing cabaret performances that involved an interaction between pantomime and puppetry: Guyon was especially gifted at creating characters with her bare hands. In 1952, she returned to Paris and worked for a month with Decroux and his son Maximilien (1930-2012) demonstrating some of Decroux’s pieces. But her focus was on her own production at a small theater of her “mimodrama,” Le Tribunal, which involved pantomime and marionettes constructed by her husband. Decroux disapproved of her use of masks, costumes, dramatic narrative, and characterization. Guyon therefore “distanced” herself from Decroux and went on to stage further marionette dramas, and in 1954, in Lausanne, she appeared as the Soldier in her production of Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat (1918), which used giant puppets (Chercher 2005: 774-775; Poletti 2011: 32-33). Her work deserves greater scrutiny, if it can be excavated, because of its strange combining of pantomime, puppets, and marionettes, but also because it exposes a unique tension between a female student and Decroux, whose hallowed legacy rests heavily upon an overwhelmingly male sector of his student corps. 

Figure 150: “Marchand d’habits” scene from Jean-Louis Barrault’s production of Baptiste, Paris, 1946. Photo; Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Decroux established a small school in Paris in 1947 that enabled him to receive invitations to give demonstrations and workshops, which sometimes lasted months, on corporeal mime in Amsterdam (1949), Lausanne (1949), Israel (1950), the Sorbonne (1951), the Netherlands (1952), England (1952), Milan (1953), Stockholm (1954), Zurich (1954), Oslo (1955), and Stockholm again in 1956. After Marceau discussed mime with American interviewers, the Actors Studio in New York City in 1957 invited Decroux to teach for eight weeks, apparently as part of an effort to prepare actors to handle assignments associated with the “theater of the absurd.” He gave further demonstrations at the Dramatic Workshop and at Baylor University in Texas. In 1959, he returned to New York, opened a school, lectured at ten universities, and taught a course at New York University. Much of the film documentation of Decroux’s demonstrations and “evocations” took place in the United States. He did not return to Paris until 1962, when he opened another small school, but many of his students opened their own small schools in Sweden, Italy, Israel, Canada, and the United States. An International Festival of Mime in Berlin sought to honor him as a “great pioneer of modern mime,” but he refused the invitation (Benhaim 2003: 266-267). In 1963, he published his only book, Paroles sur le mime, which was mostly a manifesto for a radical redefinition of theater. By the mid-1960s, Decroux had achieved an international fame that circulated primarily through mime schools established by his students and through educational institutions seeking to incorporate corporal mime into their curricula, with the mime school culture producing work for “public” audiences mostly at international mime festivals attended mostly by mime students and educators. 

            Decroux developed a severe, ascetic pedagogy that complemented his intense aversion to any public performances of corporeal mime. He separated mime from pantomime, for he regarded mime, as he defined it, as a completely modern phenomenon, while pantomime was an archaic, “ridiculous, and indecent” form of theatrical performance that attempted to tell stories through gestures and was therefore a corrupt form of writing (“thought corrupts movement”) rather than a new vision of the body’s expressive power (Decroux 2003: 61, 202). Mime, however, has no existence of its own: “for mimes to exist, there have to be schools of mime” (92). To be a mime or to perform mime requires the appropriate education in a mime school to achieve the goal of mime, which is to perform “research” on bodily expression rather than to perform for people who have no experience of the research mission. Decroux demands total, exclusive focus on the body as the goal of study. The student learns what the body can “evoke” absolutely and free of attachments to things or even other bodies. A profound distrust and distaste for theater pervades the learning environment. Like Copeau, Decroux practiced a sequestering of the student from the world outside of the studio classroom. The bare studio is the ideal space for mime performance or, preferably, “demonstration.” This space contains no scenery, no costumes, no masks, and no props; the lighting is always flat and even; music is unnecessary and obtrusive; texts have no place here. The research goal of the actor is to “evoke” a relation to the world, to things, to others entirely through the body. If a mime wants to show that he climbs a ladder to retrieve a tool with which he builds a chair on which he will sit, he should “demonstrate” these actions entirely with his body, although for Decroux, the “purest” aim of mime is simply to evoke the act or concept of building without representing it. “Evocations” in Decroux’s pedagogy were free of drama, avoided showing conflict, and did not tell stories or represent characters. In performing demonstrations, students should wear loincloths or neutral body stockings, although in early demonstrations, Decroux wrapped a thin veil around his head. In the film documentations of his own demonstrations done around 1960-1961 in Texas and New York, Decroux appears alone in a loincloth or white body suit against a dark or white background. His demonstrations evoke numerous abstract actions through stylized movements that emphasize a balancing of weighted and counter-weighted pressures (pushing and pulling movements) within the body, usually within about twenty seconds: “The Weight Lifter,” “The Rope Puller,” “The Boxer,” “The Bell Ringer,” “The Offering,” “Melancholy,” “The Effect Becomes the Cause,” “Transporting a Glass of Water,” “Placing Plates between the Guests,” “Inclining with Respect and Shaking Hands.” In one of the longest (one and a half minutes) demonstrations, “Greeting the Collectivity,” Decroux makes expansive gestures with his arms while shifting his weight from right foot to left and pivoting, as if surrounded by persons he must acknowledge in an elaborately formal manner. Decroux hardly ever moves more than three or four steps away from the initial standing pose of equilibrium. Indeed, the goal of the demonstrations is to display a ceremonial formality in the performance of basic actions like greetings and lifting or setting down imaginary objects. Kathryn Wylie and Maarjana Kurkinen suggest an influence on Decroux of the elaborate stylization of bodily movement in Japanese Noh theater dating from Copeau’s 1924 experiment in Noh aesthetics, Kantan, which Decroux himself acknowledged as significant (Wylie 1993: 111-112; Kurkinen 2000: 111-113; De Marinis, 2003, 272-274; Decroux 1963: 18). But the demonstrations also remind one of the elaborate ceremonial gesturing introduced at the court of Louis XIV and his successors, a ritual dignification of humble bodily effort, and Sklar (1985: 73) notes a student who observed that studio sessions with Decroux resembled a ritual designed exclusively for initiates.

            While Decroux focused largely on the education of the solitary body, he did construct some evocations involving two or more bodies. These date mostly from the 1930s and 1940s, but students afterward performed them for decades. With these evocations, he supplied musical accompaniments. In La Statue, about three and a half minutes long, Decroux appears as a sculptor in black while the female statue wears a white leotard. The piece develops a Pygmalion theme: the sculptor rises inspired from a slumber with his lumpen material (the female partner), makes commanding gestures to which the female figure responds with dancelike movements, then applies hammering and chiseling gestures that bring the statue to life. Impressed with his creation, he picks up the statue and carries it exultantly, until it embraces him. He slips out of the embrace and sinks exhausted to the floor as the statue stands smiling. L’Usine, about five minutes long, used three performers of indeterminate sex wearing hooded black body suits contoured with a white stripe. Here the performers wore silver masks and performed movements evoking the operations of machines: stamping, pendulum, hacking, sawing, flipping movements synchronized with mechanical sound effects devised by Decroux. The piece had no dramatic structure, no concept of struggle between or within machines or between the body and the machine; rather, it straightforwardly demonstrated the ability of human bodies to emulate the geometric movement patterns of automated factory machines, which was hardly innovative even in the 1930s. Le Matin, with harp accompaniment, and Le Duo Amoureux, accompanied by the slow movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto (1901), were more lyrical demonstrations, four and six minutes long respectively, in each of which a male-female couple in white body stockings slowly exchanged or shared ardent, picturesque poses of devotion, as if they were statues moving in a kind slow motion trance, always remaining within a couple of feet of the places in which the pieces began. One of his most interesting demonstrations, Les Arbres, dating from 1946, lasts about nine minutes and features his largest documented ensemble—four persons wearing white body stockings and veils covering their heads, the face never having any importance in his aesthetic. The piece does not imitate the movement of trees; rather, it evokes, so to speak, the lives of trees and of groves through continually shifting configurations of flowering, blooming, branching, bending, reaching, fluttering, swaying, arching, canopying, bobbing, and lilting motions, sometimes in unison, sometimes individually, mostly with the arms and hands [Figure 151]. The performers do not move more than two steps beyond their intial and concluding “grove” position. In one film document, the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata (1801) accompanies the action, but in another film document, Decroux uses unidentified postromantic orchestral music, which suggests he did not conceive the piece in relation to any specific musical source. In Combat antique, one of the earliest demonstrations, from about 1933, about four minutes long, two men, bare-chested, enact a physical combat brandishing imaginary swords and spears and making lunging, feigning, darting, stabbing, shielding, dodging, tangling, leaping, and taunting motions until one of them, almost inadvertently, stabs the other, who falls. The victor prods the body to make sure it is dead, then walks away. Though somewhat less abstract than other Decroux demonstrations, the Combat antique has remained a popular exercise in mime schools dedicated to Decroux’s philosophy, in part because it emphasizes his enthusiasm for “masculine,” sport-inspired movement themes, which has proved effective in making corporeal mime more attractive to male students than dance. But as Decroux’s ideas about mime became more abstract, he responded to the question of what differentiated mime not only from pantomime but from modern dance in a quite long-winded, abstruse manner, deciding eventually that “the need to dance is not the need to narrate” and that “dance is an evasion, mime is an invasion” (Decroux 2003: 110-116, 194). In practice, dance movement consumes much more space than mime movement as he taught it. He believed that the torso anchored the body, whereas in dance, the torso functioned like a motor to animate the arms and legs into movements that pretended it had no weight. Sculpture provided a huge inspiration for Decroux, and he regarded mime as a kind of “mobile statuary” (Lecoq 2006: 44). “I think often of Rodin, never of Deburau,” he claimed, and according to Petra Kolařova, who has written an enormous dissertation on Decroux’s relation to Rodin, “the work of Rodin appeared to [Decroux] as the antithesis of classical dance” (Kolařova 2015: 127, 132-133). Yet his evocations never disclosed a serious “need to narrate.” They show instead a need to sculpt the body with movement.             

While Decroux described his work with students in his studios as “research,” he had no interest in sharing the results of his research with the public, through performance or publication. His little book Paroles sur le mime consists entirely of essays written in the 1930s and 1940s. The film documentation exists because universities wanted it. He relied on his students to “publish” his work through interviews with him and their own memoirs of working with him. A cult atmosphere emerged that, as Kurkinen has remarked, encouraged “the zealousness of the students of Decroux” to produce a discourse on him in which “one is let to understand that writing or doing research on Decroux’s art without having first-hand experience on his mime disqualifies the scholar altogether” (2000: 14). Yet he deserves credit for initating the international expansion of mime culture from the 1950s to the 1980s, even if much of this global expansion was due to the performance success of a few students who had departed from the master’s teachings. The mime culture spread primarily through schools established by students of Decroux and through universities that sought to incorporate corporeal mime into their performing arts curricula: schools provided a more reliable source of income than the production of performances for which audiences were willing to pay enough to see. Mime education, with its minimalist aesthetic of the bare studio, was less expensive than traditional theater arts, with their costly scenic technologies, costuming requirements, complex collaborations, theater facilities, royalty payments, marketing obligations, and intricacies of casting. Perhaps, too, many students found mime less intimidating than conventional theater or dance studies, which often encourage demoralizing competitiveness, although numerous actors and dancers have studied mime as a way of enhancing their competitiveness. Decroux’s socialism was attractive. Mime, he contended, was something one could only learn and learn only through the application of the appropriate technique; it was not a “talent” given by genetic predisposition or biological determinism. The learning of the technique came from the teacher and the pedagogical regime, not from an intuition or “instinct” or even from mere exposure to art or performance. Ostensibly, an egalitarian spirit pervaded the studio, for the purpose of mime was not to produce art consumed by public audiences, but to create a way of living with the uniqueness of one’s body, regardless of whatever “talent” the body may possess. Most students studied mime to become teachers of mime and to reproduce the studio classroom environment that defined the life of the mime. One learned technique above all through exercises, and exercises often resulted from a process of improvisation that resisted any “complete” idea of an action. The chief product of mime study was therefore not performance nor was it the analysis of performance, but exercises, the discovery, development, and compiling of exercises, the deployment of exercises that showed a student how to “use” a part of the body as a sign. But using a body part as a sign is hardly the same thing as using the body to signify, to narrate, or to build a representation of the world. It is somewhat like learning a vocabulary without learning to compose an essay or a story. Decroux himself, however, never published any compilation of studio exercises. In interviews, Decroux discusses mime in broad, philosophical terms, sometimes referring to great authors, like Hugo, or great artists, like Rodin, and often in an aphoristic style: “The mime must not detest technique […] The technique is the proof of personality. It is an obligation, a language, and it tells us: ‘You have to do it like this and not like that.’ […] Monsieur Paul Bellugue [1892-1955] was professor at the Academy of Fine Arts […] One day he said to me: ‘Technique is the obedience of the hand to the spirit.’ I was struck by the clarity of this reflection […]” (Decroux 2003: 119). But he never described his technique or particular relations between body parts, “counter-weights,” rhythms, and signs. He introduced theoretical terms like “body lines,” “segmentation,” and “immobility,” without showing their applicability to particular bodies in relation to particular “evocations.” Leabhart mentions an exercise in which “students manifested the five qualities that [Decroux] associated most with corporeal mime: pause, weight, resistance, hesitation, and surprise” (Leabhart 2003: 437). But he doesn’t describe this exercise or any others, which apparently he derived from his old demonstrations and evocations. Instead, his students compile his many aphoristic statements: “The feet are the proletariat of the body” (Decroux 2003: 202); “Immobility is indissociable from the law that says ‘one thing at a time’” (347); “The mime is no longer a mime if he uses music” (136). One of his most prominent students, Thomas Leabhart (b. 1944), a professor at Pomona College, has described the classroom atmosphere when he studied under Decroux from 1968 to 1972. But the discussion of the classroom atmosphere does not include examination of the pedagogic system or technique applied by Decroux; it focuses instead on identifying the teacher’s personal qualities, his way of interacting with students, his style of communicating: Because he “insisted first on technique and that improvisation and inspiration came only afterwards, he tended to show us how what he humorously called dry and boring technique worked in an improvisation. He did this by first giving us a philosophical context for work (the conference), and then allowed us to realize how this technique could enslave the imagination and work ‘from within to outside’”; “Decroux responded differently to our efforts to transcend ourselves: mockeries, warm praise, tender compassion […] Often a long cold silence followed our efforts [… then] commentaries such as: ‘You must sing with your muscles’ or ‘You have not found the rhythm of the thought’ […]” (Leabhart 2003: 437). In other words, exercises were “proof of a personality” insofar as they revealed the mysterious or “elusive” charisma of a teacher in sculpting the minds and bodies of students (cf. Soum 2003: 405ff.). Mime physicalized the mysterious, unwritten relationship between teacher and student, which was the thing the student could best reproduce rather than any relationship to something outside the studio.

Figure 96: Etienne Decroux’s Les arbres (1947), as filmed in his New York studio in 1960. Photo: screen capture from projectomimicas YouTube channel, posted on December 19, 2012.

Even though “mime cannot be learned from books,” according to Samuel Avital, because “it is passed down from teacher to student,” nevertheless, the period from the 1960s to the 1980s saw a prodigious publication of books on mime (Avital 1977: 101). Nearly all of these books explain how to do mime and how to be a mime; they emphasize mime as a technique learned by performing exercises or “routines” recommended or described by the author. They avoid analyzing or evaluating mime performances or the history of pantomime. They also tend to focus on mime as a solitary activity, somewhat like a hobby that opens the path to a more creative life. One of the most imaginative of these publications is Mime Work Book (1977), by Samuel Avital (b. 1932), a Moroccan-born Jew, who migrated to Israel before moving in 1958 to France to study with Decroux, Barrault, Marcel Marceau, and Maximilien Decroux, who had established his own school and company in Paris in 1955. In 1964, Avital moved to the United States, where in 1971 he founded his mime school, Le Centre du Silence, in Boulder, Colorado. Mime Work Book is a montage of texts and photographs including autobiographical statements, interviews with Avital, interviews with other mimes, brief reflections on the history of mime as it derives from the commedia tradition, Pierrot/Deburau, Decroux, Barrault, and Marceau, quotations from mime students, polemical essays on mime (“Not every white face in a town square gesticulating hopelessly is a mime”), and remarks on the mystical relation of mime to Kabbalah (“In our Jewish culture in Morocco we have days that we don’t speak. We fast from speech.”) (Avital 1977: 20, 137). But much of the book consists of advice on how to do mime, including numerous exercises and philosophical aphorisms in the manner of Decroux grouped under thirteen headings, such as “Staccato and Slow Motion,” “Snail Movement,” “Bases and Fixations,” “Trips,” “Gravity”: “Work the traject in staccato rhythm. Break down the everyday movement into pieces of movement like a camera lens opening and closing. Walking in staccato send a telegram to one part of the body and move it. Be careful the movement is not tense. Breathe the movement” (33). Some advice relates to habits of living as a mime: “Fast from words once a week, choose a day and keep it steady” (86). “The Singing Plastique Cycle” consists of eleven exercises that the mime should perform daily; No. 7: “Pelvis: first lift each hip straight up, alternating; then Belly Dancing, i.e., swirling hips in a circle, 26 times” a day (87). Avital also provides a “Language of the Thinking Body” that lists words under four categories of “communication” between teacher and student, such as “Exercises: spiral, withdrawal, interwinding […] caress the space, steal the space […]” (90) and “Expressions” that the mime should keep in mind as motives for making a sign with the body: “the body as a brush,” “shower on fire,” “don’t be too nice with yourself,” “embrace the opposites,” “heels kissing,” “rewind the film,” “be your own mirror,” “vigorously, not violently” (92-94). Then, “Samuel Says” offers several pages of teacherly aphorisms: “The slower the breathing, the more relaxed,” “A teacher is one who takes what is given and gives what cannot be taken,” “Orgasm is freezing,” “When you think you can do it, your progress stops,” (110-111, 116-117). Avital is more open to theatricality and public performance than Decroux, and his book includes numerous photographs of himself, in circus-like costumes, and his students, in white face, performing in public spaces. But the book avoids analysis of mime performance itself or the aesthetics of mime performance. The focus is always on how to improve one’s life through the practice of “mime work.” In all these ways, the book is typical of the many books on mime that appeared from the 1960s onward and established mime as an individualistic enterprise in self-development, an actor-centered life that only incidentally intersected with theatrical performance. 

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Pantomime: The History and Metamorphosis of a Theatrical Ideology: Table of Contents

PDF version of the entire book.

Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise)

The most impactful pantomime performance in the 1940s was Jean-Louis Barrault’s performance as Baptiste Duburau in the French film Les enfants du paradis (1944-1945), directed by Marcel Carné (1906-1996). Regarded by many film critics as one of the greatest films ever made, Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise) makes pantomime as the French conceived it a central, motivating force in the narrative. The idea of making a film about the mime Deburau came from Barrault when he met with Carné and his longtime collaborator, the poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert (1900-1977) while on holiday in St. Tropez in 1942 (Forbes 1997: 11; Barrault 1972: 167). The three-hour, two-part film takes place in Paris over a period of several years, roughly 1828 to 1836, with nearly all of the action occurring in the theater district or “Boulevard of Crime.” The story depicts how performances at the Funambules Theater draw four men to an enigmatic, elusive woman, Garance, who works as an idealized “living statue” in pantomimic performances. Prévert based the characters of the four men on historical personages: the actor Frederick Lemaitre (1800-1876), the criminal and would-be dramatist Pierre François Lacenaire (1803-1836), the Duke of Morny (1811-1865), presented in the film as Comte Édouard de Montray, and the pantomime Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796-1846), presented in the film as Baptiste Deburau. Played by Arletty (1898-1992), Garance conducts amorous relations with all four men, but the only one she loves is Deburau. She becomes the mistress of the Comte de Montray and leaves Paris for several years to live in London and Scotland. When she returns to Paris, she nightly and secretly attends pantomimic performances by Deburau. Discovering her presence at the theater, Lemaitre, Lacenaire, and de Montray compete with each other to claim her attention, but when Lemaitre learns that she has only loved Deburau, he contrives to have the mime rendezvous with her at the theater in which Lemaitre is performing the role of Othello. The social/class animosity between de Montray and Lacenaire reaches its peak when, during an intermission, Lacenaire, weary of de Montray’s contempt for him, exposes to the public the romantic tryst between Garance and Baptiste on a terrace of the theater. De Montray in turn humiliates Lacenaire by having him thrown out of the theater. A few days later, Lacenaire completes his revenge by murdering de Montray in a Turkish bath and awaiting the police to arrest him for the crime. Garance and Baptiste share a night together in the hotel in which years before they first communicated their romantic feelings for each other. But in the morning Baptiste’s wife Nathalie, played by Maria Casares (1922-1996), appears and tries to persuade him to return to her. She is as much in love with him as he is in Garance. As she embraces him, Garance flees the room. Baptiste follows her into the street, but loses her in the jubilant crowd of carnival celebrants. She disappears forever from his life. 

            The film projects a powerful romantic grandeur, but a tragic logic drives the narrative: for the main characters, love never achieves fulfillment, reciprocation, or even happiness that is more than of the utmost brevity. The only love that seems enduring and mutual is that exchanged between the actors and their audience (“the children of paradise”). As Lemaitre explains to Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand [1897-1953]), when the criminal visits the actor in his apartment with the idea of extorting money from the man he thinks has robbed him of Garance: “To hear and feel your heart beat at the same time as the audience” is what makes acting “the finest” profession. Theater here mobilizes “passions” in the characters and brings them into contact with each other. The performances on the stage do not “mirror” the life of the film characters. Rather, they represent a “poetic” life that the characters seek to intrude upon and assert themselves as “authors” of it, a point made most humorously by Lemaitre when in the performance of a bad melodrama, he ceases to speak the lines written for his character and begins improvising a critique of the play, leaving the stage altogether and assuming the position of spectator in a loge, from which he addresses the audience and the actors with his extravagant criticisms. Pantomime is the most “poetic” form of theater insofar as it creates “more love”—that is, it awakens the love of Garance and Baptiste for each other and Nathalie’s love for Baptiste, whereas the other men, who disdain pantomime, only desire Garance, who loves none of them. Lemaitre, played by Pierre Brasseur (1905-1972), gets his start in the theater by performing small roles in Baptiste’s pantomimes, but he feels profoundly stifled by not being able to speak with the bombast and grandiosity that come more naturally to him than from the authors of plays: “I’m dying of silence!” Prévert, however, was reluctant to write the screenplay because of his aversion to pantomime, and he agreed only after Barrault said that he and Decroux, who played Baptiste’s father in the film, would supervise all the pantomime scenes, which they did with the help of Georges Wague (Turk 1989: 220). Yet Baptiste is more than the role he plays on stage, and indeed, his love for Garance is an expression of a doomed desire to escape that role. 

            The film presents three scenes in which Baptiste performs pantomime. In all three scenes, he enacts the figure of a “white” Pierrot. The first scene, however, which introduces the character of Baptiste, takes place in the street before the theater and presents a proto-Pierre. Anselme Deburau addresses the crowd and invites people to attend the theater. He introduces his son, Baptiste, sitting before the crowd, as “someone you will not see on stage,” for Baptiste is a “know-nothing, a dolt, a sleepwalker, an unbelievable nincompoop, a blockhead, a good-for-nothing, a famous father’s despair” whom the father clubs on the head. Baptiste sits forlornly, as if catatonic. Instead of the typical Pierrot white pajama costume with large buttons and a black skullcap, Baptiste wears a white waistcoat, a white vest, white baggy pants, a large, floppy white hat, and long blond hair, although he paints his face close to that of the typical Pierrot. While Anselme speaks to the audience, Baptiste sees Lacenaire steal a watch from a man watching the presentation. Anselme goes into the theater, leaving Baptiste alone on the street stage. When the man discovers that his watch is stolen, he accuses Garance, standing next to him, of having stolen it. The police arrive and seize Garance, but Baptiste intervenes and demonstrates through comical pantomime how Lacenaire stole the watch. The police release Garance, which inspires the audience to cheer exuberantly the skill of the pantomimist. The pantomime is unusual in that in reconstructing the crime Baptiste impersonates, with caricatured gestures, the man with the watch, the thief, and Garance. Garance thanks Baptiste by giving him a flower and blowing him a kiss as she wanders away, which inspires the smiling Baptiste to see in her the great love of his life. But this scene also establishes Baptiste as a superior pantomime artist who replaces his abusive father on the stage of the Funambules. In contrast to the other ambitious male characters in the film, who love to talk in a poetic, philosophical, aphoristic, literary manner, Baptiste embodies ambition as a “silent” phenomenon, as a thing unspoken, undeclared but merely manifested through a gesture, a movement, a glance, a posture that others cannot perform so well or so “poetically.” 

            The second pantomime occurs somewhat later, after Baptiste has become a star. This time he wears the typical white Pierrot costume with huge sleeves, huge buttons, billowing pants, and the black skullcap. The rather modernistic painted scenery depicts a city street with the statue of a goddess (Garance). Pierrot becomes enamored of the goddess, although a police officer (Anselme) enters and discourages his unwholesome attraction to the statue [See Film Series A below]. Pierrot retrieves a bouquet of roses that he offers in vain to the immobile goddess. Depressed, he falls asleep beside the statue. Harlequin (Lemaitre) appears, picks up the roses, and offers them to the goddess, who comes alive, floats down to him, and accepts the roses as he guides her away. When the policeman awakens him, Pierrot becomes distraught to see that the goddess has disappeared, and he dives off the stage. The curtain falls only to rise almost immediately. The scenery now depicts a drab countryside. Pierrot sees the beautiful woman with Harlequin in a boat gliding past him on the river. He longs for her, but she vanishes beyond his impotent, tormented reach. He decides to kill himself with a rope, but as he prepares to hang himself from a tree, a little girl appears and asks to use his rope to skip rope. When he retrieves the rope from the girl, a woman, played by Nathalie, appears and asks to use the rope to hang laundry with Pierrot holding one end of the rope. While holding the rope, Baptiste sees Garance chatting intimately with the harlequin Lemaitre in the wings, which causes him to freeze with jealousy and Nathalie to cry out in alarm: “Baptiste!” a violation of the law that forbids pantomime theaters from uttering anything on stage. Backstage, Nathalie explains to her father, the manager, that Baptiste has changed, that he is “lost,” and that only she can see his “torment,” because she loves him. The pantomimic scene represents only a tiny fragment of pantomimic action that the Funambules would have presented in a show, yet the scene is not in itself particularly interesting. What is interesting is how the film shows characters outside the pantomimic scene intruding upon the lives of the characters in the pantomimic scene: from his box, the Count de Montray (Louis Salou [1902-1948]) sees Garance and becomes infatuated with her; Lemaitre and Garance in the wings disturb the performance and partnership of Baptiste and Nathalie. In costume backstage, Baptiste expresses gentle, quiet concern for Nathalie’s “distress,” while she confides that she has “faith” that someday he will love her. In costume backstage, Lemaitre and Garance discuss their dying relationship: neither is happy with the other, and in her sleep, Lemaitre observes, she calls out “Baptiste!” As he leaves her dressing room, de Montray enters, bringing with him an enormous wreath and proposing to her, using grandiosely flattering euphemistic language, that she become his mistress. While changing from her goddess costume into her street dress, she explains that her life is fine as it is, but she accepts his card, which proves useful when dealing with the police again, who suspect her of having conspired with Lacenaire to commit another crime. When the Count leaves, Baptiste enters, still in costume. He treats the wreath as a symbol of his own funeral, which is better than a wedding for a groom without a bride. The memory of his happiness when he danced with her in the tavern and escorted her to the hotel room he found for her never leaves him. He dances momentarily and sadly with himself, then draws a sword from a prop rack and hacks violently at the wreath, confessing his hatred of the Count, Lemaitre, and himself. Garance asks why he assumes she does not love him. But Nathalie enters; she declares that Garance does not love him, only she loves him, no one else can love him, and no one else can break the invincible truth that she and Baptiste belong to each other. The point here is that the pantomime performance extends beyond the stage to include a drama that no single character can see as completely as the action on the stage. This drama bestows a power on pantomime that is really not in the pantomime performance itself, which consists almost entirely of simple, childlike, exaggerated gestures whose “poetic” quality rests upon the assumption that no one would perform them except on a stage the characters explicitly say has “changed” them. As a result, the pantomime performance on stage appears much simpler and less sustainable than the dramatic and much more subtle performances that unfold before the camera off stage. The film propagates the idea of pantomime as a “poetic” or romantic art, but this idea depends on the cinematic representation of Baptiste, for example, carrying the Pierrot image into dramatic scenes off the stage in which he performs bodily movements of a far greater refinement and subtlety while also speaking. 

            The third pantomime occurs several years later, after Garance has returned from Scotland and watches nightly, from her private box, the pantomime performances at the Funambules. This pantomime is a heavily abbreviated version of the old Le Marchand d’habits scenario from 1842.The scenery here is handsomer, more costly, indicating a rise in the fortunes of the theater and of Baptiste. At night, a luxurious carriage, pulled by a mechanical horse, glides across the stage, with Pierrot stealing a ride on the rear bumper. An elegant, aristocratic woman, the Duchess, played by Nathalie, descends from the carriage and ascends the steps admitting entrance to an opulent mansion. Through a window, the spectator can see the silhouettes of couples dancing. Pierrot hops off the carriage as it pulls away and, in his white pajama costume and skullcap, jauntily struts toward the mansion entrance. But a pair of guards blocks him and then tosses him on his butt, causing a great roar of laughter from the “gods,” the “children of paradise,” the crowd in the cheap seats of the top balcony. The dejected Pierrot signifies his unhappiness at having the wrong costume to gain entrance to the ball. He dances momentarily with himself, emulating the dancing silhouetttes in the window. He then hears the call of an itinerant clothes merchant bearing a rack of secondhand garments. Leaping exuberantly, Pierrot prances around the merchant, who tosses him a pair of items. But when the merchant extends his hand for payment, Pierrot plunges his hand into a big pocket and comes up empty. The merchant tussles the clothes from Pierrot and moves away. Pierrot draws a sword from the merchant’s scabbard and stalks him with a chilling intensity, causing Garance in her box to remark to Lemaitre: “He is gentleness itself. How does he manage to look so cruel?” Pierrot plunges the sword into the merchant, elegantly watches him fall, leaps over the body, and gathers up the clothes he wanted. He stealthily tiptoes away with large steps as the curtain falls. But the film intercuts the pantomime performance with scenes of Garance talking with Lemaitre in her box, where the production manager has escorted the actor, who wears his arm in a sling as a result of his duel with the author he insulted on stage. The dialogue between these two updates the viewer on Garance’s life over the past few years, then drifts toward other themes: Baptiste’s “marvelous” artistry, her current non-happiness, Lemaitre’s jealousy over Garance’s persistent love for Baptiste, his willingness to inform Baptiste of Garance’s desire to see him during her brief stay in Paris, and his realization that his jealousy has now enabled him to play Othello. Backstage during the intermission, many things happen that effect the performance of the pantomime on stage. Lemaitre and Baptiste meet after many years and praise each other’s success as theater artists. They join Baptiste’s wife, Nathalie. The actor praises Nathalie for her beauty, though Nathalie says she is not beautiful but happy. Lemaitre also meets the couple’s young son. The insidious ragpicker Jericho (Pierre Renoir [1885-1952]) arrives, urging Baptiste to move away in disgust with Lemaitre. An informant, a spreader of malignant gossip, and dealer in contraband goods, Jericho complains to the stage manager about Baptiste “murdering” him every night in the pantomime and then complains that his sad fate is to inspire no one’s love. He informs Nathalie of Garance’s presence in Box 7, and she sends her little son to the box to inform Garance that his family is very happy, the implication being that Garance should stay away from Baptiste. As Baptiste in the wings prepares to go back on stage, Lemaitre reveals that Garance is watching the show and would like to see him again. The pantomime resumes inside the ballroom of the mansion with many couples waltzing and the Duchess (Nathalie) at the center. The Duchess drops her fan, which is the cue for Baptiste, in his new toreador-like costume but retaining his skullcap, to sweep onto the stage and retrieve it. He takes a position to dance with the Duchess, but freezes, thinking of Garance. In tight close up, Baptiste, with a memorable expression of painful renunciation, turns his white face away from the frightened Nathalie. He rushes off stage, abruptly terminating the performance and arousing dismay from the audience. He goes to Garance’s box, but she has gone. In a subsequent scene, Baptiste broods in the hotel room where he first declared his love for Garance. When the concierge brings him supper, she suggests that he cure his depression by attending a performance of Lemaitre’s Othello. It is during the intermission of the play that Baptiste and Garance run into each other, observed by Lacenaire, who turns the rendezvous into a humiliating “scandal” for de Montray and himself. Here, more than in the rope pantomime, the actions of characters outside of the pantomime overwhelm the action on stage and even destroy it. Pantomime seems too fragile to absorb or even to survive the “passions” of those who perform or watch it, although the same might also be said of Lemaitre’s bombastic performance as Othello. Pantomime mobilizes the passions of the characters without representing the passions beyond a perfunctory, stereotypical set of gestures. This is not a weakness of the film, for which pantomime is merely a sign of a “poetic” spirit that actually conceals what only the film can see: the destructive interlinking of real and simulated passions. Barrault performs Pierrot masterfully, but as Baptiste outside of Pierrot, he is powerfully captivating, his speech exquisitely economical (compared with nearly everyone else), his movements elegant, precise, delicate, cautious, his smile, his gaze, even a slight turn of his head or a shift of his eyes, all seem like the inflections of a sublimely gifted artist who brings a majestic poetry to the body, to the character of Baptiste. It is Barrault/Baptiste, not Pierrot, who brings about the redemption of French pantomime. This point is fundamental in understanding how the film almost single-handedly rehabilitated the decadent, nearly extinct Pierrot figure, which then inspired, in the postwar years, the emergence of the mime school culture, guided by Decroux, that succeeded in dominating international perception of pantomime until the end of the century (cf. Him-Aquili 2012) [Film Still Series A]. 

            The haunting romantic aura projected by Barrault is the heart of the film, even if other characters, though splendidly acted, are more interesting or complex as characters (rather than as acting performances). Postwar audiences for the film, which were very large, believed that Barrault’s enchanting performance was due to his training in pantomime under Decroux, a belief reinforced by the partnership of Barrault and Decroux in constructing the pantomimic scenes. Indeed, the film earned for Barrault the reputation of being a great mime, even though after the film he seldom performed any pantomime. But Barrault’s enchanting performance became entangled in the strange political significance of the film, which further contributed to the rehabilitation of Pierrot. The making of the film in Nice and Paris during the Occupation entailed tremendous difficulties that Turk and Forbes have described extensively: film production resources were curtailed, weather, personal conflicts, and financial problems hobbled production, and both collaborators and members of the Resistance participated in the production, which necessitated much devious, stressful maneuvering on the part of Carné and his associates to avoid German interference (Turk 1989: 180ff.; Forbes 1997: 10-16). Upon its release in March 1945, the film simultaneously symbolized the Liberation of France from Nazi tyranny and France’s “tragic” accommodation of the Nazi Occupation. Arletty spent eighteen months in prison for treason because of her brazen love affair with a German Nazi officer. Carné himself faced interrogation because the film received financing from collaborationist and German sources. However, the immense popularity of the film assured its place in history as a monumental achievement that restored cultural glory to a humiliated France. The film takes a distinctly and entirely French subject, the theatrical milieu of the Funambules, and uses it as a metaphor from which the viewer may discern a political significance: in a milieu, in a society consumed by theater, pervaded with masked or concealed identities, and smothered with deceptions, illusions, dreams, and failures to love or inspire love, pantomime makes the act of “not speaking out” seem deeply poetic and romantic, the sign of an epochal tragic loneliness insofar as the solitary, melancholy figure of Pierrot totally dominates the film’s representation of pantomime. Les enfants du paradis perhaps represents best what Turk regards as the “unmitigated sadness” of Carné’s film work as a whole: “Equating individualism with abject solitude, [Carné’s films] suggest that human fulfillment resides not in maturity, critical consciousness, and emancipation, but in regression, dependence, and disengagement from the material world” (1989: 433). While one may easily apply this statement to the characters of Les enfants du paradis, with theater on stage, backstage, and in the audience signifying an ironic, collective desperation to negate this tragic loneliness, Barrault/Baptiste/Pierrot represents this “abject solitude” in its most romantic vein, as the heritage of a nation, a poetic defiance of societal constraints and yet a glamorous incarnation of defeat and lost happiness. But as Turk’s treatise demonstrates, this “unmitigated sadness” pervaded Carné’s films of the 1930s. The Occupation did not cause it; rather, the Occupation allowed it to achieve monumental, heroic grandeur in Les enfants du paradis. The abject solitude of the Barrault/Baptiste/Pierrot figure functioned beautifully as an icon of the existentialist philosophy that emanated from Paris across the Western world in the postwar years and defined much of Western culture until the 1970s. This philosophy, as explicated especially by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), proposed that human beings are fundamentally alone and responsible for their actions; they are “free” and cannot use God or the state or society to absolve them of responsibility for their own actions or the actions of others, otherwise they justify totalitarian catastrophes like Nazism in the name of some “higher meaning” for existence. Freedom is a condition of existence, not an ideal toward which humanity strives. Freedom makes one alone, yet obligated to respect the freedom of others, which means, as Sartre so memorably put it in the last line of his play No Exit (1944): “Hell is—other people!” But Les enfants du paradis invests this existential alienation—the failure of love to dissolve an inescapable aloneness—with a romantic grandeur and historical credibility that ironically and incongruously encouraged audiences to see the philosophy in continuity with the past and therefore as the persistent basis of a unified national identity. The film’s representation of pantomime helps explain why the mime culture that flourished in the postwar years was so backward looking, a restoration of a premodern “poetic” civilization, a variation on the solitary Pierrot figure that completely ignored modernistic developments in pantomime from outside of France and even from the huge adventure in pantomime provided by silent films. Decroux himself said: “I have invented nothing […] because I am hostile to novelty. […] I do not like novelty. When someone proposes something new, it is because they do not have the courage to value something old” (Decroux 2003: 80). Barrault brought pantomime to the film, but the film made pantomime in France as Decroux and Barrault defined it.

Film Still Series A: Scenes from Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du paradis (1944-1945). 1) Pantomime scene at the Funambules Theatre, with Nathalie (Maria Casares), Anselm Deburau (Etienne Decroux), and unidentified actor in lion’s costume. 2) Pantomime scene with Pierrot (Jean-Louis Barrault) falling in love with the statue of an ideal woman (Arletty). 3) In pantomime, Pierrot sees his ideal woman sail away with Harlequin (Pierre Brasseur). 4) Pierrot holds up the wash for Colombine (Maria Casares) with the rope by which he intended to hang himself. 5) Baptiste crosses out his Pierrot image in the mirror when he realizes that Garance cannot love him as he desires. 6) In the Marchand d’habits pantomime, Pierrot’s love for the ideal woman makes him vicious when he has no money to buy nice clothes to gain entry to the party where his love awaits; so he steals the clothes seller’s sword and stabs him. 7) Offstage, Pierrot usurps or effaces Baptiste as the center of domestic life. 8) In portraying Baptiste offstage, Jean-Louis Barrault’s performance is much more restrained physically than when he portrays Pierrot in the pantomimes on stage. Except when he takes a sword to the huge bouquet of flowers Count de Montray has given Garance, Baptist appears as a quiet, introspective, melancholic figure defined by his alluring economy of gesture. 9) Much of Baptiste’s character, as opposed to Pierrot’s characters, Carné and Barrault reveal through luminous close ups of greater emotional resonance and subtlety than any of the exaggerated actions performed by Pierrot in the Funambules pantomimes. The film was of immense importance in creating the “mime culture” of the 1950s to the 1980s, but it was Barrault’s romantic performance as Baptiste rather than his performance as Pierrot in the Funambules pantomimes that drove the enthusiasm for mime. 10) The Funambules pantomime performance with audience as imagined by Carné and art directors Léon Barsacq and Raymond Gabutti. Photos: Carné (2002). 

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Helpmann’s Hamlet

Nevertheless, in the darkest days of the war, theater people in London did manage to produce a large-scale pantomime: Robert Helpmann’s extraordinary version of Hamlet (1942). Born in Mount Gambier, Australia, Helpmann (1909-1986) began acting and dancing as a child, sometimes performing with his younger sister Sheila (1916-1994), who had a long career as an actress in Australia. In Adelaide, he studied social dancing with Nora Stewart, who in 1923 opened a dance club in the city. When the famous Russian dancer Anna Pavlova (1881-1931) toured Australia in 1926, Helpmann’s father was able to arrange for her to meet with his son. She invited him to tour with her throughout Australia and New Zealand, and he took ballet lessons with her dance partner, Laurent Novikoff (1888-1956). Pavlova’s performances so impressed him that he decided at the rather late age of seventeen to become a ballet dancer. She advised him to study the art in Europe, but his father’s death in 1927 compelled him to stay close to his mother. For several years, he acted and danced in musical comedies in different Australian cities. He did not reach Europe until 1933, with the goal of becoming a ballet dancer. But the classes he took in Paris were so stressful that he began to doubt that he had any talent for ballet. He went to London to obtain work as an actor. Another actor gave him an introduction to the Irish-English dancer Ninette de Valois (1898-2001). Formerly a member of the Ballet Russes, de Valois had formed (1931) the Vic-Wells ballet company as a component of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Company, managed by Lilian Baylis (1874-1937), who wanted the theater to perform separate drama, opera, and ballet programs. De Valois needed male dancers for her company, and she immediately recognized Helpmann’s potential. He performed in many ballets, and by 1935 he was starring in most of the works produced by the company (Walker 2009: 9-23). But he did not begin choreographing for the company until 1942, when he produced three major works, Comus, Hamlet, and The Birds. Comus, an adaptation of John Milton’s 1634 masque libretto, featured Helpmann as Comus, the sinister forest demon who attempts to seduce the lost Lady into a life of debauchery and depravity, and in the piece Helpmann spoke lines from the poem as he danced. What made Helpmann unique as a dancer and then as a choreographer was that he regarded dance as a form of drama that required acting skill as much as movement technique: “the dancing interest is subservient to that of the story” (Brahms 1943: 28). Because he never had much training in ballet technique, he did not regard stories as opportunities to introduce dances that displayed technique; rather, he saw dance as a means of characterizing bodies in relation to other characterized bodies. But in Hamlet, he dispensed with danced movement almost entirely and built the narrative out of pantomime. 

            Helpmann’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet was about twenty minutes long, accompanied by Tchaikovsky’s Hamlet Overture-Fantasia (1889), which invoked moods inspired by the drama rather than depicted musically specific scenes from it. As a counterpoint to the music, Helpmann’s pantomime invoked specific scenes from the drama, a kind of monumental dumb show of key moments in the play. The piece begins with the dying Hamlet being carried off stage by four monks, and what follows, after a blackout, are a succession of “swift cinematic images, economical in movement but rich in significance; each one translates visually some key passage in Shakespeare’s text” (Walker 2009: 54). Hamlet encounters the Gravedigger with Yorick’s skull, and this image precipitates the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, who reveals that his father has been murdered. Court ladies enter and perform a dance. Polonius and Laertes, Claudius and Gertrude, and then Ophelia appear: “They waver and fade and replace one another and bloom afresh before him. He makes to hold one and finds he is clutching the other” (Brahms 1943: 29). “In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Gertrude, the Queen, is an amiable but silly woman. It is the King who is the villain [… but Helpmann] and the personal beauty of Celia Franca [1921-2007] who dances the Queen, put a different emphasis on the play’s characterisations: the Queen flowers triumphantly upon her second marriage like a lovely evil orchid, while the King dwindles to a puppet’s stature with a puppet’s potentialities” (Brahms 1943: 40).  As Laertes bids farewell to Ophelia, they perform a “kittenish pas de deux,” which Polonius interrupts to press her toward Hamlet. Ophelia and Hamlet perform their own “tender and lyrical” duet until Hamlet realizes that Polonius and the King are spying on them. The Court returns, the Page assembles everyone for a performance of the play-within-a-play: the Ghost plays the murdered King, Ophelia the Queen, and Hamlet Claudius. Ophelia/Gertrude hands the poisoned chalice to Claudius/Hamlet to pour into the King’s ear. As Hamlet/Claudius points accusingly at the real Claudius, he embraces Ophelia/Gertrude while the Court rushes away in horror. Claudius kneels, Hamlet draws his dagger to kill him but cannot slay a man in prayer. Polonius intrudes upon the scene and Hamlet stabs him. Gertrude and the Ghost return; Hamlet collapses unconscious on a stairway. Laertes and Claudius enter “struggling,” but Ophelia, “stark mad in white satin,” interrupts them: she dances, handing flowers to Laertes, Claudius, and Gertrude, before embracing Laertes “passionately.” She departs, and Laertes rushes after her. Hamlet awakes: a funeral procession approaches, led by a woman. “As she reached him, she opened her veil to reveal herself as Ophelia and not the Queen.” But the blue veil represents the river in which Ophelia has drowned. Pulling aside the shroud over the bier, Hamlet sees his mother’s body. He sinks to his knees, while Claudius restrains Laertes from killing Hamlet, and both retreat from the scene. The Court returns, carrying goblets. Laertes, Claudius, and Gertrude greet Hamlet. As Gertrude drinks the poisoned wine, Laertes and Hamlet receive the foils from the Page. Laertes stabs Hamlet in the back, but Hamlet spins and stabs Laertes, who accuses Claudius of poisoning the sword tips. Hamlet turns his sword upon Claudius, but “seeing that Gertrude has been poisoned by the wine, he forces Claudius to drink its dregs.” The drunken Gravedigger appears and offers Hamlet a drink from the skull he uses as a cup. But Hamlet dies, and the four monks lift his body and carry him away, so that the piece ends as it began (Walker 2009: 54-55; Brahms 1943: 29-30). 

            It is astonishing that Helpmann could weave together so lucidly so many tragic actions in under twenty minutes, but that is because of his use of economical pantomimic actions rather than dances (or words, for that matter) to construct the narrative. The dances never last more than a minute. Helpmann used complex arrangements of arm movements, especially for the Court scenes, to create what Brahms (7) calls “a superb sense of line,” a kind of kinetic architectural relationship between bodies. The production exuded a heavy aura of expressionism. As always, Helpmann paid close attention to theatrical effects. The makeup was intensely white, luminous, with dark eyes and lips, like faces in films from the early 1920s. The costumes, beautifully detailed, even for the Court women in claret-colored gowns, evoked a late fifteenth century grandeur; Hamlet wore a black body suit with a white belt and an ornamental chain and cross over his chest; Ophelia wore a luxuriously luminous gown, “a lovely shade of lime-green,” while Gertrude was ominous in a dark, bluish-green gown and a crown with exaggerated spikes. The Ghost also wore a disturbingly spiked crown, but his mask and costume appeared “alien” within the historicized costume suite, like a figure from Chinese opera. The sleeves for all the characters were asymmetrical, producing a sense of imbalance in them. The reclusive artist Leslie Hurry (1909-1978) designed the costumes and the set. Helpmann invited Hurry to design the Hamlet production after he had seen an exhibition of the artist’s work, but Hurry was “doubtful as to his ability to design for the theatre.” When Helpmann outlined his concept for the production, Hurry consented to trying his hand at designing for the theater. In Britain, Hurry had the reputation of being an “ultra surrealist,” apparently because he studied briefly in Paris in 1938. But his work strongly favors the subjective distortions of expressionism over the incongruous juxtapositions of surrealism. His décor for Hamlet, “certainly the most original setting for ballet seen in recent years,” was a masterpiece of expressionist “representation of the subconscious.” Combining a large painted backdrop and architectonic entrances with steps on either side of the stage, the set depicted a gloomy and fantastically baroque interior of a palace in red, orange, crimson, ochre, and green. The pillars of one entrance ascended to form a huge hand holding a dagger and wine cup; the pillars of the other entrance rose to form a large, spiked crown. A huge, helmeted, nearly nude figure brandishing a sword leapt forward from the backdrop, which showed arched doorways and a staircase receding into abysmal depths. Huge, obelisk-like daggers mounted on ornate pedastals framed the limits of the proscenium. “Above the great staircase [was] a vortex ring of flame from which leapt tongues and spurts of fire.” “Mysterious, ominous, and filled with a sense of open and lurking menace, few spectators can look upon it for the first time without an involuntary catch of the breath” (Beaumont 1947: 7-9). [Figure 94]. Although Helpmann specified that he wanted an “overpowering” set that “dominated” the dancers and reduced them to “pygmy stature,” such an extravagantly linear design actually allowed the performers to move, gesture, and act with an extravagant, undulant rapidity without appearing excessively exaggerated. Powerful scenic effects did not “distract” from the pantomimic action; they enhanced it. Helpmann’s production showed images passing through Hamlet’s mind as he moved toward death. This mind approaches its end without any verbal poetry, for the passage to death is a concatenation of memories performed in pantomime within a distorted frame. 

            Hamlet opened at the Theatre Royal York on December 26, 1942, with Helpmann playing Hamlet and Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991) as Ophelia; Alexis Rassine (1919-1992) was the Ghost. The cast included several other performers who later became distinguished as actors or dancers: Moira Shearer (1926-2006), Moyra Fraser (1923-2009), Margaret Dale (1922-2010), Beryl Grey (b. 1927), Pauline Clayden (b. 1922), Lorna Mossford (1924-1972), David Paltenghi (1919-1961), and Julia Farron (b. 1922). What an amazing ensemble of youthful artistic adventurers facing the terrible proximity of death in the middle of a terrible war! Constant Lambert (1905-1951) and Julian Clifford (1903-?) alternately conducted the orchestra.

Figure 94: Scenes from Robert Helpmann’s production of Hamlet, London, 1942, with Margo Fonteyn as Ophelia, bottom left, and Celia Franca as Gertrude, bottom right, right. Photos by Russell Sedgwick, from Brahms (1943). 

On the program, the piece followed Helpmann’s one-act ballet The Birds, set to music by Respighi, and preceded scenes from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet, in which Helpmann also danced. Critical response was largely quite enthusiastic about the production, with The Dancing Times, an arch defender of classical ballet, unique in complaining about the lack of dancing (“one can scarcely call it a ‘ballet’”) and the morbidity of the piece. The dance critic and novelist Caryl Brahms (1901-1982) published a generous sampling of press comments (1943: 31-37) that describe well the great excitement provoked by the production, and she asserts that audiences were “overwhelmingly enthusiastic.” Her own monograph on Helpmann, published months after the performance and containing many beautiful photographs of the production by Russell Sedgwick, is itself evidence of the tremendous power of the production to stir the viewer. She believed that in fifty years, Hamlet would remain one of the works still performed (10). Helpmann revived the piece for the now Sadler’s Wells Ballet in 1947-1948, with himself and Fonteyn playing their original roles with an otherwise new cast. In 1964, the Royal Ballet, which was the name of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet after 1956, revived Hamlet again, with Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993) as Hamlet, Monica Mason (b. 1941) as the Queen, and Lynn Seymour (b. 1939) as Ophelia. The production used Leslie Hurry’s set and costumes. Here, as in Helpmann’s original production, the ballerina playing the Queen was younger than the woman playing Ophelia and younger than the man playing her son. However, it is not clear how much of Helpmann’s pantomimic approach remained in this production, for Nureyev was an ardent believer in classical ballet technique and carefully constructed his roles to display his virtuosity to the fullest, although in his 1966 production of Sleeping Beauty, he did employ some pantomimic scenes that did not include himself. Yet it is difficult to see how all the scenes in the piece could appear within the twenty-minute time frame without the efficiencies of pantomimic action: so it’s remarkable that Nureyev even chose to perform the piece. Reviews of the production—“a remarkable ballet by any standards”—matched in excitement the response to the 1942 production (Walker 2009: 127). The Royal Ballet revived Hamlet yet again in 1981, with Anthony Dowell (b. 1943) as Hamlet, Monica Mason again as the Queen, and Antoinette Sibley (b. 1939) as Ophelia. This production, again using Hurry’s set and costumes, had many more performances than any previous production. Anna Kisselgoff (b. 1938) reviewed the production for The New York Times (June 22, 1981) and called it “one of the season’s most interesting works.”

It is 1940’s modern and 1940’s in its Freudian approach. The action is so fast-paced and seemingly straightforward that one has to look carefully for the interpretation of Shakespeare’s play that is actually there. It is one in tune with, possibly in advance of, Ernest Jones’s famous psychological view of a Hamlet with an Oedipus complex.

In the hallucination scene that makes up this entire ballet, the Helpmann Hamlet is in love with his mother. He cannot tell the difference between her and Ophelia. The two women exchange places in a doorway, and at Ophelia’s funeral the body on the bier is the Queen’s. Ophelia herself has an incestuous hankering for Laertes – with Miss Sibley’s Ophelia giving [… him] a passionate unsisterly kiss on the lips.

The production used different dancers to perform the roles of Hamlet, Gertrude, Ophelia, and Polonius, causing Kisselgoff to remark that, “the beauty of this acted dance-drama is that it allows for diversity of interpretation,” with each cast different in excellent ways (“Monica Mason’s Queen had wonderful unconcealed passion toward her son in the evening, while Sandra Conley in the afternoon was more of a distant ideal”). In a review of a biography of Helpmann a couple of months earlier, Kisselgoff (NYT April 12, 1981) observed that Hamlet “is exactly the kind of ballet one would have thought past revival,” and “it would be foolish to presume that the present concentration on pure-dance values is not going to make room for dance-drama again.” Yet Hamlet has not had any production since 1981, and the focus on “pure-dance values” since then has become, if anything, even more intense and inhospitable to Helpmann’s actorly-dramatic aesthetic. In 2009, David Bintley (b. 1957), formerly a choreographer for the Royal Ballet and currently a choreographer for the Birmingham Ballet, asked the Royal Ballet the status of Hamlet in the repertoire in connection with the centenary of Helpmann’s birth. But the Royal Ballet told him that it had “got rid of it, which is not really forward-thinking at all. If you want to eradicate ballets then there are plenty that can be got rid of but a heritage ballet like that with those great designs? I would certainly have kept that” (Bintley 2015). 

            Hamlet moved Helpmann much deeper into acting. In 1944, he played Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play at the Old Vic in a production directed by Tyrone Guthrie (1900-1971) and Michael Benthall (1919-1974), Helpmann’s lifelong partner. He alternated with Paul Scofield (1922-2008) in the role, creating a contrast between a “cerebral, aloof” Hamlet (Helpmann) and a “passionate, romantic” Hamlet (Scofield) (Rosenberg 1992: 138-139). The production was so successful that Helpmann and Benthall revived it in 1948, and Helpmann even performed sections of the play on the radio. Helpmann continued to choreograph and dance with the Sadler’s Wells Company, including the extraordinary and controversial Miracle in the Gorbals (1944), a dark, violent expressionist ballet set in the slums of Glasgow. He choreographed the dances for the fascinating ballet film The Red Shoes (1948) and started acting in films. But he never returned to the sort of pantomimic drama he created with Hamlet. The reasons were probably political. Another major choreographer for Sadler’s Wells, Frederick Ashton (1904-1988), became deeply resentful of Helpmann’s success. Despite his own fame, Ashton was intensely insecure. His popularity with audiences and critics derived in large part from the “lightness” and glittering charm of his ballets. He favored a pure dance approach to ballet, with many of his pieces avoiding narrative altogether to emphasize the elegance and abstract beauty of movements in themselves. He feared that Helpmann’s much “darker,” expressionistic approach to ballet, with its heavy reliance on pantomimic acting at the expense of classical virtuosity, would cast a deep, dominant shadow over the company, although Helpmann, not one to worry much about his power over others, continued to perform in Ashton’s ballets, most notably when he and Ashton played the grotesque stepsisters in Ashton’s production of Cinderella (1948). Ashton conspired with members of the company to insure that “his importance to Sadler’s Wells Ballet would never be jeopardized” (Walker 2009: 56). His success in reaching this goal depended on tightening his relationship with the director of the company, Ninette de Valois, who was quite a crafty administrator as well as an important choreographer. De Valois realized that Helpmann, as an actor, dancer, and choreographer, would always find opportunities outside of the company, whereas Ashton would never find a life outside of the company. Ashton’s aesthetic prevailed, and in 1963, he replaced the retiring de Valois as director of the Royal Ballet until 1970, when he, too, retired. By 1960, Helpmann’s days as a dancer in the company had begun to wane, but just before she retired, de Valois commissioned him to do a short ballet, Elektra (1963), with an exceptionally violent musical score by Malcolm Arnold (1921-2006). The wildly acrobatic expressionism of the piece, “associated with ‘adagio dancers’ in nightclubs and cabarets,” provoked turbulent controversy and a severely divided critical response, while audiences apparently found the “volcanic passions” of the piece quite thrilling (Walker 2009: 122-123). Soon after, Helpmann moved back to Australia to develop a series of innovative, sometimes very controversial projects for the Australian Ballet in Sydney, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Hamlet was a great pantomime inspired by the war and the threat of extinction. Postwar revivals of the piece stirred audiences unforgettably. But the circumstances that created the work were inimitable: a company struggling to survive, a choreographer-director whose education in classical ballet technique was weak and whose love of acting was as strong as his love of dancing, a profound, “serious” uncertainty about the future, the sense that if “what comes next” (narrative structure) depends on what one remembers, then the future is death, and people just starting to choreograph, to dance, to design. This tragic pantomime about the sinister majesty of death was the work of an utterly unique configuration of young people who did not have a clear idea yet of what “English” ballet should be. By the 1980s, such a combination of circumstances was impossible anywhere within ballet. The standard of proficiency for the performance of classical ballet technique had become so high that ballet has become an art almost entirely fixated on the virtuoso display of dance skills. After Helpmann, the postwar development of pantomime would not find innovative nourishment from the ballet. 

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Perverse Pantomime Fantasies in Nazi Germany

One might assume that during World War II, theater artists lacked the resources or opportunities to “experiment” with pantomime, assuming also that artistic experimentation is a “luxury” reserved for times of peaceful prosperity. It does seem that pantomime of any sort almost ceased to exist during the entire decade of the 1940s. Yet the war produced two of the greatest moments in pantomime history: Robert Helpmann’s pantomimic production of Hamlet in London in 1942 and Jean-Louis Barrault’s performance as Deburau in Marcel Carné’s film Les Enfants du paradis (1944). By 1940, Western societies had become fixated, perhaps to the point of addiction, on talk as the primary variable for representing experience through performance. Radio and talking films showed how voices, speech patterns, dialects, accents, inflections, intonations, and dialogic interplay revealed a vast inner realm of being that purely visual representations concealed. Authors had always tended to stuff their plays with more talk than most spectators could endure, in large part because, to be heard on stage, voices had to project an intensity that was tiring and “artificial.” But radio, talking films, and (in the late 1940s) television provided a huge range of “natural” voices that animated, soothed, seduced, or gripped the listener to such a degree that pantomime seemed an incomprehensible, severely crippled form of representation. It was apparently unrewarding to understand the world through the unnecessary “silence” of voiceless bodies. The talkiness of films from the 1940s seems astonishing: a naïve trust in speech to explain the world often props up an excessive and even lazy dependence on speech to tell a story, as if a story was worth telling only when filled with enough voices to prevent expectations placed on the revelatory value of the image itself from becoming too exorbitant. Within this cultural ideology, in which technology strengthened faith in the power of speech to reveal a kind of “inner world” occluded by the image, pantomime receded into a virtually dormant state. 

            Nevertheless, the pantomimic imagination was not altogether extinct. Neither the war nor media fixation on talk deterred the aristocratic Austrian writer and artist Fritz Herzmanowsky-Orlando (1877-1954) from composing two pantomime scenarios in 1941. A man of great, inherited wealth and chronically poor health, he spent much of his life in an insulated world he was able to make for himself. He wrote prolifically in several genres: novels, short stories, dramas, ballet scenarios, and even a radio play. Yet the only thing he published in his lifetime was the comic fantasy novel Der Gaulschreck im Rosennetz (1928), which he wrote in 1917. Neither did he publish or exhibit any of the many bizarre color drawings he made throughout his life depicting grotesque encounters between weird humans and fantastic creatures. Only well after his death did the Austrian cultural world recognize him as a master of grotesque comic fantasy. By 1913, he belonged to a Munich circle of writers engaged in the promotion of mystical-occult theories of identity, body, and social organization, including Karl Wolfskehl (1869-1948), Ludwig Klages (1872-1956), Alfred Schuler (1865-1923), and the artist of macabre fantasy Alfred Kubin (1877-1959), with whom he corresponded for half a century. He was also a disciple of the reactionary Austrian apostle of the neo-pagan, racist, anti-modernist, and anti-feminist esoteric philosophy of “Theozoology,” Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954), and in 1922, he became a priest in Liebenfels’ neo-pagan cult religious group, Neutempler-Orden, founded in 1900. In his writings, however, Herzmanowsky-Orlando veered toward the fantastically comic rather than toward the mystical. In the 1920s, he and his wife cultivated the companionship of “androgynous” young women, to whom Carmen became intensely attached. He claimed to have joined the Nazi Party in 1932, yet evidence for his activities on behalf of the Party is difficult to excavate. When the Nazis annexed Austria and launched the war in 1939, Herzmanowsky-Orlando did not inscribe his attitudes toward these events, even in his correspondence (Goldberg 1988; Holeschofsky 2012: 3-4). He seems to have regarded writing and art as ways to insulate himself from a larger world over which he was powerless to exert any influence; writing and drawing in his Austrian and Italian castles confirmed his aristocratic sense of being able to live according to fantasies that were immune to the perturbations of world events effecting everyone else. He felt no need to share these attitudes by publishing his writings, for the mere act of writing was sufficient to affirm the aristocratic authority of his imagination. His two pantomime scenarios from 1941 are examples of a pantomimic imagination unconstrained by any need to represent life as anything other than a bizarre fantasy–something imagined rather than lived.

Youghiogheny, set in the Prater fairground of Vienna in a “timeless era,” entails an enormous cast of characters, fifty-eight altogether, although it consists only of a brief prelude and one long act. The prelude depicts preparations for the performance of a ballet in a coffeehouse garden, with the ballet master and the program director arranging dancers and escorting visitors (two old counts, Bobby and Buby), while workers arrange scenery, trees, a throne, and while the dancers move about to the accompaniment of a triangle and drum. With the sound of ovation, a ballerina escorts Bobby, who, raising his monocle, pinches her on the cheek as the curtain falls only to rise immediately. The point of the prelude apparently is to imply that persons for whom the narrative is intended to entertain and some figures on stage who are preparing to perform are also in the narrative, although the narrative that subsequently unfolds is not the ballet. The entire act consists of an incredible profusion of actions performed by a multitude of characters, many of whom remain on stage the entire time. Many of the actions occur simultaneously, and characters appear and depart with a sudden arbitrariness that suggests they exist simply to disrupt someone else’s performance. The act feels like sitting in a fantastic, expressionist coffeehouse where a strange variety of people come and go and it is difficult to make a coherent story out of the scene. It is like one of Herzmanowsky-Orlando’s bizarre drawings come to life: eccentric human forms interact with an exuberance that overrides any other motive for action or any further need to understand character. Here character is nothing more than the status assigned a body by a costume or racial attribute, although the coffeehouse society seems to lack any hierarchy of identity. Everyone in the piece exists only to contribute to an ecstatic chaos. Here is a half-page sample of the profusion of actions the author compiles in an act that contains twenty-two pages of a similar level of craziness:

The Photographer leaps from the table and, his upper body still covered with the black cloth, begins to crawl on hands and feet. He disappears to the right. The four [Persian] magicians and the Page-girls appease the audience. The Nymph throws them a hand kiss. Loud calls from the garden. The stage music intones the nymph hymn. The Flower Girls rush up against the new arrival [Youghiogheny, the little female dragon]. At the table, the fat Married Couple has placed the Trumpeter. The Oriental [Mauretainian] dancer gives the fat man a kick, because the Trumpeter had leaped up protestingly, and he falls. The Blonde [dancer] leaps over him, and [the Mauretainian and Blonde dancers] join the embracing Page-girls with the golden bow. The Pikkolo pulls the napkin from the desperately floundering Lady. The Pension Chaperon finally frees herself from the flypaper. It remains hanging on a branch. The Flute Player leaves her after a bow. She indicates to her [four] Pupils to curtsy before the nymph. The little Reporter is again rebuffed. The [coffeehouse] Manager wants to lead the Nymph, from whom the Moor takes off the fur coat, to the throne chair. The Reporter, notebook pulled out, stops the Moor and touches the fur. A bow-carrying Page-girl sticks him from behind with a gold arrow. Suddenly there appears, through the entrance to the coffeehouse, an old-fashioned tramcar, pulled by false horses. From it emerge not entirely satisfied coffee guests. Foremost, an old-fashioned Lord, who slouches toward the nymph in the throne. He immediately unfolds a newspaper. The last to appear [from the tram] is a Pifferari [an Italian shepherd, who here has a poodle as a companion] (Herzmanowsky-Orlando 1991: 130-131).

This bewildering level of action is continuous throughout the act, with three times as many other characters participating. Amazing things happen: doves flutter in and out of the scene; flowers fall from above; gold coins pour from the table; cannon shots explode; a man lights a cigarette from a torch, and each time he inhales he expands to great size and when he exhales he shrinks to a small size. Different characters perform dances: a Hungarian czardas, a “macabre Fandango-caricature,” a belly dance, Youghiogheny’s dance to the accompaniment of a glockenspiel, and Ravel’s Bolero (1927) accompanies much of the second half of the act, although other music, such as an ocarina-playing child, sometimes occurs at the same time. But the most fantastic figure is Youghiogheny, the little female dragon, who accompanies the Nymph and bears a “grim but somehow piquant mask,” whose eyes are shifting colored lights. The dragon uses a lorgnette to observe people and waves a fan. She appears about a third of the way into the act, and for a while she participates, “radiating fire as the demonic-graceful central figure,” in dances with Fan-girls and dervishes before performing her solo glockenspiel dance, without, however, diminishing the multitudinous actions performed by many other characters, including Bobby and Buby and the Director. The Lord reads his newspaper throughout all this madness. But when a “friendly, big-headed Chinese family” arrives from the tram, the chaos escalates, with the Nymph dancing “seductively” with four Page-girls and the dervishes, into a “kind of bacchanal of the coffeehouse guests.” Thunder resounds. The Page-girls decorate Youghiogheny in bridal veil and myrtyl. The Chinese lead Buby to the table, which is a fountain of gold coins. In the midst of many other actions, it becomes clear, from the gestures of the Nymph, now named the Fairy, that Buby should marry the dragon, but he refuses the money to do so. The now golden-haired Moor and the Pikkolo kneel before the Fairy and offer themselves as the groom, but the Fairy waves them away. The dragon, now possessing a “graceful girl’s body,” snuggles up to Buby, and the Fairy urges him to kiss her, but he refuses. Youghiogheny removes her mask to reveal a “delightful girl’s face” that enchants Buby, and he kisses her. However, the Flower-girls and the Page-girls surround Youghiogheny and “shoot their gold arrows to the sky,” roses fall from the sky, Bobby and Buby lead the Fairy to Youghiogheny, and the Fairy throws her arms around Youghiogheny’s neck. The piece ends with bon-bons thrown to the audience. The guests compel the Lord, sitting on the throne reading, to bow before the Fairy and Youghiogheny before he is thrown out of the final tableau (Herzmanowsky-Orlando 1991: 121-164). 

            The scenario presents the coffeehouse as a bizarre, manic society in which people, regardless of their eccentricies or otherness, may behave in a friendly, exuberant, and libidinous manner without risking any punishment. Speech is completely unnecessary in this environment where one physical action ignities another and another. The Lord, the stereotypical Vienna coffeehouse newspaper reader, gets thrown out at the end because he really doesn’t belong there: he’s too normal—he buries himself in his newspaper without paying attention to the peculiar life around him. In this wild society, even the concept of marriage becomes subverted. The Nymph suddenly decides that Buby should marry her partner, the dragon, by placing his hand in Youghiogheny’s, and the dragon, who has put on gloves for this action, makes encouraging gestures. Only when the dragon entirely reveals herself as a girl is he willing to kiss her. But this revelation compels Buby and Bobby to see the Nymph-Fairy as the proper partner for Youghiogheny, so that it seems the audience witnesses the celebration of a homosexual marriage. Homosexuality also seems hinted at in the pairing of Buby and Bobby, the Mauretainian and the Blonde dancers, and the Moor and the Pikkolo, and in the quartet of Persian magicians. It doesn’t matter to the Nymph that her partner is a “demonic-graceful,” fire-spewing, sexually aggressive female dragon and a charming, delightful girl. Thus, in addition to its extravagant density of physical action, the scenario shows a pantomimic imagination cheerfully glorifying a “friendly” reorganization of sexual desire. Obviously such a scenario would not find a place on any stage in the Third Reich or even in print; most likely it would not have found a place on a stage anywhere else in the world. But for Herzmanowsky-Orlando, the mere writing of the scenario was sufficient to show that a happy, friendly society is also a wild, fantastic society best represented through an ecstatic excess of pantomimic action. 

            Herzmanowsky-Orlando’s second pantomime scenario from 1941, Der Raub der Europa, is somewhat less difficult to describe than Youghiogheny, although it contains an even larger cast of characters. The piece contains three acts, yet it is shorter than Youghiogheny. The basis for the scenario narrative is the ancient Greek myth of the god Zeus, who abducted the Phoenician princess Europa by appearing to her as a white bull. But Herzmanowsky-Orlando only uses a few elements from the mythic material—or rather, he transforms the myth into a bizarre fantasy of an ethnically diverse society pursuing eccentric forms of sexual happiness. Though the action takes place during the “age of the bull” (“Tauruszeitalter”), anachronisms crop up, such as a large photographic group portrait of the heroes of Troy under the skull of an ox in the breakfast room of King Agenor, the use of matches, the reading of a newspaper, the swinging of golf clubs, and female harlequins on the deck of Zeus’s ship. The long first act unfolds in the breakfast room of King Agenor’s palace in Phoenicia and depicts the hectic environment in which the King enjoys his breakfast. It is similar to Youghiogheny in its extravagant profusion of pantomimic actions. Servants bring in food and drink, the Ceremony Director ushers in various guests and envoys, a morning concert plays, Kadmos, the son of Agenor, appears with seven of his athletic friends, Europa, the King’s daughter, appears with her own entourage of seven friends to ask her mother, Agraule, who has a mustache, permission to go to the beach, half-naked black African female dancers—“an improvised Laokoon group”—perform a “wild, acrobatic and—unfortunately—not entirely morally unobjectionable act.” While these things happen among others, a pair of dwarves play different musical instruments, eunuchs attempt to police the unruly visitors, a large “dog’s head” rises over the breakfast table to snatch food, the chief eunuch sings a song by Schubert, Agraule signals to prevent people from irritating her husband the King, but she herself sometimes irritates him, Europa plays the lyre, Moorish servants (one with a gold wig) hand things to others, the androgynous youth Gygax brings a bouquet for Agraule, the Ceremony Director performs a “passionate” dance while Kadmos’s friends engage in athletic contests, Gygax hurls a spear, but it goes awry and bounces off Agenor’s head, and an ape in a cage—presumably a chimpanzee—performs various actions throughout that comment on the actions of the humans: “One of the black maids dusts the bricks […] so that the other [maid] stealthily [performs] a bit of a little belly dance according to Radaukles’ rhythm. Agraule, who does not see this with pleasure, wipes a tear of emotion from her eyes and gives the ape a piece of sugar. The ape whistles loudly with two fingers toward the door, which the two dwarves, who had hidden under the table, have opened.” The act eventually ends with several of the characters, including the ape, bowing before the audience and throwing kisses. The curtain falls, but the dog’s head pokes underneath it to sniff a soufflé pot. In the second act, Europa and her entourage are at the beach. “Grandiose music” performed by Tritons resounds. A ship approaches, its crew consisting of “half-naked maritime Girls” and female harlequins. With circus-like ceremony, a young steer emerges from the ship, greets Europa courteously, kisses her hand, and summons his crew to toss flowers and confections to the girls. Europa responds by offering her hand for the steer to kiss. A group of fish heads, bobbing in the waves and holding notebooks, sing tunes conducted by a “chief fish head.” The steer (Zeus) sinks to all fours, Europa climbs on his back, and the entourage places a rose necklace around his neck. From a great laurel tree, the crew tosses flowers, then scampers onto the ship. Europa and the steer board the gold shining ship with the purple tent. The tent closes as Europa and the steer enter it; the harlequins perform acrobatics on the golden nets as the ship sails away, leaving the entourage behind. The third act takes place in a palace on the island of Crete. Zeus lies in bed with Europa, as Moorish dancers perform for them. Europa kisses her beloved. Then Zeus removes his steer mask: Europa is “delighted to see a beautiful young man before her.” He summons his assistant Hymenäos and his Negro bureaucrats to bring the scepter by which the god will officially designate Europa queen of Crete. But Mercury appears with a message: Agenor and Agraule have arrived to take back their abducted daughter. The King and his wife are in an angry, impatient mood, to which Zeus responds inscrutably, while the dancing girls offer the royal couple sweets. Thunder rumbles, Agenor pulls out an umbrella, Europa sobs, and a three-headed hellhound, Cerebus, rises up growling from the floor in red light, but Agenor scares him away with his umbrella. Agraule sees that Europa loves the young man, and she submits to the urge to kiss him, but he waves her off, “darkly and majestically.” Finally, lightning strikes: the scene reveals that the youth has transformed into a stone monument of Zeus. Ganymede appears in a pink cloud, painting his lips and spraying perfume all over Europa, who sobs on her mother’s breast. Agraule and Agenor perform several actions (whispers) of negotiation, until Agraule realizes she has a “quite passable plaster for her daughter’s wounded heart”: “Who dances prettily and with victorious confidence […] a chirping, masked little figure—is it a boy, a girl, or in the end a eunuch?” It is the androgynous Gygax, Agraule’s favorite. She presents Gygax to Europa, who does not seem keen on him. But Agenor and his ministers find the idea appealing. Europa and Gygax kneel before him, he blesses them, and Mercury brings a crown to place on Gygax’s head. Cerebus growls again. The parents embrace and kiss their children. A “gold-klanging” ballet, directed by Mercury, concludes the pantomime (Herzmanowsky-Orlando 1991: 165-183). 

            Der Raub der Europa presents a society animated by “peculiar” sexual desires: Agenor is married to a woman with a moustache, and she is fond of the androgynous Gagyx; Europa becomes enamored of a steer, and the god Zeus pursues a sexual relationship with a human but can only consummate the relationship by transforming into a beast; Kadmos and his gang of sporty friends exude an aura of homoerotic camaraderie that Gagyx tries to join; the two Moorish servant girls form an erotic pair, as do perhaps the pair of dwarves; the girl crew on the ship showers Europa’s girl entourage with affection and gifts; Ganymede’s blatant homosexuality annoys Zeus, though not Agenor and Agraule, who dislike the hyper-masculinity embodied by Zeus as a steer (“Roastbeef Lohengrin”), as an unmasked playboy, and as a stone monument, and they show no fear of him; they agree that Gagyx is a superior partner for Europa. Crowding the stage with so many characters, many more than mentioned here, serves, as in Youghiogheny, to create the impression of a busy, glamorous society suffused with a warm erotic narcissism, in which characters whimsically interrupt the actions of others or perform actions simultaneously but separately, like the dog heads that pop up seemingly inconsequentially. Pantomime here constructs an image of society that is otherwise invisible to the spectator when language, speech, is superimposed over the actions representing social relations. The abundance of pantomimic action signifies a current of erotic feeling motivating the “work” or responsibilities of all the many figures belonging to the mythic society, including even the caged ape, who “trembles with lust” at the approach of an “old Austrian woman” wearing pants. But obviously this is not a pantomime that seeks to recover an archaic, primeval mythic experience of communal rapture buried by modernity. Rather, the pantomime sabotages the archaic myth by infusing it with a modernist (and anachronistic) idea of sexuality that is almost pornographic: the old myth is merely the inspiration for a utopian sexual fantasy, for an image of an “unspeakable” need for a new, happier society. In a sense, though, Herzmanowsky-Orlando is close to the ancient Roman pantomime in his transformation of mythic material, in his modernist treatment of pantomime as a bodily “metamorphosis” of a society (myth) rather than as a myth’s metamorphosis of a body. His two scenarios represent a pantomimic imagination far in advance and far more uninhibited than people in the theater anywhere are likely to regard as feasible for production, even though his scenarios do not require material resources any greater than those for a large-scale ballet. But to stage such an abundance of unique pantomimic actions does require an equal abundance of acting and directorial talent that probably even the richest theaters cannot assemble. This is not because Herzmanowsky-Orlando has written purely literary “closet pantomimes” that take no account of the realities of theatrical production; it is because people in the theater are unable to think, to narrate, pantomimically—it is not “natural” to them. But, as a terrible war unfolded, for Herzmanowsky-Orlando, the unnaturalness of pantomime was perfect for imagining an unnatural but happier and much more productive, action-flooded society than those invoking “reality” ever allow.

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Pantomime: The History and Metamorphosis of a Theatrical Ideology: Table of Contents

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The Hibernation of Pantomime in Paris

The most significant development in pantomime during the 1930s took place in Paris, and even this development did not produce much in the way of performance until the 1940s. A new, modernist conception of pantomime emerged there through its chief theorist, the actor Étienne Decroux (1898-1991), whose ideas about pantomime dominated the practice of the art from the 1950s until the late 1980s. But Decroux was the product of a peculiar French theatrical milieu. Born in Paris to a family of modest circumstances, he did not benefit from any privileged access to education. In his youth, he worked for years as a mechanic and construction worker, and this “long confrontation with the material world” instilled in him “a profound respect for physical effort, the conviction that the spirit finds in the material the site of its supreme achievement.” His father’s friendship with a family of Italian sculptors was also an important influence insofar as sculpture, this “Promethean […] struggle of man with a brutal element,” was “a refusal to accept the world as it is, as a will placed in rivalry with God” (Benhaim 2003: 242). In 1923, after his release from the army, Decroux earned admission to the new theater academy established by the actor and director Jacques Copeau (1879-1949), the Vieux Colombier, which was an adjunct to Copeau’s Vieux Colombier Theater and ensemble. Although Decroux and Copeau differed hugely over political values, the Vieux Colombier was enormously influential in forming Decroux’s approach to pantomime. Copeau came from an upper middle class mercantile family, but he early developed a deep aversion to business. After studying at the Sorbonne, he became drawn to the theater by writing theater criticism. By selling family business assets, he was in 1911 able to finance his ambition to form his own theater company, Vieux Colombier, which he sought to build as an alternative to what he considered the excessively commercialized mainstream theater and the artificial acting that prevailed there. Beginning in 1913, the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier inspired abundant critical acclaim and for the most part large audiences in Paris and in the United States, where the company spent the war. After the war, Copeau restored the theater to Paris, where it continued to attract critical praise and devoted audiences. To present a large repertoire of classical and contemporary plays in a simpler, less artificial style, Copeau believed it was necessary to create an entirely new system of education for actors. The theater, however, quickly sank into serious financial debt, in spite of Copeau’s prodigious fundraising activities and in spite of his desire to use very spare set designs, simple costumes, and minimal technological effects. The Vieux Colombier School, launched in 1922, provided a stream of revenue that helped sustain the theater. But by 1924, he had to dissolve the theater and move the school to a rural village in central eastern France. The school attracted passionate students, but it did not attract enough funding to achieve Copeau’s educational scheme, and by 1929 the school ceased to exist. 

            Copeau devised a rigorous curriculum that in effect sequestered the student from the corrupting influences of theater external to the school (Kurtz 1999: 74-75). He invited distinguished intellectuals, such as Paul Valery, Edmond Jaloux, André Gide, and Henri Ghéon, to lecture to the students. He incorporated the rhythmic exercises developed by the Austrian-Swiss pedagogue Emil Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950), who promoted the doctrine that bodily wellness and the healthy social integration of the individual depended on the body’s ability to respond in synchrony to musical rhythms. Copeau also included mime as an area of instruction, but, like Meyerhold, he regarded pantomime as an exercise, rather than as a mode of performance: the study of mime helped the actor to become aware of his or her body as a thing that he or she must synchronize “naturally” with the voice, with the language issuing from the text; the body must not be in tension with the text, as was so often the case with “artificial” forms of acting. Copeau’s concept of “mime” derived almost entirely from the commedia format, which itself derived from the ancient Roman mimus, the street theater, not from the imperial pantomime, of which he betrayed no serious awareness. He saw mime as an exercise in improvisation that compelled the actor to “live” in the moment rather than to anticipate or remember words or actions, which was always an element of artificiality in acting. He showed no interest in the complexities and innovations of modernist Austro-German pantomime, if he was even aware of them, and the huge repertoire of plays performed by the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier contained almost nothing German. He especially disliked the complex technological innovations in theater production and the radical emotional turbulence spawned by German expressionism. In his estimation, modern theater needed to become more “human,” which meant more actor-centered. But the “humanness” of theater ultimately depended on the voice of the actor, on the voicing of the theatrical text, for theater was the “natural” voice of literature. Pantomime estranged audiences from humanity; an art that focused perception on bodily action without the intervention of the voice created the image of an alien identity. The famous actor Charles Dullin (1885-1949) was a student of Copeau and then a teacher for Copeau, and all the major French mimes of the twentieth century, including Decroux, studied under him. Dullin advocated a kind of poetic realism on the stage, which occurs through the process of “transposing” the reality of the play into the reality of theater. Transposition results above all through the actor’s poetic relation to his or her voice and body, rather than, as with Stanislavski, through his immersion in the dramatic narrative or, as happens with many stars, through finding a unique identity as a performer by watching other performances. But the actor achieves this poetic relation to his or her body through exercises designed by a master teacher who can discern the poetic qualities unique to the actor’s voice and body: exercises supposedly expose these qualities (cf. Surel-Tupin 1984: 60-63). The poetic actor is the product of an academic environment. 

            One of Dullin’s students, the poet-actor Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), was the most important French theorist of theater in the 1930s, although his ideas had little impact until decades later. Many of his most salient ideas appeared in his short book Le Théâtre et son double (1938), a collection of essays written between 1931 and 1937. Like Copeau and Dullin, Artaud condemned what he regarded as the commercialization (“prostituting”) of theater, but the worst aspect of theater is its fetishization of the dramatic text, which leads to an obsession with talk on the stage, for “actors do nothing but talk and have forgotten they ever had a body in the theater.” “No one in Europe knows how to scream anymore” (Artaud 1958: 141). For the theater to free itself from “falsehood and illusion,” it had to abandon its reliance on textual “masterpieces” to bestow value on the theatrical experience (74-79). Inspired in part by a 1931 performance in Paris of a Balinese theater ensemble, Artaud proposed that a truly modern theater is performer-driven rather than text-driven and requires a new architecture. He envisioned the “elimination of the stage” and replacing it with a sensuous architecture that “will physically envelop the spectator and immerse him in a constant bath of light, images, movements, and noises” (125). The goal of theater was to create an intensely visceral, convulsive awareness of a repressed, poetic self that Western civilization had stigmatized or poisoned by “the lie, the slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of our world; [theater] shakes off the asphyxiating inertia of matter which invades even the clearest testimony of the senses” (31-32). Throughout his life, Artaud suffered from various illnesses and diseases, both physical and mental, and his precarious health shaped his understanding of the body in performance. The default condition of the human body in the modern world was sickness. Therefore, theater achieved its highest purpose, not as entertainment, but as a mysterious form of therapy. The theatrical event was a kind of medical procedure, visceral like a surgery, intoxicating like a powerful drug, “hallucinatory,” inoculating, as the plague, to use his metaphor, inoculates those who survive it. The immersion of the spectator in “fiery fusillades” of light and powerful sonic vibrations (“sonorisation”) was necessary to achieve a visceral impact on the body, to “ensnare the organs” (91). The actor models this visceral shock to the body. But in spite of his experience as an actor for silent films, Artaud did not see pantomime as a major component in his “theater of cruelty.” He indeed observed that “in our theater which lives under the exclusive dictatorship of speech, this language of gesture and mime, this wordless pantomime, these postures, attitudes, objective intonations, in brief everything I consider specifically theatrical in the theater, all these elements when they exist apart from text are generally considered the minor part of theater; they are negligently referred to as ‘craft’ […]” (40). Yet he was suspicious of bodies that acted without using their voices, as if pantomime signified bodies that were insufficiently ailing or tormented. “It would be meaningless to say that [the theater of cruelty] includes music, dance, pantomime, or mimicry. Obviously it uses movement, harmonies, rhythms, but only to the point that they can concur in a sort of central expression without advantage for any one particular art” (90-91). But Artaud never developed any concrete ideas about physical action other than to remark, in a Dalcrozian fashion, that, “all movements will obey a rhythm” (98); otherwise, he relied on metaphors to describe the “umbilical, larval” movements of the Balinese theater that have an abstract beauty in themselves: “A rippling of joints, the musical angle made by the arm with the forearm, a foot falling, a knee bending, fingers that seem to be coming loose from the hand, it is all like a perpetual play of mirrors in which human limbs seem resonant with echoes, harmonies in which the notes of the orchestra, the whispers of wind instruments evoke the idea of a monstrous aviary in which the actors themselves would be the fluttering wings” (56). But Artaud does not explain how he would apply these observations, which seem to refer more to dance than to pantomime, to his own performance ambitions. The body should become an “animated hieroglyph,” but he could not imagine the animation of the body without the voice—an “incantory” voice that distorted words, utterances, glottal vibrations, which in turn distorted or convulsed the body: “There is no transition from a gesture to a cry or a sound: all the senses interpenetrate” (57). For Artaud, language always signified pain, an ailment. Language, speech, the voice issued from the body like blood from a wound. This attitude was not inclined to see in pantomime a significant component in the therapeutic mission for theatrical performance, for pantomime with any power showed what the body could say but the voice could not; pantomime was about the animation of the body by something “outside” of language, of the impulse to speak, of the vibrational pressure that produces utterance. Artaud’s idea of theater was much closer to modern forms of poetry than it was to modernist storytelling or narrative structuring: a profusion of images and sensations, a sensual “anarchy,” as he put it (79), rather than the building of a new type of logic or motive for the sequencing of actions. But this way of thinking limited his ability to put anything on the stage or even to compose scenarios for this “alchemical theater.” He proposed as “the first spectacle of the Theater of Cruelty” a piece dealing with “The Conquest of Mexico,” which never achieved production; the notes for this project didn’t even appear in print until after his death. He envisioned an enormous four-act spectacle about the conflict between Cortez (Europe) and Montezuma (anti-Occident), but his notes on the project constitute a poem, not a scenario (126-132). He described impressions and effects but not the physical actions that would produce the effects: “The spirit of the crowds, the breath of events will travel in material waves over the spectacle […] Montezuma cuts the living space, rips it open like the sex of a woman in order to cause the invisible to spring forth […] Lights and sounds produce an impression of dissolving, unraveling, spreading and squashing […] This unrest and the threat of revolt on the part of the conquered will be expressed in ten thousand ways […] And in the collapse and disintegration of the brutal force […] will be delineated the first inkling of a passionate romance.” But this describes a theater that exists only in the mind of the poet. Artaud proposed other projects that never moved beyond a listing in a dream program for his proposed theater: “an extract from the Zohar”; “the story of Bluebeard […] with a new idea of eroticism and cruelty”; “The Fall of Jerusalem”; “a Tale by the Marquis de Sade”; “a play of extreme poetic freedom by Léon-Paul Fargue” (1876-1947); and so forth (99). His historical-poetic treatise Héliogabale ou l’anarchiste couronné (1934) contains startling and fascinating descriptions of connections between physical actions and ideas within an innovative (montage) narrative account of the young Roman emperor’s “anarchistic” life and bizarre religious cult, but Artaud never seems to have considered either the book or the emperor’s life a suitable subject for “transposition” into theater. Instead, in 1935, he mounted at the Folies-Wagram Theater in Paris an adaptation of a five-act verse tragedy of incest and murder, The Cenci (1819), by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), with Artaud himself playing the maniacal Count Cenci; the modernist conductor Roger Désormière (1898-1963) arranged the music, and the artist Balthus (1908-2001) designed the sixteenth century costumes and the large, semi-abstract but not spacious or deep set. The glamorous socialite and part-time actress Iya Abdy (1897-1993) played Beatrice, the Count’s violated daughter, and also financed the production, which Artaud claimed “is not Theatre of Cruelty yet but is a preparation for it” (Artaud 1972: 103). But the production was a great failure, partly because of poor acoustics, but also because of Artaud’s inability to stage physical action effectively: he resorted too often to tableaux vivants postures while actors spoke in a stilted, amateurish manner (Artaud 1972: 128-145). Henceforth, his work for the theater remained confined to the manifesto essays gathered in Le Théâtre et son double. He went to Mexico in search of mystical, drug-induced therapies; he became progressively sicker. The Cenci production, however, seriously undermined the credibility of his ideas within the Parisian cultural milieu; he envisioned a theater that required the resources of a highly advanced scientific medical research center, but the justification for such resources seemed dubious to a society that hardly as yet saw itself as profoundly sick. Yet Artaud nevertheless exerted a strong influence on Decroux and his students, for his writings galvanized the idea of the performing body as a poetic phenomenon. But Artaud’s attention to the voice (as the chief sign of illness) obscured the poetics of the body. In a sense, pantomime was for Decroux an antidote to the “affliction” of language, a sign, not so much of health, as of resilience, of immunity to the depredations of language and speech. At any rate, the pantomime aesthetic cultivated by Decroux could survive, he assumed, only by showing that a poetic body was not the same thing as a diseased body. His idea of pantomime therefore avoided the morbid themes, the pathological states, or the violence and “cruel” exorcisms that Artaud regarded as inescapable to the therapeutic mission of theater. Decroux took from Artaud the notion of the therapeutic mission, but he sought a more benign form of healing that linked therapy to political values.

            Copeau’s royalism and devotion to the rightwing doctrines of Charles Maurras (1868-1952) provoked tensions within the student cadre of the Vieux Colombier. Decroux’s way of thinking about how to make theater more “human” and actor-centered diverged significantly from that of his mentor and became more aligned with the views of Dullin, who had broken with Copeau, at least as a collaborator on theatrical projects, by 1920. In his youth, Decroux, like Artaud, developed an enthusiasm for anarchism, but by the end of the 1920s, he pivoted toward a socialist world-view, having reached the conclusion that “above art, there is politics” (Benhaim 2003: 244). Throughout the 1930s, he dedicated much of his time to political activism, including affiliations with communist organizations, which, starting in 1931, sponsored agit-prop productions through an ensemble he formed called “Une graine” (247). These productions, filled with oratory, choral scenes, and polemical dialogue, only occasionally and very briefly included pantomimic scenes (247-248). However, information about these productions is very scant. Although the great actor Jean-Louis Barrault (1910-1994) became his student in 1931, Decroux did not actually form his own school until 1938, but the outbreak of war quickly brought an end to this project. In the 1930s and during the Occupation (1940-1944), Decroux found work as an actor in plays and occasionally in films. It was a period of time spent thinking about pantomime and performing improvised, pantomimic experiments in Dullin’s Paris studio. In 1930, Decroux, in collaboration with his new wife, Suzanne Lodieu, composed a three-part pantomime that corresponded to the three economic ages of humanity: the primitive life, the artisan life (Middle Ages), and the industrial life (“the forces of super animals”). This piece evolved over many years and only achieved public form in the late 1940s: Decroux performed only for small, invited audiences of “two or three people” in Dullin’s studio or in his own home (Benhaim 2003: 254-255; Leabhart 2007: 11). In 1933, Barrault broke away from Decroux and aligned himself more closely with Artaud’s psychoanalytical, trauma-oriented theater than with Decroux’s socio-economic philosophy of “corporeal mime.” The rift seemed profound when, in 1935, Barrault staged at Dullin’s Théâtre de l’Atelier Autour d’une mère, a pantomime adaptation of the novel As I Lay Dying (1930), by William Faulkner (1897-1962). The narrative depicts the dismal, nearly catastrophic struggle of a poor, rural Mississippi family to bury their mother, Addie, as she wished, in the town of Jefferson. The novel presents this struggle through the perspectives or monologues of fifteen different characters across 59 chapters to show that none of the characters has a complete or accurate or even shared history of Addie or of each other. How Barrault transformed this modernist literary, stream-of-consciousness narrative into a pantomimic narrative is not clear, even from Barrault’s description of it (Barrault 1951: 30-45). Barrault played Jewel, Addie’s favored but illegitimate son, film actor Jean Dasté (1904-1994), Copeau’s son-in-law, played Jewel’s brother Darl, and eleven other actors played almost as many characters as have monologues in the book. The Belgian surrealist painter Felix Labisse (1905-1982) designed the set, continuing the French habit of infusing theater with modernism by using scenery that placed the action against a backdrop of modernistic painting. But commentators do not discuss clearly, if at all, how Barrault constructed the different perspectives of the characters through pantomimic action. Barrault received much praise for a scene in which he showed Jewel wrangling a horse and played both Jewel and the horse, becoming a “centaur.” Another scene that inspired delight showed the family crossing a river in a wagon bearing Addie’s coffin: the actors conveyed the presence of the river and the difficulty of traversing it entirely through bodily gesture. Artaud wrote enthusiastically about the production, which opened a month after his own Cenci production and enjoyed a much more favorable response from the press (cf. Plana 2004: 50-51). He saw Barrault bringing great “magic” to the theater because he possessed access to a “primitive,” pre-rational level of experience (Artaud 1958: 144-146). The production seemed to demonstrate the viability of pantomime even in relation to a densely literary work, which probably very few who commented on the production had actually read, and the piece greatly enhanced the esteem with which the Parisian cultural milieu held Barrault. Yet the production, this “synthesis of drama and music hall for intellectuals,” had only four performances, far fewer than for Les Cenci (Artaud 1990). The relentlessly ambitious Barrault never again attempted such a large-scale pantomimic narrative, despite eventually gaining a reputation for being one of France’s greatest mimes. Though it was daring, exceptionally innovative, and close to Artaud’s therapeutic rather than political belief in the tormented, convulsive basis for action, neither Barrault nor anyone else ever revived the piece, although in 1948, the American dancer-choreographer Valerie Bettis (1919-1982) staged, in New York with her own company, a ballet-modern dance adaptation of Faulkner’s novel. One gets the impression that Barrault saw in Autour d’une mère the opportunity to demonstrate the power of the actor’s body to “transpose” literary language into a theatrical poetry rather than to open up a new path for pantomimic theater or even for a more successful realization of Artaud’s “cruel” aesthetic. Having demonstrated this power, he felt no need to sustain it by constructing any more pantomimic narratives of even remotely similar magnitude. He could subordinate pantomime to his larger goal of revealing his manifold capabilities as an actor and director. Almost no actor was as skillful at using his body to play any role. So, in spite of its small audience, the production of Autour d’une mère was quite good for Barrault’s career as an actor without being much help, if any, to the development of pantomime. Yet without this production, pantomime in France during the 1930s had no real existence on the stage, and without Barrault’s captivating and beloved performance as the nineteenth century pantomime Deburau in the 1944 film Les Enfants du paradise, it is most likely that Decroux, who also appeared in the film as Deburau Senior, would not have found his path to establishing a distinctive French school of “mime” in the years following the war. 

            Meanwhile, Pierrot seemed to have vanished from the Parisian theatrical scene. The last of the Pierrots descended from Deburau’s configuration of him, Maurice Farina (1883-1943), had retired from the stage in 1928, ailing from wounds he received during the war. He made his debut in 1899 collaborating on “cantomimes” with Georges Wague. After serving in the army in Morocco and Algeria (1905-1907), he returned to Paris, where he collaborated with Adolphe Willette on Pierrot pantomimes; he toured extensively, but by 1912, he began appearing in ballets produced by the Opéra de Paris. He became a soldier again during the war; in spite of his severe wounding by mustard gas, he returned to the stage in 1920, working with Séverin at the Olympia Theater, appearing with the Opéra (1923), and performing at the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925). His performances attracted much praise from prominent Parisian literary figures in the 1920s. Pierrot was always the center of his theatrical life. According to the biographer Albert Keim (1876-1947), who composed some Pierrot scenarios for the mime, Farina’s face “has the tormented, ravaged face of an emaciated Beethoven, or that of a light-hearted and naive Pierrot figure with candid blue eyes that surprise vice and infamy, and sometimes also [he presents] the profile of a hunched, tortured daemon” (Driant 2012: 6-7). Just as importantly, he collected an enormous archive of documents, images, and artifacts related to the history of Pierrot, which in 1947 his widow donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (9-12). The archive served in part to resolve the “debate” about the future of pantomime between Wague, who advocated the abandonment of Pierrot, and Séverin, who remained attached to the belief that pantomime was Pierrot. Farina himself was ambivalent, uncertain, but he did not welcome the Futurist pantomime that Prampolini offered Paris in 1927 (13). However, by 1930, it was evident even to those outside of Decroux’s tiny circle that the future of French pantomime depended on a way of thinking about the art that did not stem from either Wague or Séverin.

            Although Decroux’s success after 1947 in establishing his emphatically “humanistic” conception of pantomime owed much to peculiar postwar conditions and to the rise of existential philosophy and the aesthetics of “absurdism,” much of this conception was the product of ideas and convictions already formulated in the 1930s and even the 1920s. World War II was not the catalyst for a new conception of “mime”; rather, it was the catalyst of a “liberated” or liberal political spirit for which mime was a convenient humanist emblem. Decroux was important as a teacher, not as an artist, of mime, and he established mime as an experience produced by schools rather than by authors or artists exploring the body’s power to narrate. Like Copeau and Dullin, Decroux believed that reform of the theater was necessary to save it from commercialization, which in his mind was synonymous with technologization and the Wagnerian concept of integrating various scenic and sonic performance elements into a “total work of art” that supposedly displaced the actor as the dominant element of theatrical performance. Of course, an excessive amount of talk on stage was a major problem, but the solution was not to build shows around technological effects or music hall spectacles. The solution was to build performance around actors rather than around texts or scenic splendors. But actors required a systematic, institutionalized education to achieve the confidence to build performances around themselves. Schools were essential to the fight against commercialization, but, as Copeau realized, they also could provide a more reliable revenue stream than actor-centered theater productions. Decroux only slowly grasped that the school experience of the actor could have a greater impact on the perception of pantomime than theatrical pantomime productions driven by authors and artists who believed more in the authority of their narratives than in the authority of actors to attract audiences. After World War II, “mime” became above all an educational activity, a process of teaching actors to free their bodies from the pressures of commercialization, from the pressures to narrate and technologize performance according to tastes learned outside of school. The academic environment placed a high value on the studio performance of exercises, often of an improvised nature that stressed the excitement of the present moment rather than the authority of structural relations between the past and the future. The education of the mime became a never-ending process of devising exercises that tested the performer’s skill at creating “moments” unique to or within the performer rather than to some larger “scene” containing the performer. Mime education was not about theorizing the relations between pantomimic imagination and the constraints imposed on that imagination by linguistic, social, political, economic, cultural, and biological circumstances that motivate or depress the desire to construct or consume speechless bodily performance. Exercise-based education in the performing arts invariably makes the display of technique the dominant aesthetic value of performance. Bodily technique emerges as the counterforce to technologization and to domination of the performer’s body by authors, by narratives, by persons outside of the mime “community.” Dullin’s concept of theater as a “community” was another idea from the 1930s that Decroux (as well as Artaud) found helpful in developing his mime pedagogy. But by community, Dullin implied a collective activity that remained closed off to other communities and lived according to rules, values, and aspirations unique unto itself. He did not mean that a theater community was indifferent to political, social, and artistic issues outside of itself; rather, the community existed as a unique collective processing of these issues, yet it could only survive through a sequestering of itself, through a collective sense of purpose that was indifferent to the value placed on it by “outsiders” (cf., Surel-Tupin 1984: 76-77). Decroux “transposed” this idea of the theater community to the studio classroom. The history of mime after World War II is largely a story of mime teachers and their students, of mime schools, of mime companies formed out of mime schools, of mime communities formed out of teacher-student networks with a shared education in mime. It is not a story of powerful theatrical productions, daring narrative or technological innovation, significant transformation of the entertainment industry, or certainly any more ambitious idea of pantomime than the history of pantomime had already offered. Exercises were fundamental in building the mime community. Exercises strengthened the bond between teacher and student by making transparent the technique that bestowed the greatest value on the act of miming, a value that was not dependent on anything outside of the community performing the exercises. Mime became a technique identified with schools and controlled by teachers. With exercises, teachers and students were simultaneously performers and spectators of the pantomimic action, of the technique that authorized, so to speak, the pantomimic action. Through exercises in the studio, students built audiences for mime out of their shared appreciation of the technique that brought them together. As with ballet and the academies that sustained it, the core audience for mime consisted of students who had studied mime. This audience would never be large enough to control theater culture, but it was large enough to sustain an international community that did not depend on “masterpieces” of its art to grow or attract the support of “outsiders.” It was an art of distinctive personalities, solo artists, masters of technique, and revered teachers. This way of thinking about pantomime was what made Decroux such an important figure after the war. Pantomime thrived during the Roman Empire because Tiberius abolished in effect the academies that purported to educate pantomime artists according to a “standard” determined by the academic community. Since then, pantomime had constructed a long, disorderly history of experimentation and unsystematic, unregulated efforts to define itself instigated by people educated to do something else. Decroux’s achievement in redefining pantomime as “mime” receives closer attention in the section dealing with the pantomime culture from the 1950s to the 1980s. The point here is that the ideological framework defining mime was a product of the 1930s and of a small French community of teachers and students formed in the 1920s. 

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Table of Contents

Pantomime: The History and Metamorphosis of a Theatrical Ideology: Table of Contents

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Das goldene Pferd (1930) and the Impact of Sound Film on Pantomime

Throughout the 1920s, serious pantomime in the theater functioned internationally as an experimental form of performance, and as experimentation, pantomime maintained an affiliation with modernism. But as an experimental form of performance, pantomime had an unreliable, unstable existence without any secure institutional “home,” even within the large network of immature ballet companies attached to the German opera houses. By 1930, however, pantomime and the use of the word “pantomime” and of synonymous words (“Tanzspiel,” “Tanzdrama”) to describe these performance experiments had disappeared almost entirely in Germany, and it is difficult indeed to find applications of the term to performances elsewhere. The desire to experiment with voiceless performance had come to an abrupt end, even though experimentation and modernism in the theater continued to thrive. But an account of pantomime in the 1920s does not seem complete without a glance at an ambitious pantomime scenario that never achieved performance or even publication during the decade but which shows the unprecedented scope of the pantomimic imagination stimulated by the postwar cultural environment: Das goldene Pferd, by Richard Beer-Hofmann. The composition of this piece occurred between 1921 and 1922, nearly thirty years after his previous pantomime scenario, Pierrot Hypnotiseur (1892). But Beer-Hofmann continued to work on it throughout the decade. He corresponded (1922) with Reinhardt and his brother about a possible production of the work, and with the Bulgarian composer Pantscho Wladigeroff (1899-1978) about composing the music; in 1926, he considered inviting Richard Strauss to compose the music (Vollmer 2011: 472-474). Ostensibly production of the piece did not happen because it was too costly, although a production of it does not seem like it would have cost more than the production of numerous modernist operas staged during the Weimar Republic. The action takes place in an archaic society apparently on the coast of the Black Sea, a sort of Scythian culture. The plot deals with a young man, Bahadur, who longs to travel the world in search of adventure. However, in the courtyard of the landowner Bilal, he agrees to marry Bilal’s daughter Halimah, which the couple confirm when Halimah gives Bahadur a necklace with a medallion bearing her image. As the engagement ceremony unfolds, a troop of warriors arrives, led by an Emir mounted on a horse covered in gold armor. The Emir invites Bahadur to join them, which excites the young man until he sees the sadness in Halimah’s face and rejects the offer. Night falls and Bahadur sleeps. The warriors return, with the Emir on the golden horse, accompanied by a giant and a dwarf. The Emir proposes that he and Bahadur trade places: Bahadur will receive the horse, all the splendid garments, the weapons, and the power of the Emir in exchange for the medallion necklace with Halimah’s image. Bahadur agrees. After a musical interlude, the action moves to the gate before the royal city. Bahadur/Emir returns from his adventures accompanied by the giant and the dwarf. The dancer-lute player Tarkah reveals her attraction to Bahadur, but she already has a lover, Ghajur. When Ghajur strikes Bahadur in a jealous rage, Bahadur stabs him to death. The giant and the dwarf extricate Bahadur from the angry crowd of Ghajur’s friends, and Bahadur rides the golden horse into the city followed by the giant and the dwarf. In the throne hall, the childless King and the Queen Mother expect the arrival of the King’s nephew, the Emir. During the ceremonial encounter, the dwarf presents Tarkah, who appears in a silver veil, which she briefly opens to reveal her nudity to the King. This action causes consternation in the court, including Bahadur and the Queen Mother, who inspects Tarkah and compels her to return with her to the “women’s house.” In a long ensuing scene, the giant and the dwarf bring Tarkah back to the King in the throne hall. She plays the lute and gives a kind of speech-song (“Sprechstimme”) explanation of herself and him that is seductive without being romantic, analytical and ominous, yet voluptuous: “Youth flown! – What hope is left? Feel, how your life drains from you! […] See—I want to be more! From evening until morning, you shall, my restless King, rest quietly on my breast […] Only death shall separate us!” While she intones this song, the King drinks from a poisoned chalice given to him by the dwarf. When the King realizes he has been poisoned, he tries to flee, but Tarkah casts her veil over him like a net and finishes him off by pressing her knee against his head. Bahadur, who has watched this scene from behind a curtain rushes to prevent Tarkah from continuing her violence, but the giant stops him. When the commotion summons the Queen Mother and her entourage, Bahadur defends Tarkah and claims authority as the new king. In the fourth scene, the action moves to the sumptuous royal garden by the sea. As Bahadur, Tarkah, the giant, and the dwarf luxuriate in the performance of female dancers, the Queen Mother and her entourage appear and the sky darkens. The Queen Mother questions the identity of Bahadur, which leads to a potentially violent confrontation. Halimah seizes the medallion from Bahadur. The Queen Mother then makes a signal, and the Emir’s ship appears, and then the Emir himself. The Emir commands deference from the court, but Bahadur challenges him, after Tarkah, the giant, and the dwarf have thrown themselves at the feet of the Queen Mother. The Emir points to a youth on the mast of the ship bearing a golden bow and golden arrows. Bahadur throws off his helmet and commands the Emir to kill him. The Emir gives the signal, but Halimah rushes in front of Bahadur and receives the arrow in her chest. But Bahadur manages to escape with Halimah when rioting Negroes break into the courtyard. In the castle courtyard, Bahadur removes the arrow from Halimah and tries to comfort her, but she dies, and he goes into shock. Six Negroes carry away Halimah’s body to a grave; Bahadur seeks to join her but the Negores hold him back. The giant and the dwarf appear, and they invite Bahadur to mount the golden horse that now appears at the gate. Bahadur rushes toward the horse, but the golden armor falls off and reveals instead the skeleton of the horse. The gate collapses, and on the wall stands Tarkah, in her silver net-cloak, “glistening in the light.” She plays the lute, and he follows her until she sings-chants “… As I swore to you—Bahadur, I’ve kept so: Loyal until your death!” She casts the net over him; he struggles to free himself; the stage grows dark and echoes with a “blaring cry from the deep.” The scene shifts to the courtyard of Bilal’s estate. Bahadur wakes up; all was a dream. The morning sun bathes the scene. Halimah enters and holds his head with both hands and kisses him on the mouth. In the Epilogue, the entire cast appears. Tarkah takes her place with Bahadur and Halimah. She plays the lute and, smiling, sings a song about dreams that concludes with her “wish from me: May the forms of your dreams not be uglier than us.” The stage goes dark, leaving only the Drunkard, who wishes the audience “Good dreams—good night.” The curtain falls, and from behind the curtain a choir repeats: “Good Night!” (Beer-Hofmann 1963: 467-519). 

But this overview of the plot hardly covers everything in the scenario. Beer-Hofmann provides an astonishing amount of detail regarding production of the piece for the stage. He includes interludes between scenes that involve a Blind Singer commenting on the actions that precede and will follow the interlude, a device somewhat similar to the interpellator in ancient Roman pantomime. But the Blind Singer, along with the Drunkard, appears in the action as an outside figure who represents a detached perspective on the characters. Many details refer to the music in the piece, which occurs on stage as well as in the pit. The orchestral music should never rise above mezzoforte and perhaps never below it. In Wagnerian fashion, the text specifies the use of a harp, a horn, an oboe, timpani, a tuba, gongs, and a violin for specific effects or motifs—for example, a harp arpeggio should accompany the firing of the arrow—and the author indicates tempo and rhythmic changes in the music. He also indicates various sound effects, such as the rumbling of the storm in the garden scene, the rumbling of the sea, “a dull tone, as if someone were striking iron in deep darkness.” Occasionally, in the midst of much pantomimic action, characters abruptly utter one or two-word phrases: “The lute player!”; “Yes!”; “I command it!” These phrases are unnecessary as clarifications of motives; these function as startling sound effects that disturb the pantomimic action—or rather, make words and voices seem like shards of humanity engulfed by pantomimic action. The visual detail is extravagant. Beer-Hofmann describes costumes in detail, with much gold and silver ornamentation, purple cloaks, the dwarf wears at the end a turban containing a skull, the King wears black silk, as does the Queen Mother, while the giant wears “poisonous green with thickly woven silver,” and the warriors in the tower wear silver in contrast to the Emir and his troop, who wear gold. The characters in Bilal’s courtyard wear “southern Slavic or Near Eastern peasant costumes, while the characters in the King’s court and city dress in an “oriental” manner, with turbans, silken garments. The cast includes many—well more than twenty, perhaps as many as forty—Negroes, many of whom are naked except for gold loincloths, and who are slaves, warriors, or eunuchs. No other pantomime explicitly requires so many black bodies for performance, although Beer-Hofmann does seem to regard them as an ominous decorative element in the overall visual design, the signification of a “dark,” alien civilization. The action also makes use of startling, technically complex visual effects with torches, the fiery electricity of Tarkah’s veil-net, the arrow shot into Halimah’s chest, the riding of the golden horse, and the entrance of the ship with the “golden” archer on the mast. The scenery is monumental for each scene, requiring multiple levels, terraces, steps, balconies, towers, pillars, walls, a grandiose throne “made of black basalt,” immense doors and gates, trellises, curtains, and niches, into the shadows of which the giant and dwarf retreat, and Beer-Hofmann makes sure action occurs in all these places. The pantomimic action is also immensely detailed. But the scenario describes pantomimic actions that do more than construct the narrative; these actions provide a meticulous, anthropologically precise image of physical interaction within an archaic, imaginary society, as if the purpose of pantomimic action is to reveal how the entire organization of a society, the hierarchical distribution of power, desire, and identity rests upon particular gestures, actions assigned to particular bodies. Tarkah’s gestures, dances, actions create havoc within the society because both the King and Bahadur fail to grasp that their desires bring death, they summon a fatal music, a deadly voice, a lethal body that prevents them from differentiating the true Emir from the false Emir, from separating dream from reality. In each scene, Beer-Hofmann devotes so many pages to detailed descriptions of pantomimic actions integrated with scenic effects that it seems as if a major goal of the pantomime is to show how the mysterious interplay between bodily movement, props, environment, lighting, music, and physiognomy is inevitably the revelation of doom, a movement toward death that enters a scary territory of beauty that speech always makes invisible:

At the same moment, as the cupbearer enters the woman’s house, the dwarf becomes visible. He waves in the hallway—and past him file the group of black porters hauling the gifts. Behind him the dwarf with Tarkah’s lute. Bahadur, without turban or weapons, enters the hallway—Tarkah from the women’s house. She glances at him, and rushes joyfully from the background and throws herself on his breast. He embraces her for a moment, then pushing her away, shows a dark glance; with a sharp tilt of his head to the [the dead] King: “And he?” Tarkah wildly shakes her head decisively: “Never!” And again throws herself on Bahadur’s breast; she pulls him so deeply into the dark passageway that the embracing couple are no longer visible. The blacks have loaded up the gifts. Darkly coiled, scampering soundlessly on naked soles, the group presses forward in feverish haste. Weightless shine the silver instruments. The distant sleepy song growls now in the manner of a muted echo that escorts the blacks upward into the night (491).

This kind of intensity of description of physical action can overwhelm the reader page after page, but in performance this constant energy of pantomimic action integrated with scenic and musical elements can be exhilarating, as gripping as a powerful drug. The scenario is an engine of continuously inventive pantomimic action, some of which is quite complex:

The King takes his seat again. Bowing deeply, everyone else pulls back. While his court leaves through the right door at the back of the hall, the Queen Mother strides through the left pillar door of the women’s house. Near the pillar, next to which the captain of the bodyguard is at his post, stands Tarkah in her veil. The Queen Mother notices her. With a commanding gesture, she lifts Tarkah’s veil with the point of her walking stick. Tarkah throws the veil back, the captain recognizes her and flinches. The two princesses and the Queen Mother notice this. With a wave from the Queen Mother, the female slaves lead Tarkah into the women’s house. The princesses draw close to the captain. With scarcely moving lips, he divulges information. The princesses urgently convey the information to the Queen Mother. She frowns and strides with her entourage into the women’s house. Two slaves have placed wine vessels and a platter on the table […] (489).

Beer-Hofmann introduces simultaneous and overlapping pantomimic actions to show the intricate interlinking of physical actions that create what one might call the movement of a society. Freksa and Reinhardt attempted this kind of complicated action in Sumurun, but they saw simultaneous pantomimic actions arising from the assumption that each individual on stage has a unique character that causes him or her to move uniquely—an actor-centered approach. Beer-Hofmann prescribes the actions, the gestures, the qualities of movement more precisely because he sees physical action defining character—the character comes out of the action: the action comes out of the society’s structural positioning of the body within it—an author/spectator-centered approach. This approach seems more dramatic, because it establishes a structural (power/class) relationship between physical actions and bodies rather than a unique relationship between physical actions and characters. For example: the dwarf “waves,” the giant “waves,” Tarkah “waves,” and the Queen Mother “waves”: regardless of their unique physiognomies and regardless of their unique characters, the “waves” bestow on all these bodies an authority to initiate obedient actions performed by others, even though the “wave” does not specify what action the others should perform. Each actor might come up with an individual “wave” for the character he or she plays, but the scenario treats the “wave” as a sign of status rather than as an attribute of character. Tarkah, the giant, and the dwarf all behave deferentially toward the King and the Queen Mother, but their “waves” indicate to the spectator that they possess a power over everyone in the story, not because of their physiognomies, but because a larger force than social hierarchy, Death, invests their bodies with that power. Perhaps the most complex pantomimic action occurs in the garden scene. Here physical actions unfold on multiple levels. While Bahadur, Tarkah, the giant, and the dwarf sit at a large table, with a cupbearer standing behind them, an orchestra of female musicians performs, and a group of ten female slaves, with golden baskets filled with grapes on their heads, moves from left to intersect with a line of ten Negroes moving in march formation, with the movement of both groups “colored” by dancelike rhythms. On the terrace, another group of slaves and their supervisors operate a wine press, with all this work integrated with the tempo of the music, which begins slowly but becomes faster. Through the tree-covered path the Queen Mother, veiled in black, enters with her entourage of women, a doctor, and the bodyguard captain. Bahadur starts to rise to greet the Queen Mother, but Tarkah presses him down and rises instead to signal the musicians to continue playing. The dwarf and the giant “wave” the grape slaves to work stronger, faster. Tarkah “waves” yet another group of Negroes to come forth from the tree-covered path, and each female slave now has a Negro on the left and the right of her and has her arms around the neck of each Negro. All of these actions occur “rapidly.” At the same time, the sky slowly shifts from a perfect blue to an intrusion of clouds that gradually develops into a great storm. Much pantomimic action develops the interactions between the Queen Mother and those sitting at the table, while the slaves and Negroes continue with their actions. Eventually the Emir’s ship glides into view and the storm explodes, leading to the arrow shooting and the riot. Beer-Hofmann evidently understood that a long, almost two-hour pantomime narrative required increasingly complex pantomimic action to sustain the attention of the spectator. Pantomime narratives of more than a half hour in duration demand an innovative approach to physical action. By 1920, a film pantomime could extend well over two hours, as long as the spectator saw rapidly changes views of the action, without which no one would watch a film at all. In the theater, a scene could change, as it does in Das goldene Pferd, but as the time of narration increases beyond a half hour, a larger range of actions performed by more bodies is necessary to preserve the attention of the spectator. As with Prampolini’s Paris program of pantomime, spectators can enjoy nearly three hours of pantomime as long as they are watching a series of different narratives. A two-hour pantomime narrative requires a unique style of pantomimic imagination, a way of thinking about physical action, as complex as any style of writing necessary to write spoken drama. Beer-Hofmann displays this style with, among numerous other devices, his interesting use of the “wave” gesture. Although many other pantomime creators obviously displayed imaginative use of pantomimic action, Beer-Hofmann, by the immense scale of his scenario, suggests that the longer the narrative, the more detailed and varied the pantomimic action must become, unlike dance, which depends on repetition of movement to signify its detachment from the narrative. Dance frequently finds a place in pantomime, as it does in Das goldene Pferd, but it is always in the background, an incidental element, which only serves to foreground the pantomimic action, those physical actions that add to the narrative, that allow bodies to tell a story that cannot be told better, if at all, any other way (cf. Scherer 1993: 67-75; Elstun 1969: 181-191; Vollmer 2011: 472-483). 

            The fifth scene of the scenario seems to undermine the darkness of the narrative by making all the action that preceded it merely the content of a dream, although the Epilogue, in which Tarkah, the figure of Death, wishes the spectator good dreams and good night, seems ironic enough to undermine the supposedly happy ending wherein Bahadur wakes up to a long, unadventurous country life with Halimah. But Das goldene Pferd is a doppelgänger story that shows how “another life” inhabits the body of the protagonist, and this dream life is a presentiment of death, an image of a desire for freedom that is self-destructive. Beer-Hofmann saw pantomime as an optimum representation of a dream state, and from his perspective as a literary author, the dream state was where language was powerless, silent, against the beautiful actions of Death: Pantomime makes death visible, a point emphasized by the Blind Singer, who sings the “reality” of the protagonist’s situation but cannot see the action unfolding before him. The astonishing visual complexity of Das goldene Pferd shows the impact of film on pantomimic imagination insofar as Beer-Hofmann sought to create in the theater a visual experience that was impossible to achieve on film. Pantomime in the theater, not on film, created the most accurate connection between dreaming and death, because pantomime on the stage was the most transparent revelation of “another life” within the body. This view of pantomime is close to the ancient Roman idea of pantomime as a story of the body’s “metamorphosis.” Yet Das goldene Pferd has never reached the stage. The economic resources, the technology, the rehearsal time, and the pantomimic talent required to realize the scenario belong to film, not to theater. The scenario takes pantomime into a theater that has existed, if at all, only briefly under Viganò. In spite of its archaic subject matter, its Wagnerian soundtrack, and its ostensibly conservative resolution of a tragic “fate” by merely waking up, the scenario represents the modernist pantomimic imagination at its most ambitious level of inscription.

            As long as pantomime in the theater remained an experimental form of performance, its appeal rested upon innovation, upon extending the possibilities of performance into “modern” understandings of bodily signification, and upon creating instability rather than stability within theater culture. Innovation occurred through imaginative use of stage technology, stage design, musical accompaniment, pantomimic action, and narrative. On the narrative level, the most significant innovation was the abandonment of Pierrot and the commedia format as the primary basis for pantomimic action. As a result, pantomime became a much more serious art that inspired a complex technological and musical support, and, in Germany especially, a far larger number of people and theaters than was ever conceivable in the excessively stable, hermetic realm of Pierrot connoisseurship. Pantomime moved speechless performance well beyond the boundaries imposed upon it by dance, especially ballet, with its conviction that only beautiful movements performed by beautiful bodies can justify performance devoid of the power of speech to tell a story and “explain” why people on stage are there. The creators of pantomimes, focused on actions rather than movements, tended to find interesting the actions of a much wider range of bodies than the creators of dances in the theater. Modernist pantomimes therefore included dwarves, freaks, older bodies, self-consciously mechanized bodies (Futurist robots), monsters, nude bodies, black bodies, or roles taken by people who also performed in plays or cabaret or dance or appeared in silent films. But the pressure to innovate takes a steep toll on the pantomimic imagination. To construct a narrative out of pantomimic action is intensely challenging if the spectator has very limited or most likely no ability to change views of the action, as happens in a film. The narrative must come out of the pantomimic action, out of the body, not the image. It is a very stressful activity to construct a logical sequence of physical actions that tell a story or communicate ideas better than speaking or writing, because human society, in its constant need to regulate the body, does not encourage, so to speak, thinking with the body—that is, seeing what the body “says” when language cannot help one see. Playwrights can crank out one play after another; choreographers can produce one dance after another, composers can churn out composition after composition, because they all rely on some sort of language that subordinates the body to it and causes us to see something other or “more” than the body in performance. But creators of modernist pantomime were unable to sustain themselves in the genre. Innovative pantomime exhausted them; it was remarkable if they wrote or produced more than one pantomime. Beer-Hofmann attempted his second pantomime scenario thirty years after the first, and after the monumental Das goldene Pferd, any further venture into pantomime seemed utterly inconceivable. 

            But after 1930, pantomime itself seemed unimaginable, at least in relation to anything resembling the magnitude of experimentation and productivity of the previous four decades. In 1932, Reinhardt briefly revived Das Mirakel and a theater in Munich revived the 1924 Vienna version of Wedekind’s Die Kaiserin von Neufundland. But these productions now seemed like curiosities from a vanished era. The urge to experiment with new pantomimes had disappeared. The most likely reason is that silent films had also disappeared. Silent films signified a vast public appetite for pantomimic performance, and creators of modernist pantomime sought to accommodate this appetite with pantomime narratives and productions that filmmakers failed to make or that film was incapable of making. With the advent of talking films, the appetite for film pantomime was suddenly no longer large enough, at least according to the film industry, to justify the cost of producing silent films. Sound film technology encouraged some filmmakers to produce films that combined imaginative use of sound and strong musical soundtracks with naturalistic pantomimic action while containing hardly any speech, for example: Earth (1930), directed by Alexander Dovzhenko (1894-1956); Vampyr (1931), directed by Carl Dreyer (1889-1968); City Lights (1931), directed by Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977);  Emil und die Detektive (1931), directed by Gerhard Lamprecht; Das blaue Licht (1932), directed by Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003);  Päikese lapsed (Children of the Sun) (1932), directed by Theodor Luts (1896-1980); Ecstasy (1933), directed by Gustav Machatý (1901-1963); Amok (1934), directed by Fedor Ozep (1895-1949); and Modern Times (1936), also directed by Chaplin. Despite the success of such films, filmmakers overwhelmingly saw sound technology as the foundation for speech-driven storytelling. The unity of voice and image amplified public faith in technology to create more realistic representations of life and thus bring humanity closer to reconciling or somehow even diminishing the great distance between reality and the imaginary. Perhaps, too, audiences felt that talking films, as opposed to sound films, prevented the bodies of performers from signifying that which is stranger than anything they speak. This cinematic power of the voice to restrain, to control the body further implied that technology strengthened faith in language to sustain social unity or at least to assure that the body performed within the limits of language rather than outside of it. At any rate, pantomime in any modernist idiom disappeared because of a technological innovation rather than because of, say, the world economic crisis of the 1930s or the tempestuous political crises afflicting the Western democracies even in the 1920s. The theatrical pantomimic imagination simply could not respond to cinematic innovation with any greater innovation than it had already achieved in response to silent film. 

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Futurist Pantomime

Figure 145: Scene from Cocktail, pantomime by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, as performed in the Futurist pantomime show in Paris, 1927. Photo: Iwata Nakayama.

In Italy, pantomime had largely disappeared after the death of Salvatore Viganò and his Napoleonic era spectacles. French pantomime derived from the Italian commedia dell’arte, but Italians saw no benefit to a commedia without voices or to an expansion of commedia beyond what it had been for centuries. The Italian theater world found no inspiration in the ancient Roman art of pantomime, if, indeed, theater people were even aware of it. Pantomime appeared here and there in whatever remained of ballet. By 1900, the theater culture was pervasively stagnant, ramshackle, and moribund, heavily dependent on itinerant ensembles that lacked incentive to depart from the conventions and expectations that attracted deeply conservative audiences. Opera was the most vibrant and dynamic aspect of the Italian theater. Italians seemed distrustful or at least dissatisfied with voiceless performance on stage. Yet with the invention of cinema, Italians were guiding innovators in pantomimic film performance and in developing the narrative possibilities of film. In relation to the theater, however, Futurism (ca. 1909-1939) provided Italy’s strongest contribution to the early phase of European modernism. The Futurists, inspired by their charismatic founder and default leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), pursued a radical transformation of theater, and they possessed a keen sense of how to transform all their activities into attention-grabbing performances. Futurism was a movement driven by manifestoes, grandiose pronouncements, and loud advertisements of its presence. While numerous members of the Futurist movement, including Marinetti, produced a huge number of theatrical tracts, dramatic works, scene designs, theater technology schemes, and innovative performance projects, pantomime held almost no interest for them, probably because they associated it with an archaic form of theater that deserved to be obsolete, along with so much else in theater. The Futurists composed many sintesi, as they called their often very short texts for theatrical performance, but these “syntheses” of modernist theatrical actions rigorously avoided voiceless bodies in performance. Sintesi became voiceless when the performance included no human beings but instead consisted of the actions of machines, technology, the movement of lights in the performance space, the mechanized movements of objects, the choreography of marionettes, “electric dolls,” automatons, and robots, the “ballets” performed by squadrons of airplanes, and the “music” of turbines, machine guns, railway cars, and the intonarumori (noisemaking devices) invented by Luigi Russolo (1885-1947). Voiceless human bodies on the stage did not help the Futurists promote their important concept of “words in freedom,” whereby freedom from an oppressive heritage and diseased cultural institutions depended on detaching language, in writing and in speech, from the syntactic laws, typographic rules, literary conventions, and clichés of linguistic communication that “imprisoned” the mind and obfuscated any liberating view of the future. The only Futurist to describe his work for the theater as pantomime was the visual artist Enrico Prampolini (1894-1956). 

While studying painting in Rome, Prampolini became involved with Futurism in 1913 as a result of reviewing and publicizing Futurist art exhibitions. Futurism opened up for him an interdisciplinary approach to artistic production, and, like other Futurists, he initiated his affiliation with the movement by publishing theoretical essays and manifestoes, beginning with a statement, Chromophony (1913), on the relations between sounds and colors. Sculptor Umberto Boccioni’s (1882-1916) ideas about architecture as an extension of painting and sculpture urged Prampolini to explore scene design for the theater, and in 1915, he published an essay on “Futurist Scenography,” in which he introduced his ideas for a “dynamic” theater architecture wherein performance arose out of the kinetic interplay of architecture elements—colors, lights, shadows, planes, beams, panes, and “chromatic emanations from a luminous source” (Kirby 1986: 203-210). But Prampolini ran into difficulties with Marinetti and other Futurists because of his intense, impolitic competitiveness, and he suffered ostracism and a failure to gather any support from the movement for the realization of his ideas. He worked for a while in the commercial theater, where he gained considerable knowledge of European advances in scenic technology. For his friend, the Futurist photographer Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890-1960), he designed sets for the films Thais (1916) and Perfido incanto (1917). When the Ballet Russes visited Rome in 1916, Diaghilev sought a partnership with the Futurists, who suddenly found dance a promising subject for the application of Futurist performance theories. But Marinetti would not allow Prampolini to participate in the Futurist negotiations with the impresario. As it turned out, the financial difficulties of the Ballet Russes prevented any realization of the partnership. Prampolini then developed an alliance with the French avant-garde poet, dramatist, and editor Pierre Albert-Birot (1876-1976) to design the scenery and costumes for a production of the poet’s marionette play Matoum et Tevibar (1918) at the Teatro dei Piccolo (Teatro Odescalchi) in Rome in 1919 (Berghaus 1998: 264-290). Prampolini’s innovative colored lighting, combined with his startlingly abstract set design and robotizing costumes for the marionettes, overwhelmed discussion of the production: Marinetti invited him back into the Futurist club, and he received numerous opportunities to exhibit his work internationally with the Futurists and commissions to design productions of Futurist sintesi, “mechanical ballets,” and theater experiments, including a couple of works by Marinetti. In 1925, Prampolini exhibited in Paris his designs and model for a “magnetic theater” in which an entire theater, not just the stage, would be kinetic, with multiple platforms and planes capable of moving, rotating, ascending, and receding in relation to chromatic distributions of light. The designs won him the Grand Prix d’Art Théâtrale at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs. Dissatisfied with the theatrical resources available to him in Italy, Prampolini would move to Paris in the same year. There, at the Théâtre de la Madeleine, he established his Théâtre de la Pantomime Futuriste, whose aim, he explained, was to “demonstrate 1) the machine as a symbolic guardian of universal dynamism […] 2) the aesthetic virtues of the machine and the metaphysical meaning of its movements […] 3) the plastic exaltation of the machine and of mechanical elements […] 4) the stylistic expressions of mechanical art which spring from the machine as an intermediary between the spiritual concept of the object and the plastic evaluation of the subject.” “In this new type of spectacle, which is the expression of unreal life in movement, all the scenic elements converge in a dynamic exaltation of rhythm, in an orchestration and interpenetration of visions in freedom” (Berghaus 1998: 450-451). 

Of course, grand intentions always produce an unforeseen reality. Prampolino gathered together an unusual assortment of prominent talents to produce his program of performances. Günter Berghaus (1998: 451-458) gives a comprehensive description of the program of ten pieces that premiered on May 12, 1927. Many of the pieces embodied aesthetic qualities that contradicted the aesthetic principles that Prampolini claimed to define the identity of the Théâtre de la Pantomime Futuriste, and reviewers of the production did not fail to point out that much of the program evoked the past rather than intimated the future (e.g., Le Ménestrel May 20, 1927). La Naissance d’Hermaphrodite, with music by Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) from a scenario by Vittorio Orazi, was a neo-classical pantomime on a mythological theme, featuring an androgynous figure encountering her/his lover in a luxurious dream world. L’Agonie de la rose, by composer Vincenzo Davico (1889-1969), was apparently an “elegant” miming of the death of a flower accompanied by Davico’s impressionist music reminiscent of Debussy. Vladimir Golschmann (1893-1972) conducted the orchestra. Les Trois Moments, with scenario by poet Luciano Folgore (1888-1966) and composer Franco Casovola (1891-1955), who would soon renounce Futurism, employed film décor on behalf of a three-part narrative: in a forest, a satyr seduces a nymph with his syrinx and takes her to the big city; in a hotel lobby, a ventilator and a gramophone make love while being watched by a voyeuristic elevator with red and green lights for “eyes”; in a hotel room, noises behind a door assail the satyr and nymph, in Japanese dress, and eventually compel them to go through the door and leave behind their clothes, which dance as marionettes (Lista 1976: 112). This piece used Russolo’s intonarumori, and Prampolini designed an abstract forest that, along with “polychromatic lights,” dissolved distinctions between nature and mechanized urbanity. Popolaresca, by Prampolini and composer Francesco Pratella (1880-1955), used photographic projections, combined with “folkloric tunes” to narrate an Italian woman’s fantasy of being kidnapped by a Japanese officer. Le Dame de la solitude, by Folgore and Guido Sommi-Picenardi (1892-1949), was an expressionist piece featuring dancer-mime Maria Ricotti (1886-1974), formerly a student and partner of Georges Wague, playing a queen wandering in a gloomy, nocturnal castle dominated by immense caryatids; when she embraces one of the caryatids, it strangles her. The mood changed abruptly with Arlequin et le travesties, by Francesco Scardaoni, who actually remained attached to the Symbolist idea of theater as a “temple of beauty” (cf. Goldberg 1920: 150). Arlequin visits a department store, where he mistakes two mannequins for Rosanna and Colombine. When he learns they are mannequins, he switches his affections to living models. But when he discovers how much their clothes cost, he flees. Le Marchand de coeurs, with scenario by Prampolini, music by Casavola, and choreography by Valclav Veltchek (1896-1967), involved three scenes in which a merchant pursues the ideal woman as embodied by three female archetypes, a country/nature woman, an erotic, lascivious woman, and an emotional, romantic woman. In the third scene, the merchant “encounters their spiritual doubles, performed by marionettes.” The women reject him, so he chases away both the “real and simulated forms” of womanhood and “returns to his cave of eternal dreams” (Berghaus 1998: 454). Veltchek performed the role of the merchant, described by Prampolini as a “type d’ephebe astral.” Prampolini designed an abstract set of screens of different colored surfaces that could move and project silhouettes and photo imagery (by Brunius and Greville). The female costumes were allegorical (peasant, sexy bikini, Roman chiton), while the merchant wore an expressionist black body suit with a kind of red target sewn onto the chest. The acting, according to one reviewer, entailed the “marionettization and mechanization of the person represented” (456). With Interpretations mimique, Maria Ricotti returned to the stage to perform three slow, moody dances to music by Schmitt, Albeniz, and Grieg. Then Toshi Komoro (1887-1951), a Japanese modern dancer who had worked with Charles Griffes in New York during the war, performed Urashima, his adaptation of a Japanese fairy tale concerning a fisherman who discovers that the turtle he has saved is a princess. He follows her underground, but when he returns to his life above ground, he discovers that he is three hundred years old. Armande de Polignac (1876-1962) wrote the music in the dark, postromantic style she had adopted by the end of the war, if not before. The final piece on the program was a performance of Cocktail, a pantomime scenario by Marinetti. The scenario, like nearly all Futurist scenarios, was less than a half-page long (Lista 1976: 113). Silvio Mix (1900-1927) wrote the accompanying jazz score. The action takes place in a cocktail bar, where ten human bodies impersonate bottles of liquor, placed on two shelves, next to which is a giant siphon operated by a black barman, played by Veltchek. A black spectator, played by the Swiss Laban student Gilbert Baur (1903-1988), ascends to the stage from the audience and orders a cocktail. The order animates the bottles, which swirl around trying to mix the cocktail, while the swiveling siphon releases colored lights. The barman and the customer attempt to catch the bottles, but it all ends as “chaos and inebriety triumph” in a manner similar to Grosz’s Baby in der Bar (1928). The piece was “a joyous panegyric of mechanized life, where the primitive and sophisticated merge, humans become objects, and machines turn into intelligent beings” (Berghaus 1998: 457-458; cf. Martinez 2008: 216-227). 

Prampolini faced manifold technical and interpersonal difficulties in producing the program, but it proved quite successful, even if reviewers observed that the program contained pieces that were antithetical to the Futurist aesthetic agenda and represented performance styles that Paris had already seen years ago (cf. Zanotti 2015: 10). Prampolini planned another production in Paris, as well as a tour of European cities. But none of that happened. Instead, he toured three Italian cities, Turin, Bergamo, and Milan in 1928 with a ten-piece program that included only four pieces from the Paris program: Tre momenti, Popolaresca, Il mercante di cuori, and Cocktail; these he supplemented with pieces he deemed much more Futurist than what he had replaced. These new pieces emphasized the mechanization of humans and the interaction of humans with machines (Teatro Torino 2017): L’ora del fantoccio, pantomime by Luciano Fologre, with music by Alfredo Casella (1883-1947), who was a modernist without being a Futurist; Volutta geometrica, by Folgore and Guido Sommi-Picenardi; Ritmi spaziali, a “phono-dance” involving records on a gramophone, Prefazione, “grotesque pantomime” by Prampolini, with intonarumori soundscape by Luigi Russolo; another “grotesque pantomime,” Il pesce meccanico, by the same pair; and La salamandra (1924), a “dream pantomime,” by Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), with music by the poet-composer Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960). Pirandello’s two-page scenario in “five tempos” takes place in the atrium of a country villa and involves eight performers, including a dog (Pan) and a salamander. Pan guards a nymph against a large salamander by chasing it away with fire, but the salamander leaps out of its hiding place under a mill and attacks Pan, who manages to kill the salamander by playing the saxophone. Pan and the nymph bury the salamander and the saxophone, but flames arise from the grave. So they and the other shepherds start drinking and cooking over the fire (Pirandello 1924). But this piece seems quite out of place with the rest of the program, and in Milan, it was not even on the program, replaced by the Prampolini-Russolo mechanical pantomime Santa velocita, described by one reviewer as “without action, without characters, without scenery, and without music” (L’Impero, March 9, 1928: 3). Magito, Veltchek, Komori, and Wisiakova participated in the Italian tour, while Casavola conducted the orchestra. But the Italian tour was not a success. Reviewers insinuated either that Futurism was not respectful of Italian audiences or that Italian theaters lacked the resources to achieve the Futurist glorification of technology (Il Teatro Torino 2017; Berghaus 1998: 458-459). Prampolini’s Paris program may not have represented accurately the Futurist principles he ascribed to the Théâtre de la Pantomime Futuriste, but the program nevertheless offered an innovative, emotionally diverse, and even wild type of variety show that was much more complex structurally than any program with a more unified Futurist aesthetic. The Paris program revealed Prampolini’s gift for seeing the future of theater as something greater than technological or mechanical effects: the future was also a matter of a new type of structuring of the theatrical experience involving complex collaborations across a variety of works that shifted abruptly from one mood to the next and established the point, perhaps inadvertently, that the beauties of technology do not unify bodies, scenarios, actions, themes, images, or sounds across time and space; they create a much more fragmented or disunified image of the world than the manifestoes acknowledged or the Italian theater culture cared to embrace. Prampolini never again attempted a project with the magnitude of the Paris program. To gain access to greater theatrical resources, Marinetti and many other Futurists, including Prampolini, attempted to build an alliance with the Fascists, but Mussolini saw the future of Italian theater, not in relation to a belief in the transformation of Italian society through technology, but in relation to the glorification of a kind of populist humanism, a monumental neoclassicism, provincial comedies, the celebration of operatic traditions, and state-Fascist centralization of theater culture. Fascism seriously marginalized Futurism even before 1930, and after 1930, speechless performance was nearly extinct except for the “aerodanze” (her famous propeller dance) and “physical culture” solo dances performed by Giannina Censi (1913-1995) in 1930-1933 (cf., Vaccarino 1998; Bonfanti 1995). Prampolini shifted to a rather conventional career as a scene designer (Berghaus 1998: 462-463). Yet he was a major figure in pantomime history, because, more than anyone else, he saw that pantomime was, more than any other art, the most capable of revealing the future as the technologization not only of performance and narrative, but of human identity itself.

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