I was writing in my journal, waxing profound about the arcs in my life. “Sometimes it seems like I’ve spent my life walking in place. I move along and then I hit a wall. After banging my head against it for a while, I often discover there was no wall, or that the wall ended just to the side of me but I was blind to the opening….” I stopped and stared at what I wrote. Holy crap, my life had been an imitation of my art.
For over 25 years, I performed as a mime artist. I loved every cliché: walking against the wind, getting trapped in a box, climbing endless flights of stairs. My practice made them metaphors for the human condition, each struggle I had against invisible forces resonated for me and my audience as I sobbed pitifully leaning on an invisible barrier only to see there was a doorknob right in front of me.
There have been many times in history when the mime artist was revered. In ancient Rome they were like rock stars — one even captured the heart of Emperor Justinian. The mime artist practices illusion, mastering isolations of body parts, that fool the eye and delight the mind. Michael Jackson apparently learned the rudiments of his “moonwalk” by studying Marcel Marceau. That is the craft, like learning the scales for a musician, or developing expertise at mixing paint.
The art of the mime is to reflect the human condition, to understand the foibles and triumphs our characters experience and embody them in stories that awaken and teach the audience. The craft serves the art: the mime’s ability to portray a broken heart, a greedy miser, the fool on the edge of the cliff. The true mime’s power is evoking empathy through revealing the emotions we are afraid to share.
At a certain point in my career, like in many of my mime pieces, the map of my journey had become unreadable. My work as a mime artist stagnant, I was literally “walking in place.” I had to choose new directions, and I found myself developing expertise in of all things: movement and the emotions. It turns out that neuroscience is finally catching up with the art of the mime, connecting dopamine, adrenaline, serotonin and other chemicals with our posture, breath and facial expressions. Dozens of studies and TED talks examine ideas like power posing, the link between slumping, depression and heart disease, and embodying compassion. Really, they could have saved millions of dollars and just asked a mime.
The study of the expression of emotions is as old as the human experience. Research suggests that language evolved out of music and gesture, and that gesture was the first form of both communication and entertainment. From India’s codification of emotions called “rasas,” to 19th century “Delsartism,” to the stylized expressions of Kabuki, humans have an instinctive understanding of how emotions affect our bodies. Our language is filled with embodied sayings: he broke my heart, I just can’t stomach it, she was a breath of fresh air. How is it that the world’s oldest art form has become the subject of scorn and parody?
Most contemporary people’s exposure to mime consists of passing by gold painted “statues,” or fending off obnoxious white faced buffoons with not a whit of craft or art in them. It’s easy to pass by a bad musician on the street, but a bad mime might chase you down. Charlie Chaplin was a mime. Comparing him to these hucksters is like comparing Beyoncé to some of the more painful TikTok imitations of her choreography.
The great mime actor Jean Louis Barrault once said that the art of mime appears when society has lost its voice. I started writing when I decided to stop miming — finding my voice after decades of silence. Perhaps, as we move into a world where more people begin to understand the link between their chemistry and their behavior, we will all be able to better embody the empathy of the mime. I still have my white face makeup and my striped shirt in storage just in case.