Early on in mime school, I hit a brick wall. It’s about 6ft high and the width of my outstretched arms, but you can still see my shiny, plum-faced embarrassment through it. “First you hate the wall,” internationally renowned mime artist Nola Rae prompts, as we scratch and smack at the stale air, “and now you love the wall.” We drool and shimmy against the imaginary bricks and I wonder if I’m secretly being filmed for a prank show. I wave my arms awkwardly in a caress, wondering how much shame I’m willing to wade through. “It is the most beautiful wall you have never seen.”
Rae is a co-founder of London international mime festival. Originally a dancer, she trained with Marcel Marceau in Paris. I’ve joined the 70-year-old Australian performer’s coveted two-day workshop at the festival to attempt to learn her art.
A mime artist, Rae offers, is an illusionist. “We grab things out of the air. We make our audience see what isn’t there.” Over the weekend, she teaches us the skills of rhythm, rupture and articulation. We become zombies, spiders, misers and flies. We bob and crouch and hop as she teaches us snippets of history through Marceau, Étienne Decroux and commedia dell’arte.
There are two dozen of us. Our group includes a clown, an improv duo and drama-school students. They all carry themselves with such confidence. Their exaggerated movements seem to flow effortlessly through their joints and fingertips, while I’m trapped inside my head panicking about how awkward I feel. “Don’t worry about being stupid or making mistakes,” Rae advises. “That’s how you learn.” And yet, the worry lingers.
For comfort, I cling to the few others who have little experience in performing on stage. There’s a young woman who has never acted but wanted to give mime a go, and a retired councillor who has been going to the mime festival for years and thought it would be fun. Then I’m paired up with 10-year-old Eva.
An all-round fan of stories (her cat is named after Harry Potter Hermione’s Crookshanks), Eva didn’t realise the class would be full of adults when she signed up but doesn’t seem the slightest bit intimidated. A brilliant performer with an eye for timing, she takes the biggest risks and builds the wildest inventions, encouraging the rest of us to be ever more playful with our actions.
We’re partnered up for an exercise where we have to mimic each other while crossing the space to meet in the middle of the room, as if greeting a long lost friend, only to meet, realise it’s the wrong person, and waddle away. When it’s our turn, Eva leads. We shout and grumble and squeal, flinging our arms and legs and jumping around like deer. At one point, she makes me laugh so hard I have to catch my breath before I can copy her, rasping like a wildcat and wobbling like jelly. When we cross in the centre she makes me walk like a crab across the whole length of the space back to the starting line. I can’t stop grinning. Finally rid of my stifling embarrassment, I start to get to grips with the task. Look through the bright eyes of an eager, intelligent child, and mime is all about play.
Mime doesn’t have to mean someone in a black-and-white stripy top stuck in an imaginary box (though I can now very effectively push away a heavy invisible box, should the need arise). Instead, the best way to describe it, Rae says, is through “panto-mime”. Though the word has been hijacked by the glitzy celeb-filled family Christmas show, it originally means “to play all”. While it can come across as a highly pretentious art form – particularly, Rae says, “if you take yourself too seriously” – mime celebrates the skill of playfulness. “To be silly is quite an art.”
Mime makes us focus on the little things: eye contact, touch, individual movements. To mime is to play a game and stick to the imaginary, wondrously childish rules as well as you can. It is the comedy in someone falling over and the pleasure of making someone laugh. It is the skill of telling a good story, eyes wide and lips sealed. Mime, I have learned, is the art of paying attention. At least, that’s what I think it’s all about, sweaty and aching as I leap over a brick wall, pick up a heavy suitcase, slip on a puddle of water and wallop into a tree on my way out.
The London international mime festival runs until 2 February.
