Ssssh!

The actors stay mum at the fourth edition
of the Montreal mime festival

SILENT SINGING: L’Amour est un opéra muet

By NEIL BOYCE

It’s all Marcel Marceau’s fault. Although he was one of the founders of mime and its most well known exponent, try to get any respect for this influential art when all anyone thinks of is that flower-holding, white-faced, striped-shirt clown pulling on an invisible rope and forever escaping from an imaginary box. It’s enough to make you shoot yourself (silently) in the head.

No one knows this better than Jean Asselin, founder of Omnibus theatre, card-carrying mime and creator of the triennial Rencontres internationales du mime de Montréal. The three-week celebration, which started this past Tuesday and runs until Oct. 11, fills the three-storey Espace Libre building with workshops, screenings and performances from 10 companies and 30 performers, all aiming to illustrate the “eloquence of the human body.”

I ask if people have an accurate idea of what mime is. “Not. At. All,” he says, laughing. “For better and for worse, Marceau made mime known throughout the world. Everyone knows the word, but they see this art form as something minor or comical—niaiserie—which it is not at all.”

“But this period is passing,” he continues. “I’m quite happy with the 35 years of mime we’ve done here, and I feel a new sensitivity to the work. You have three schools in the world: London, Paris and Montreal. In Montreal, mime has best integrated itself into the theatre community. There are no theatre schools that don’t teach mime, and our work is widely respected.”

Performers from France, Germany, England and the Netherlands join Quebec artists as different schools of thought and movement merge and contrast. “You don’t have the barrier of language,” says Asselin. “It’s universal.” Styles incorporating circus work, marionettes, gymnastics, and dance are featured, with work ranging from clowning to drama, and from short performance to a full-length “mute” version of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte entitled L’Amour est un opéra muet.

This latter production with mimes and musicians follows closely the story of betrayals between men and women in the opera. “But what comes out of this production,” says Asselin, “is the money factor: what is obscene is not sex, but money.”

A subsection of the festival, Théâtre de Poche (roughly translated: Ugly-Ass Theatre) features several short solo works, including Roxane Chamberland’s edgy road trip piece Le Roxy horreur show.

In all, a rare chance to see how the form has evolved since the passing of old masters Marcel Marceau, Jacques Lecoq and Étienne Decroux (who taught Asselin and actor Jessica Lange, among others), and how it continues to influence theatre today.

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Lynne Cooper and her Sunk in the Trunk collective continue their tour of schools and Maisons de la Culture, tomorrow, Friday, Sept. 26 at 7:30 p.m. at Polyvalente de Pierrefonds (13800 Pierrefonds). The warmly received show—about a clown named Wendy who lives in a trunk and encounters a border guarded by toilet paper—tells a story of frontiers, territory and the fear of the unknown. The clown universe mixes puppetry, dance and music, while Cooper’s unconventional onomatopoeic language lapses into English and French.

www.clocloval.com/trunk