Speechless

Rêves, chimères et mascarade is fearless, chaotic and not your striped-shirt kind of mime performance

SILENT SIGNALS: Rêves, chimères et mascarade

by NEIL BOYCE

I wrote last year about mime company Omnibus and the high level of work performed therein: their passion for expressing with movement and gesture what words cannot. To launch their 2009–’10 season, artistic director Jean Asselin picked a diverse group of directors for the triple-authored work, Rêves, chimères et mascarade.

Réal Bossé, Pascal Contamine and Christian Leblanc—who call the collaboration a creative “blind date”—worked with a cast of six young performers, most of them students of Asselin and Denise Boulanger in the company’s associated École de Mime.

More a series of skits and moods than a linear story, the themes centred on couples, romance, hooking up and the ridiculousness of our everyday routines and insecurities—all of it tossed about with great abandon.

Mime is nothing like the popular striped-shirt image we have of it. First, these mimes speak if they feel like it. Performers might break into a disjointed monologue (a man likes to watch children play, but is worried people will think he’s a molester, just as he thinks when he sees someone looking) or slide across the floor or get pulled around by their hair.

Scene morphs into scene at a dizzying pace: Three goofballs with nervous tics wheel a grim-faced girl around on a trolley, trying anything to make her laugh. As they slap, punch and knock each other down, she begins to giggle and is soon in uncontrollable fits.

A would-be mugger is frustrated when his obsessive-compulsive disorder gets in the way, requiring him to bust moves à la Michael Jackson.

A man spots a couple making out and says, “Your girlfriend’s fun … can I try?” She obliges. Soon, a kind of temporal tomfoolery begins as the couple kiss passionately while, oblivious, a frenzy of activity surrounds them at hyper speed.

It all devolves (or evolves) into a giant masturbatorium, where the performers’ frantic groping in their pants is at odds with their mundane remarks about the weather or finding a new recipe.

Oh, and an “ass dog” makes a recurrent appearance: a guy walking backwards on all fours, barking from his posterior at the madness surrounding him.

And so on.

The work owes a debt to movement-based theatre giant Gilles Maheu and his company Carbone 14: a shared sense of how to overwhelm an audience, changing rapidly from joy to sadness; alternating action and pitched emotion with dead calm.

But what impresses most is the freedom and fearlessness they express, and not just the 20-something performers. After the curtain calls, Asselin, in a classy move, brought out the entire company—tech crew, stage manager, everyone—to well-deserved applause.

STOOD UP

A heartfelt apology to any who saw our Fall Arts listing of Fenulla Jiwani’s 30 Dates at the Centaur and took it as an endorsement. The story of an East Asian woman’s search for a husband was a god-awful black hole of wretchedness, sucking both time and space into its gravitational pull of cliché and mediocrity. This hellspawn of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Sex and the City celebrated the worst elements of popular culture, leaving only a sense of shame and irrevocable loss. Perhaps a national day of mourning could be declared on the anniversary of its creation, that we may someday learn from this tragedy.

RÊVES, CHIMÈRES ET MASCARADE,
TO OCT. 10 AT ESPACE LIBRE
(1945 FULLUM). INFO: (514) 521-4191,
MIMEOMNIBUS.QC.CA