When Mime Art Meets Cello Music
Mime actor Larry Ng
Mime and music – the former without a sound and the latter without a shape – they seem so distant from each other. Is it possible they will meet at all? If so, where will it be?
If you speak of dance instead of mime, perhaps it will be easier for us to imagine because rhythms in dance movements often share close relationships with those in music. Also, we can often find repetition and variations in dance movements which are similar to music structures and formations. But for mime movements, it’s another story because they have their own type of rhythms. Though music may accompany mime performance, mime movements may not necessarily follow closely with the music.
Still, mime art can be closely connected to music. It is from my experience that I can strongly relate it to bow instruments, cello in particular. It is particularly explicit in the training and techniques of Corporeal Mime, established by the Father of Mime, Etienne Decroux. This system of theatrical performance also laid the foundation of the later well-known Pantomime style developed by Marcel Marceau.
This was precisely the stream of mime art I studied in UK. The two major teachers there were disciples of Decroux at his late and last stage of teaching. I have come to notice that my senior classmates and instructors had preferences in taking cello music as a source of their inspiration or helping them derive their imagination. In fact, the few classical repertoires by Decroux were often accompanied by cello pieces. Interestingly, the mime classes I had there were always "loud" instead quiet. Our instructors would continuously guide us by "singing out" the dynamo-rhythms. Decroux once joked that anyone who passed by his classroom would have thought it was a singing class. (Of course, the word ‘singing” here did not refer to singing any pop songs or any songs with lyrics.)
So how did this interesting phenomenon happen? Can it be a clue for exploring the connection between mime art and music?
Based on my above learning experience at the mime school, my layman views and interpretation on cello music and my practical experience of mime art, I believe the first common ground that mime art and cello (and also singing or, in a much broader sense, music) share is “vibration.” For Corporeal Mime, besides creating gestures, images and dynamics with their physical bodies, a more fundamental or at least equally fundamental task for a mime performer is the performance of “vibrations.” These vibrations are generated from the tensions and changes in such tensions amongst different body parts. Each muscle and its muscle fibres are like threads of strings and, back and forth, these intertwining strings will brush over each other to create waves after waves of “vibrations” that come from deep down the soul and touch the heart of each soul. Even in the stillness after movements are completed, some kind of “vibration” will still linger. That is why Decroux believed mime could condensely represent people’s struggles and their battles while illustrating a sense of tragedy and sublime resulting from the earthy and physically finitude of human beings as mortals who try to break through their limitations. This kind of “vibration” in itself is the presentation of traces of human drama.
Therefore, I frequently emphasize the idea of “vibrant silence” in mime art which is more fundamental than melodies and rhythms because this vibrant silence will lead to the start of “time” from stillness or silence. It is also the foundation of creating the sense of time in mime art.
Some say the sound of cellos resembles the human voices the most while some would argue otherwise. Nevertheless, it is the vibrations of the sounds of singing and cello that touched me the most in my first contacts with them. Such vibrations have a unique intimacy that can’t be strongly felt from other instruments (not that it can’t be found elsewhere at all). When I hear the cello or someone singing, as a layman listener, I will pay special attention to appreciate the vibrations and the change in tension brought out by such vibrations and will feel how the music leads my heart and resonates with it. There were even moments in which I would be deeply touched just by the vibration created from a single stroke of bow on the strings.
About the Author
Larry Ng
Larry has received varied theatric training which included the 2-year theatre programme on movements by Lecoq offered at the International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA) and a 1-year Decroux’s corporeal mime training offered at the International School of Corporeal Mime both held in London. He is also a graduate of Stage 4 training at the Playback Theatre in the US, North American Drama Therapy Association (NADTA) certified drama therapist and the International Medical and Dental Hypnotherapy Association (IMDHA) certified hypnotherapist. He also learnt from Familie Floez and Donato Sartori on mask design and making.
Over the years, Larry has provided movement training all over the world including Germany, England, Switzerland, Poland, Russia, Italy, Hungary, Belgium, Austria, Pakistan, Mainland China and Hong Kong. He also repeatedly taught various movement and mask theatre programmes at the Poznań Academy of Performing Arts (PAPA) in Poland. He was also invited in the summer of 2015 to be one of the three major instructors for the 8th and the 11th School of Modern Mime held at Warsaw Mime Centre in Poland.