The Silent Eloquence of Marcel Marceau

Sometime in the 1950s, in Chicago, I saw the great mime Marcel Marceau perform a piece he called The Ages of Man. He began crouching, a creature huddled close to the ground. Slowly he unfolded his arms, drew himself up into an upright stance, raised his arms high, reaching the fullness of his stature, then—varying his gait and arm movements in keeping with the stages of life’s progression--began to turn inward and again contracted into the crouch. His arms crossed at his chest, the left hand turned slack, wilting in death. All this in four minutes, complete in what he has called “timeless time.’’

Nothing I have experienced has surpassed that performance in eloquence as a metaphor for the human life.

“Mime can reach the soul in silence,” Marceau has said.

As a ten-year-old refugee school girl in Nazi Austria, I watched the art teacher draw a grid on the blackboard, divide it into eight squares, and draw the figure of a man, head to toe, the parts of his body fitted into the grid according to specified proportions. The figure stood straight and rigid, fitting into the grid perfectly. I tried in vain to draw that man correctly and failed, concluding that I had no artistic talent. Later I saw Michaelangelo’s drawings of a man, unboxed and free. Marcel Marceau’s man had nothing in common with the Austrian art teacher’s confined figure. Much later, I tried drawing from a living model. The drawing was worthless, but I held on to the satisfying feeling I had while making it. The pencil, an extension of my hand, enabled my eyes to see what I was looking at.

What may be elementary to a visual artist can be a revelation to someone accustomed to playing primarily with words. Further lessons in the mind-body-spirit connection awaited later in life as I  took up Aikido and then T’ai chi, which allowed me to begin to embody what the great artist Marcel Marceau had revealed.

Marcel Marceau