I remember the first day I experienced the art of corporeal mime. I stepped into a Black Box Theatre in North London filled with pre conceived thoughts of the world of mime: the man with the white face and gloves mimicking everything he sees. I sat with my back to a mirror watching the teacher guide us through an excersise which we had to follow and I remember very clearly that at that moment in time I forgot my name.. His movement and expression were like a painting in which every single part of his body spoke;  it told a story which touched the deepest parts of my human experience. (In front of me) There was a calm face, but a talking body. All dreams, meanings, thoughts, feelings, needs, and intentions stood out in such presence and awareness within every delicate movement of this body that I was in awe of so much Life moving in front of me.
I remember not knowing at all what I was seeing, I only knew that I needed to leave my job, my work, my studies and dive head first into the depths of what I saw. So I did. For three years I learned to embody the dramatic body that I inhabited.

There is a deep yearning inside, a longing, inside us all. A longing that the inner world we hold be expressed outwardly in the most accurate of ways. For a feeling, a thought, a question to have a place and to be embodied in the most truthful of ways. A longing to create. To be in tune with a rhythm that goes through us and out into Life and through it to understand life better, to understand my "being human" better.. That's what drove me eight years ago and still does. 

 

This artform holds a place for these impulses and drivers. If in pantomime the actor mimicked what was seen, in corporeal mime the human Questioned, felt, meditated, dreamt and planned; thoughts push and pull and carry with meanings and impulses which all have weight and rhythm bound in the mind's space and time.

 

Corporeal mime has a magic which makes "The Invisible Visible".  It was developed by Etienne Decroux when the revolution of the human mind was at peak of industrialised change.  He was a man who explored humanity and its functions in this world: he was an observer. He sought to portrays all our human being through the talking body.

 

 

 

 

Etienne Decroux’s dramatic corporeal mime is taking the body as a main means of expression and the actor as a starting point for creation with the aim of “making the invisible visible” (Etienne Decroux), of allowing the actor to show thought through movement.

Art of movement rather than art of silence, dramatic corporeal mime is first of all the art of the actor/actress. An actor, whatever his artistic ambition might be, must, before all, be present, “be” on stage and this presence is shown through the body. The body is what sustains the costume, what the spectator sees, what carries the voice. It is the skeleton, the hand in the glove.

Placing the body at the centre of his work, the corporeal mime actor seeks to recreate the essence of drama, to integrate in the body all principles of an action or a dramatic situation – disequilibrium, instability, causalities, rhythms – and to attain the control of the latter through learning a corporeal technique. The actor becomes sculptor and sculpture.

The dramatic corporeal mime of Etienne Decroux, as a teaching process, aims to give to the actor this control of presence on stage, of placement, displacements, actions through learning the technique, articulation, mobile statuary, improvisation and repertory.

To study a technique, as in music, multiplies the possibilities of the actor, allows him to do what he wants, not only what he can. In this way, it is a door open towards more freedom and imagination, and more clarity in in the execution.

ETIENNE DECROUX (1898 – 1991)
Having studied at Jacques Copeau’s Theatre School in France, Decroux became a cinema and theatre actor and collaborated with, among others, Antonin Artaud, Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet and Marcel Carné in the movie ‘Les Enfants Du Paradis’. He dedicated the second part of his life to the creation of a theatre which takes the actor as the centre of the creation processand considers the actor’s body as the principal instrument. He created numerous pieces, investigated into the body’s expression for many years and gave classes at the school L’Atelier in Paris, Teatro Piccolo in Milan and the Actors’ Studio in New York. Moreover, he directed his own company and toured Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Great Britain and Israel.
In 1962, Decroux founded his school in Paris, where he taught and continued developing his technique. Many actors studied with him, among others: Jean Louis Barrault, Marcel Marceau, Jessica Lange and Michel Serrault. His work as well as his contribution to theatrical knowledge earned him worldwide recognition. His name figures among the great masters, such as Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Grotowski, or Lecoq.
There are numerous schools (ESAD of Valencia, RESAD of Madrid, Instituto del Teatro of Barcelona, as well as schools in Paris, London, etc.) at which Etienne Decroux’ technique is taught as a complement to other physical or corporeal techniques. In Spain, however, the International School of Dramatic Corporeal Mime in Barcelona is the only one that offers a specialized and intensive training in this technique.