Mime, Metaphor and the Wildness of Words

Robert McNeer, Italy

Robert McNeer is a theatrical educator, actor and director, co-founder of “La Luna nel Pozzo,” a cultural centre in southern Italy, where he hosts a summer theatre festival in a stone amphitheatre of his construction, as well as Waldorf school trips. He regularly works with professional and non-professional actors, teachers in schools and patients in psychiatric wards, as well as with the differently-abled. He has co-founded an Italian social clowning group, and planted both a small forest and a large labyrinth at his home.
www.la-luna-nel-pozzo.com
E-mail: lupo.teatro@libero.it

Over the years, I have periodically worked with teachers and teachers-in-training, especially foreign language teachers. These are always precious opportunities for me, a chance to deepen my inquiry into the relationship between body and voice and between word and gesture. Specifically this has led to a focusing on the refinement and deepening of perceptive capabilities and towards a fuller presence in the world, as well as on developing a richer teaching vocabulary.

I recently came across the following quote, from Jacques Lecoq's book, Le Corps Poetique (misleadingly translated as The Moving Body), which helped me bring into focus an intuition which has been surfacing in my work over the last years:

To mime is literally to embody and therefore to understand better (Lecoq 2002, 22).

Reading these words, it occurred to me that mime is to theatre what metaphor is to poetry, that is, at the synesthetic heart of the matter. If I make a metaphor, if I say Tom is a bullrush, I'm telling a lie which invites the listener to stretch her imagination, looking for the truth in that which is literally untrue. There is already a fundamental invitation to play in the gesture: it is the playful part of me which entertains-- lovely word-- the transparently untrue equation regarding the human being Tom, and the water plant.

In this way, if the auditor is game to join, we share together a play of incompatible realities. This generosity -- a willingness to accept the risk of open-ended play, is of course an important quality which the metaphor cultivates, opening a playground, scary for some, where things are not so securely separated, but all is in movement. Maybe I even notice, awakened by the surprise of the proposal, that “bullrush” is made of two words, each of which can resonate separately with “Tom,” subtly altering my feeling of what “Tom” is, as well as enriching my sense of “bullrush.” In this way the words are freed of their cognitive chains. It is significant that the game works even if I don't know what a “bullrush” is: at the same time that part of me reaches for a dictionary, another part fills the gap with an ad hoc idiolect definition. This is connected to what I see as the wildness of words: the auditor can witness, but cannot control this resonance. And neither can the poet, having once set it in motion. It is at the same time an exercise in magic, and in humility. Through this exercise, we get to know words differently, on their terms, rather than just ours. We entertain an untruth, in order to honor a mystery, part of art's solemn play.

And the same goes for Lecoq's definition of miming as a means of understanding the world. What the mime does is exactly the same thing as what the metaphor does, but physically grounded. That is, as an artist I am bringing the lie to life: although there is demonstrably nothing in my hands, I am drinking a coffee. In this way I invite the beholder to hold two incompatible realities together at once, without imploding them into a mono-reality. This is, simply, the invitation to play, exercising Keats' “negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable grasping after fact and reason...” as he so emphatically put it (Keats 1899, 277).

Through the activity of mirror neurons, the spectator is also drinking a coffee, is also shocked and repulsed to discover that it has been sweetened with salt, not sugar, although neither salt, nor sugar, nor coffee nor cup are literally present. And more again: as Lecoq points out, through the identification which is the basis of mime, I literally embody the world; I create physical metaphor. The exercise “I am an olive tree" moves in me, the mime, powerful empathetic forces. Just as the word is freed of its cognitive chains in spoken metaphor, so the egoistic fetters on me are loosened as I dedicate my imagination to the embodiment, not only of the extra-individual, but even of the extra-human. I experience, not an idea, but a felt-sense, of empathy for another sentient being.

I feel it is important to practice mime, not as a technique, but as an attitude, because it tones up our muscles for empathy. We can develop a habit of engaging physically with the world, while heightening our sensitivity to the often ineffable way that the world continuously engages with us, from the changes of light with the cycle of the day and the seasons, to our internal, skeletal response to the movement of water over stone, for instance. I think of this kind of attention, simply, as physical prayer, which stretches our capacity to engage with the world humbly, on its terms rather than just ours.

In his poem, The Breeze at Dawn, Rumi says, “You must ask for what you really want.” This is an imperative to which very few of us can respond fully. But taking the time to experience the world as an olive tree or a lemon, or a dog or a cloud, releases us momentarily from the stranglehold of our individuality, so that we are not caught unprepared, like those who receive three wishes in the fairy tales, wasting them in pointless chatter. When the breeze at dawn offers its secrets, we are prepared to respond more fully, because we have imaginatively explored the alternatives.

I take Lecoq's expression, to “understand better,” as understanding with the heart, as well as with the head, recognizing, on a cellular level, that the two are not just compatible, but symbiotic. How much better, says Oscar Wilde in his essay, The Truth of Masks, to enjoy the rose, then to place its roots under a microscope (Wilde, 1982, 426). I think both understandings are to be encouraged. Most of us have more experience with the microscope. But by letting the wilderness cultivate us, instead of the other way around, we can offer ourselves, physically, to the risky synesthesia which embodies the rose, as well as the earth whence it draws, the sun, wind and rain towards which it strains. This is an understanding of the world as being of us, rather than simply happening to us.

In the words of Mary Oliver's poem, Wild Geese:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting ―
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Keats, John. The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats. New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1899.
Lecoq, Jaques. The Moving Body. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Wilde, Oscar. “The Truth of Masks.” In The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Richard Ellman (ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

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