Mimes often find themselves on the wrong end of jokes. But two of them, Laurie Willets and T. Daniel, have spent their careers bucking the stereotype.
The pair appears this week at Illinois Wesleyan University as part of the Illinois Chamber Music Festival, performing mimed interpretations of classical pieces and giving workshops to young musicians.
Willets and T. Daniel trained with the mime credited with popularizing the persona of a beret wearing, white-faced street performer, Marcel Marceau, and with Marceau's teacher, Étienne Decroux, the father of modern mime.
But it all started about six decades ago at Illinois State University, where as co-eds, Willets and T. Daniel met and fell for their artform. Marceau appeared at ISU in 1975, while T. Daniel was a graduate student, touted in The Pantagraph as “the foremost interpreter, without props, words or protection, of one of the oldest, though least practiced and most difficult of the performing arts—the art of gesture.” Tickets ranged from $4.50 to $5.50.
“I tried very hard to get an introduction to Marceau and nothing worked,” said T. Daniel. “The short story is, after his performance, I snuck backstage.”
T. Daniel posed as crew member, told the crowd Marceau was tired and requested the security guard not let anyone in.
“And then I walked in,” he said. “I asked [Marceau] to sign my program and told him I wanted to study with him. I went home and wrote him a letter, which is what he suggested I do. A year and a half later, I was in Paris.”
Is this all there is?
As Willets and T. Daniel started performing and touring, they felt limited by Marceau’s training.
“It just didn’t seem enough,” T. Daniel said.
“It seemed there was more foundation,” Willets said. “We wanted to know what that was.”
While on tour in Europe, the couple made arrangements to talk to Pierre Verry in Paris, a close friend of T. Daniel’s and longtime partner to Marceau.
“We sat with him and said to him, ‘Is this all there is?’” T. Daniel said. “He said no, but you are now ready to study with Étienne Decroux—the man who taught both Pierre and Marceau.”
Their time with studying Decroux’s corporeal mime technique “filled in blanks,” Willets said.
“What Decroux gave to us was the idea that mime is not the illusions; it is the body expressing ideas by itself,” T. Daniel said. “A mime performance doesn’t take place on the stage. A mime performance takes place in your mind. When we understood that, everything changed.”
Expanding the form
Decroux’s pedagogy gave Willets and T. Daniel more artistic freedom within their artform, which shares similarities with physical theater and dance but is distinct in its approach.
“Decroux was taking each part of the body—from the fingers and head all the way down to your toes—taking each different movement and combination thereof to create drama, comedy and abstract thought,” Willets said.
The couple rarely confines themselves to the sorts of vignettes Marceau did, opting instead for full-length productions and mimed adaptations of classical music, following each phrase as an idea, rather than following beats like a dance.
Their long-running relationship with the Chicago Symphony and other orchestras physicalizing classical pieces is just part of what prompted an invitation to the Illinois Chamber Music Festival.
A series of movement workshops with the festival’s young string players and pianists are based on the principle that instruments merely make sounds—musicians make music.
“Igor Stravinsky has said it is not enough to hear the music; you must see the music,” said T. Daniel. “What we are trying to teach them is how to show the music to the audience.”
“It has to start within them. It’s so important to build the individual musician first without the instrument,” Willets said. “We’re doing different exercises and ways we confront a piece.”
Willets admitted it took a few sessions to get the young players on board.
“The kids are coming up to us and saying, 'I really want to have that in me,'” she said. “'I want to have the character in me. I want to have the music in me.' They ask for help after the class—and we know now that this is reaching all the kids.”
Optimism for pantomime's future
Such interdisciplinary applications are one way Willets and T. Daniel keep their artform alive. Another is eventually finishing the encyclopedia of mime they started writing years ago.
“All the different artforms have these waves,” Willets said. “We need mime and we need all the other arts.”
Manifestations of mime can be seen in physical theater and clowning. But for purists familiar with Decroux’s technique, it’s not the same. Still, the couple doesn’t worry about mime dying.
“The idea that mime has died out has happened throughout its history,” T. Daniel said. “But the foundation of theater still remains mime. Theater needs mime more than ever.”
Laurie Willets and T. Daniel perform at 5 p.m. Friday, July 26, at the Illinois Chamber Music Festival at Illinois Wesleyan University’s Presser Hall, 1210 N. Park St. The festival’s faculty concert takes place at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 24, in the same location. Both concerts are free.
