The art of mime has come a long, elastic way from Marcel Marceau, whose cute Chaplinesque manner became so ubiquitously influential that it could safely be called “classic” mime. But, as the cliche goes, a sea change has taken place in contemporary European mime, a good sample of which—the Theatre du Mouvement—arrived in Calcutta courtesy Alliance Francaise and ICCR (Birla Sabhagar, March 4).
This trio comprising Claude Bokhobza, Yves Marc and Lucas Thiery obviously belongs to the new trend of lengthy, thematically unified, single theatrical presentations (as opposed to a series of brief sketches) performed by a group (as opposed to solo mimes). The evening’s work, titled Another short hour, took exactly one uninterrupted hour and bore traces of the absurdist world-view of Polish mime Henryk Tomaszewski on the one hand and the psychoanalytically disturbing images formed by the Swiss trio, Mummenschanz, on the other. Like much recent mime, it used words occasionally to heighten the effect, but more for their sonic qualities than for their meanings.
Three visual metaphors dominated the show: lost men adrift on a voyage upon the sea of life, an awesome chute into which they slide and disappear, and an office room where scrolls of computer print-outs shoot through the air creating spectacular mock-battle scenes. The abstract but imaginative stage pictures, the precise, almost robotic synchronization and choreography, the angular moves taken from break dance, the architecture of boxes in various sizes, the unbelievable plasticity of the men’s bodies (who squeezed into crates like contortionists) combine to make Theatre du Mouvement a truly postmodern outfit.
(From The Telegraph, 17 March 1993)