After the war, Marceau joined Charles Dullin’s School of Dramatic Art, in Paris, intent on becoming an actor.
“We were alone on stage, making funny movements and not speaking.”
Teachers at Dullin’s school had a dream. They wanted to create a new poetics of theater to supplant the decadence and mediocrity. In early twentieth-century Paris, stage actors focused entirely on their voices and facial expressions. Their bodies were inexpressive anchors. Then, a writer named Jacques Copeau, who at thirty-three had never set foot on a stage, envisioned a renewal: Actors who were also playwrights. Actors who performed without words on a bare stage. The body was their text.
Étienne Decroux: intellectual, theoretician, teacher, actor. As a young anarchist, he enrolled in performing arts school to study political oratory. But his path was diverted, and soon he brought all his dogmatism and verbosity to mime. Decroux sneered at bumbling pantomimes who flailed about onstage. “That play of face and hands which seemed to try to explain things but lacked the needed words. I detested this form.” His wordless theater stepped over hapless romantics and their flower-seller girlfriends. Decroux wanted to train and isolate the body. To shift gravity, challenge balance, create a physics of compensation. He called this corporeal mime. “Art should be serious after all.”
Leave speech behind. The body has its own language: weight, resistance, hesitation, surprise. Decroux was so obsessed with the purity of his new art that for years he taught and performed completely nude. He took to wearing loincloths only when he realized that his audience was distracted. Marceau later said of his teacher, “The work was very beautiful, but abstract, not unlike the Cubists.”
Decroux met Marceau, taught Marceau, and proclaimed the young actor a natural mime.
The critic Walter Kerr later wrote of Decroux, “It is the teacher’s fate never to be incomparable himself; he frees talent to go where he cannot go.”
Of course, Marceau was not a Cubist. His work was far from abstract. He created the beloved Bip. He kissed the hand of Charlie Chaplin for birthing the Little Tramp. He thanked Charles Dickens for his Pip. But when historians and critics whispered Pierrot, Pierrot, Marceau responded, “Pierrot was a French figure; Bip is a citizen of the world.”