This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

21st June 2008

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“Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence...”

You would imagine that the Desiderata has little in common with a theatre phenomenon variously described by critics in Europe, America and Australasia as “dazzling”, “a spectacle” and even “a gigglefest”. What, after all, could Max Ehrmann’s austere spiritual poem have to do with a group of actors, dancers and clowns that have (in various forms) been performing together for over three decades – including an unbroken three-year stint on Broadway?

But Mummenschanz is no ordinary troupe of entertainers. And Mummenschanz 3 x 11, their 33-year retrospective show that is currently touring South Africa, is no ordinary piece of entertainment. For one thing, although they tell stories, the performers of Mummenschanz – which could loosely be translated as “masquerade” – do not speak a word.

Founders Bernie Scürch and the late Andres Bossard grew up in Switzerland, a country that has four official languages (with English as an unofficial fifth). Granted, that’s not as many as South Africa, but the Swiss are well acquainted with the curse of Babel: the conflict caused and aggravated by linguistic differences. So one can understand why, back in the 1970s, Scürch, Bossard and co-founder Floriana Frassetto set out to use their training in mime and physical theatre to “create a non-verbal theatrical language that would transcend the traditional barriers of language and culture”.

Using a variety of props and masks that (though they are made out of the simplest of materials) can bend and flex with great sophistication to achieve elaborate movements, Mummenschanz has pioneered the development of a universal vocabulary of gestures and facial expressions that are not dependent on actors’ visages. Indeed, for the most part, the performers of Mummenschanz are hidden from view; when they are not inside a costume or behind a mask of some kind, their presence is obscured by careful lighting. Certainly, we never see their faces. In this way, they overcome not only distinctions of language and culture, but also the visual markers of otherness: race and ethnicity.

There is no musical accompaniment, which would itself indicate some cultural preference or prejudice. There is, in fact, no sound at all – the hearing and the non-hearing experience Mummenschanz in the same way. Equally liberating for those who feel the burden of either age or youth (or, mostly, being somewhere in between) weighing on their shoulders, the experience of Mummenschanz also breaks down the generation gap; young and old alike respond to the physical comedy as well as to the moments of pathos evinced by the performers’ eccentric characterisations.

Claims to universality are, of course, problematic. Each individual’s response to a work of art is conditioned by his or her subjectivity, which can never fully break the bounds of history and geography. Likewise, an artist inevitably produces work that is informed by the axes of space and time defining his or her historical moment.

Even Mummenschanz can be shown to have its roots in a particular brand of European theatre; Schürch, Frassetto and their colleagues Rafaella Mattioli and Pietro Montandon trained in Paris, Rome and other centres of European “high art”. There is, arguably, a line of continuity running from the Commedia dell’Arte of Renaissance Italy, through the more modern tradition of Jacques Lecoq’s physical theatre, to the colourful but quiet world (re)created by Mummenschanz. But the enthusiasm of the multi-racial, multi-lingual, multi-generational audience at the State Theatre’s opening night performance of Mummenschanz 3 x 11 suggests that such intellectualising is less important than an affective embrace of the possibility that we can share a collective, transcendent response to “timeless” human situations.

These situations are reflected in a series of mini-narratives: characters exploring their environment, lovers quarrelling and making up, combatants engaging in duals of one-upmanship. Some of the relationships and characterisations are obscure, while others are light-hearted caricatures. There are animals, insects, humanoid creatures, oversized mouths, disembodied hands and stick figures. Various “lifeless” objects – an errant set of windows, a piece of paper blowing in the wind, an amorphous and constantly morphing bubble, a pipe playing with a ball – are given a consciousness and an array of emotions, demonstrating that it’s not only Pixar and Disney who can animate the inanimate.

The Mummenschanz performers make imaginative use of everyday materials: masking tape, cardboard boxes, toilet paper, plasticine. Amid the environmentally unfriendly “noise and haste” of consumerism (as Ehrmann would have it), this inventive “recycling” communicates a further, unarguably universal, ecological message.

* Mummenschanz 3 x 11 runs at Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre from 17 June to 5 July and at the University of Johannesburg Arts Centre from 8 July to 20 July.