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Lebanese actor and stage performer Faeq Hmeissi has released a new book, “My Journey with Mime,” published by the Arab Theatre Authority (Sharjah). The book chronicles his personal experience, from his beginnings as a hobbyist to his professional career, spanning from 1972 to the present day.
“I don’t believe in complete silence,” Hmeissi explains. “Therefore, we call musical pieces ‘silent music.’ I also differentiate between silent and mute. Silent means refraining from speech, while mute means deaf and unable to speak.” He continues, “I still adore expressing myself through movement and silent forms, choosing to convey meaning through bodily configurations alone, or in combination with silent elements or silent music. I also love observing still life. Trees don’t speak, but their movement and form communicate with us, evoking a range of emotions, much like ocean waves, which people can watch for hours, captivated by their rhythm and entering diverse emotional states.”
“The joy of watching doesn’t rely on listening to dialogue; it’s the joy of connecting through movement and rhythm without words, using the sense of sight. Of course, I don’t deny the pleasure of listening, or the pleasure of watching and listening together. And yes, I still enjoy silent movement and silent music, whether in cinema or theatre. I follow these art forms closely and seek out physical theatre, as it’s called today, though I prefer to call it movement theatre, aligning with the slogan we adopted at the Mime Artists’ Meeting in Paris in 1976: ‘From the Art of Mime to Movement Theatre.’ Notably, James Thériault, grandson of silent film star Charlie Chaplin, is a leading figure in creating works based on movement in theatre.”
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“I’d like to start by clarifying that I don’t believe in complete silence, and therefore musical pieces are called ‘silent music.’ I also differentiate between silent and mute,” Hmeissi says. “You began your journey through your relationship with the art of mime, silent cinema, and the Salah Tizani troupe, and your involvement with the Al-Jarrah Scouts. How do you remember the general atmosphere of Tripoli in that era, the 1950s?”
“When we talk about Tripoli in the 1950s and before, we’re talking about one of the capitals of thought and art in the Arab world,” Hmeissi recalls. “Tripoli was a meeting point for artists traveling through its sea port from Cairo via the port of Alexandria, as it was a station where artists were keen to present their works at the Zahrat Al-Fayhaa Theatre, or ‘Al-Beroukiah’ – an opera house that was demolished some time ago – to obtain a pass to Aleppo, Baghdad, and then Haifa on their way back to Cairo by land.” He adds, “It was natural to hear names of Italian, French, or Arab artists who performed in Tripoli, such as Umm Kulthum, Youssef Wahbeh, Ali Al-Kassar, and Mohamed Abdel Wahab from the generation who lived during that time.”
“As a child, I used to play in a neighborhood where the Tripoli artist Abdullah Al-Husseini established an acting school in 1951 after returning from studying acting in Italy. I would sneak a peek at its strange visitors practicing acting. This school was frequented by those who later became stars in radio, theatre, television, such as Dr. Shakib Khoury, Mrs. Suad Al-Hashem and her husband, Emile Harb, Aouni المصري, and Abdul Karim Omar, Ahmed Badi’a… It was also my first experience in acting, as director Nizar Miqati would come to the school every Saturday and Sunday with a 16mm film camera, asking us to act out fight scenes or ‘heroes and bandits’ which he would then film and show us inside the school.”
“Alongside this school, there were other groups performing plays at the Freres School, the Italian School, the Mar Maroun Church, or in one of the cinemas. These included the ‘Lebanese Comedy Troupe,’ which later became the ‘Abu Salim Troupe.’ The entire troupe was the Al-Jarrah Scouts’ artistic group, led by Salah Tizani, whom I had previously seen performing monologues on stage during intermissions to change the ‘reel’ of the film. Joining the Al-Jarrah Scouts allowed me to get to know Salah Tizani closely and attend all his performances, including the silent ones. I remember plays like ‘The Liberation of Algeria’ and ‘The Battle of Port Said,’ which he staged at the municipal stadium, using group movements on a football field, and I was one of the members representing the English team participating in the attack. When Salah Tizani moved to Beirut with most of his troupe members, I had the opportunity to join the Al-Jarrah Artistic Troupe led by Abdullah Al-Hamصی ‘As’ad,’ with whom I co-founded the Popular Arts Troupe in 1961 to work outside the Scouts framework, where I performed silent movement scenes called ‘The Silent Joke.’”
“Furthermore, when discussing the atmosphere of Tripoli in the 1950s, it’s important to mention the cinemas, of which there were about fifty. They were essential festive venues during holidays, screening films from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. Films were often presented as being shown specifically for the occasion.”
“This atmosphere had a significant impact on me personally, as a child I was fascinated by watching the stars of the small screen in the streets of Tripoli, such as Ahmed Badi’a, Aouni المصري, Abdul Karim Omar, and Ali Diab, or the big screen stars like Abdullah Al-Husseini, who played the role of Layla’s father in the Egyptian film ‘Layla Al-Ameriya’ alongside Kuka and Yahya Shahin, who would visit Al-Husseini at his school in Tripoli. I was overjoyed when the first Lebanese film was screened at the Cannes International Film Festival, directed by George Nasr and starring mostly Lebanese actors and crew from Tripoli or the North.”
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“You mentioned that when you presented ‘Fadous Discovers Beirut,’ it was a success with the audience and you were celebrated as a mime artist. What criteria make a mime performance successful for the audience? Charlie Chaplin delivered silent cinema brimming with dark comedy. Is live performance much more difficult than cinema, which relies on image and filming?”
“The conditions for a successful mime performance are no different from those for other theatrical performances, whether spoken or based on dance to express an idea that should interest the audience. In addition to the idea, the directorial vision, in its audio and visual elements, must be exciting. The performance must be portrayed with a high level of skill in character and personality, and in the theatrical setting. In a purely mime performance, the difficulty lies in mastering the principles of mime performance, which are based on mastering the creation of the character and its states and the scenic environment through movement alone, which must respect the dimensions of the elements requiring precision in illusion through movement and movement of the body, its size, and its nature clearly. A movement sentence, like a spoken sentence, will not be understood if its movement or sound vocabulary is not expressive or clearly articulated.”
“For me, when an audience doesn’t understand the idea or state in a theatrical performance, the blame first lies with the actor’s performance. The success of ‘Fadous Discovers Beirut’ lies in respecting the conditions for success I mentioned earlier. The general climate of the artistic scene was not new, as many European performances were presented on the stages of Beirut, but the surprise for those interested in theatre was that the work was entirely local, with the director, Maurice Maalouf, and the actors – Lina Mishalani, Nabil Sabih, and myself – all Lebanese. It was the first time a poster featured a Lebanese actor with his face painted white. Critic Nazih Khater wrote an article in the Al-Nahar newspaper after seeing the play, titled ‘Finally, a Talent… Extraordinary,’ praising the group’s performance but specifically praising my mastery of mime performance as the only actor who painted his face white.”
“This article was followed by articles in other Lebanese newspapers, some of which included public statements of love for the performance and admission of their inability to criticize because they were unfamiliar with the foundations of mime performance. One headline caught my attention: ‘We Now Have a Marcel Marceau,’ the French mime star. The article stated that the performance filled a void in Lebanese theatre. I was annoyed because I wasn’t imitating Marceau, as I hadn’t seen him when I was performing ‘The Silent Joke’ in Tripoli or when I was studying at university. This annoyance prompted me to express my artistic project based on kinetic expression, which lies in a position between spoken theatre and ballet. This is a theatre that not only tells stories through movement, as in ‘The Silent Joke,’ but can also express a plot or theme and can depict the conflict between different directions in the performance around this theme. This is what I developed during and after completing my postgraduate studies in France and practiced at the Montreal School of Theatre.”
“When I suggested to my professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, Maurice Maalouf, that he direct a mime work for me while I was still a student, he found it strange, but his wife said to him in English, ‘He is capable of it.’ A few months later, he called me and told me that the opportunity had come, and the Beirut College for Girls, where he also taught, would be holding a festival of student plays, and I could present a mime play as part of the festival. He offered me an idea that needed development, based on the theme of youth migration from rural areas to the city and the disadvantages of this migration. We began developing the idea by identifying the situations and states experienced by the young rural protagonist, whom Professor Maalouf named ‘Fadous.’ The play was completed and performed once during the festival under the title ‘Migration to Death,’ in which we see Fadous complaining about his lifestyle in the village, hurting his family, and going to the city where he is exploited at work and then disillusioned in a love story, leading to a state of despair that leads him to decide to commit suicide, but he fails and the play ends with him wrapping himself in the rope he prepared to hang himself, turning into a small spot like a speck of saliva on the stage.”
“What the tongue utters can be written in words, but what is expressed through movement is written in the body. The starting point of the tongue and movement is the same: the idea. However, the details of the story are written in words alone in radio performance and in the body alone in kinetic performance, and in both in theatrical and cinematic performance. The festival committee, for the First Work Festival in 2004, asked me to present ‘Fadous Discovers Beirut,’ my first work, but I apologized due to the difficulty of reuniting the actors. The committee suggested I present my second work, ‘Mime 79,’ which I performed after returning from Paris in the classic style known to the public in 1979. When I began rehearsing the performance after 25 years, I used the program and couldn’t remember all the details of the scenes while sitting and reading the program, but as soon as I stood up to start rehearsing, taking the first positions, the scenes began to unfold like a string of beads, as if I were performing the play in 1979. Mime and kinetic acting is not a translation of the meanings of words written in a spoken play script, but a kinetic output created by the body to record as a kinetic text in memory, as the human brain consists of two groups of cells, one specialized in innovation in emotional situations and the other specialized in storing and recording this innovation for use when the situation is repeated.”
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“You said in your book that mime is an art of protest in historical stages, an art of the oppressed throughout history. How did you employ protest in your experience? Was your journey a search for pleasure, or was it an art of protest and expression of oppression?”
“This is not my definition, but what researchers in the history of this art have agreed upon in Europe only. In the Far East, it is the only art of performance recognized in China, Japan, and India, and it is a fundamental pillar of Japanese theatre and Peking Opera performances to this day, as well as in Indian devotional rituals of the Mahabharata, which are still practiced today. Since we in Lebanon follow European sources, we remind the reader that the origin of this art was in ancient Greece with the flourishing of Greek theatrical performances, which were performed only by nobles for the general public, and it was forbidden for the general public to perform in these performances because all the characters were gods or kings. Outside of these performances, a movement emerged from the general public presenting performances outside the theatres, and to avoid being accused of violating the concepts and laws of authority, they used movement instead of speech and painted their faces to erase the effects of personality so as not to be accused of practicing acting.”
“Then, with the change of thought and the transfer of civilization between Greece and Rome before and after the birth of Christ, when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its religion, the relationship between authority and the art of mime fluctuated between persecution and adoption, between accusing it of obscenity and adopting it to promote the new religion, but persecution prevailed until it was banned by a royal decree issued by King Charlemagne, who considered mime performances a kind of witchcraft and sorcery punishable by burning. This was between the 7th and 8th centuries AD. This was followed by another royal law issued in 1221 in Sicily by Emperor Frederick II, which allowed anyone who encountered a ‘mover,’ i.e., a mime or clown, to beat this performer and even kill him without any consequences leading to legal prosecution. This situation of fluctuating relationship with authority lasted until the 19th century, when kinetic performance arts moved from satirical and purely athletic to the circus in the 19th century and then back to the street and theatres at the beginning of the 20th century.”
“In the Arab East, before Islam, the art of mime was known, although evidence is scarce, but the mention of the word ‘miyamis’ in some poems of the Sa’alik poets and their description as dancers who paint their faces and sway, and there is beauty in their ugliness, is noted. There were also performances by groups called ‘al-samajah’ that presented expressive, satirical dances in popular celebrations. Contrary to popular belief, these performances continued after the rise of the Islamic call and its spread and the establishment of the Islamic state in Baghdad, and even entered the palaces of the caliphs to entertain them, despite the opposition of some jurists and advisors of the caliphs to their obscenity. These theatrical practices ended when Caliph ‘Al-Mu’tamid’ issued an order in 238 AH to ban those performances and burn the houses of their practitioners, including the pictures on the walls, because they caused noise and chaos in the streets.”
“I was rebellious, even towards what I liked, and I tried to see it from another angle or an angle I invented myself. I was rebellious even towards the performances I prepared and presented. Each performance has its own idea, experience, and character.
“Returning to the beginning, the pleasure of watching a mime or kinetic performance is the same as the pleasure of watching the sea with its waves and the forest with its trees. It’s not just the pleasure of harmonious movement, but what it allows us – a space for imagination and an opportunity for innovation. When a sea wave moves, we move to a state derived from the impact of the wave’s movement and rhythm, and the same applies when we watch a mime performance that leaves us room to imagine the invisible elements suggested by the actor. In the form of the performance I watch, I prefer the artist to leave us the pleasure of imagining or thinking to create the emotional state for ourselves.”
“You spoke about mime, about the origins of the art of mockery in ancient Greece and the art of the circus clown in 19th-century Europe, and about the performances of the ‘samajah’ groups in Baghdad. I would now like to focus on the art of the clown, which has evolved into the only kinetic art with clear foundations for its performance. Here I am talking about the structure of comedic scenes, not the techniques of performance, which are no different from mime. In every successful comedic scene, there are three characters: first, the simple character, second, the cunning character who manipulates the simple character, and third, the balance character who does not let the cunning character’s tricks pass without preparing for them. Educationally, this structure is one of the most important things that helps the child when watching it to enhance the growth of his mental abilities, most notably observation and inference, as he knows what will happen to the simple one when the cunning one plays a trick on him, so he shouts warning the simple one who falls into the trap, which allows the child to boast about his intelligence and his superiority over this big person (the simple clown). This is what gives him confidence in himself and his mental abilities.”
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“You talked about mime before ‘Fadous Discovers Beirut,’ mentioning mime performances by Salah Tizani. To what extent do you consider Abdullah Hamصی a mime artist? And Shoushou as well… even if they played speaking roles…”
“Most of our comedians were influenced by the performance of the ‘Commedia dell’arte’ troupes, which relied on building the external form of the character with its fixed positions and the way it moves with its half-mask. This is a method adopted by the Commedia dell’arte because it allows the actor playing a role, such as Arlecchino, to be replaced by another actor who is skilled in performing in the same way. I believe this influence arose from the mixing of civilizations resulting from colonial wars and invasions. Abdullah Al-Hamصی was the most successful silent actor in Salah Tizani’s silent plays, and Shoushou, in his early television appearances in a children’s program, performed short mime scenes. Their abilities in physical expression were evident when they performed speaking roles, except for their performances in cinema or television that did not require comedic physical performance, such as Abdullah Hamصی in the film ‘A Trip to Beirut’ and Shoushou in the series ‘The Long Journey.’”
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“You ask: Is the problem with mime that it takes the word and its literature as a means of expression? And has it been suppressed by supporters of the word? Or has it been suppressed for presenting performances with the body, which various societies consider an obscenity that should not be displayed? Or does silence frighten authority? Through your questions, have you been harassed by proponents of spoken theatre? Has society harassed you? Have you been subjected to censorship?”
“Obscenity, immorality, heresy, witchcraft, noise, causing chaos in the streets – these are words with connotations, some related to morality and some related to public order, all of which were used to describe the art of mime. The instigators were motivated by either prioritizing the word over movement or considering the body an obscenity that should not be performed. However, in appearance, these performances mocked the prevailing social and authoritarian norms. Personally, I have not been subjected to any persecution, but on the contrary, I have been overwhelmed with welcome and appreciation from the Lebanese and Arab public.”
“The flood of media will not affect theatre in general, and therefore will not affect mime, because the flood of media arts previously, such as cinema and television, did not affect people’s desire to meet and interact, as humans are social creatures.”
“Art is superior to politics.”
