Camille Garcia  |  Contributing Writer

Before becoming a professor at APU, Dr. Marcia Berry was trained in the miming style of Marcel Marceau and toured Europe, using miming as an evangelistic tool. Collide sat with Dr. Berry as she reminisced about performing with her mime troupe Window and shared her most memorable moments in the art of miming.

Q: How did you get into miming?

A: I was a junior at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and I had seen mime performed, … and I was fascinated by it. Now, my roommate and I went over, we heard about a class being offered – a special topics class – so we went over, not sure if we can get in or whatever, and we got into the class and had him for one or two semesters. … I joined Youth With A Mission, and they needed someone to start a mime troupe to go to the Montreal Olympics way back, and so I went to Holland to start a mime troupe for them. As it turned out, I did not perform at the Montreal Olympics, but we started performing after that. Two young men joined me eventually, and so I did mime full-time for about five years and lived in Holland, and we trained and we performed around there and then we performed in Germany, England and actually went down in Australia and New Zealand and did workshops on mime down there.

Q: What type of performances did you do for miming? Was there a specific theme that you had for each of them?

A: Yes, it just developed over time. Audiences can’t take silence for very long because it just bothers them. … We did ours in silence because it was easier and cheaper, and you only had to walk around with a bag of ballet shoes, makeup and your mime costume, so [you] could just carry it with you. We built the show together in bits and pieces because the audience couldn’t stand a long time. So when we were in the clubs, we would do a piece where one of my mime partners pretended to be someone searching for truth, and I played Satan.

Q: What was your most memorable show or moment you had when you mimed?

A: There was a show we did in New Zealand. … We were on this amazing stage and the lights were wonderful, and it was just a very exciting time. That one was exciting in terms of place and being able to do it, but it was also really thrilling on the streets when people would stop and watch. … We also did a tour in England for about a month and we did a lot of schools there and at least, that time over 30 years ago, they still had religious education, so some of the drama teachers would bring us in because we were religious education, and we performed at one school, and we never required money – we never asked for money. But the next day they came and brought us a bag of … English coins; the kids had taken up an offering the next day with milk money and given it to us, and so we had these coins for parking for part of the time we were in England, so that was really precious.

Q: Do you mime today?

A: You know, I don’t do a lot of it anymore because it requires so much physical training, but I had done it for so long that my body hasn’t forgotten it. … Dr. David Weeks, the dean of the Honors College, asked me if I would mime at the opening kickoff this year. He said, “You need to bring the fun to this.” I started playing with [the audience] to help them relax and kind of warm up the audience, … then I took all the honors faculty and posed them for a faculty picture – a silly picture. We did it very quickly; mime never lasts very long, and so I played with the audience for 5-7 minutes until they started laughing, and then I posed them for the picture. And then I ran out, washed off my face and came back and talked about public speaking. My joke with it was that you may be the only honors students who have a mime for their public speaking teacher; I mean the irony of that is just way too much fun.