A Burlington actor and dancer hopes to grow an audience in Brantford for contemporary mime.
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Trevor Copp first performed locally in the 2023 Grand River Arts Festival and won the 10-minute play competition for his piece The Stag Hunter.
He convinced festival organizers to perform a full-length play at this year’s festival, and the ensuing show was a sell-out.
“I want to be coming back to the (Glenhyrst) Coach House a couple of times a year to share my work,” he said. “I love an intimate theater with the audience 20 or 30 feet from me. In that intimate space you can create magic. You’re right here with me, and I can feel you there.”
Copp became interested in the performance art when a high school drama teacher gave him an instructional VHS tape on how to do mime.
“I work as an actor, but I’ve never loved my voice,” he said, sharing how he would never be able to sound like actors at the Stratford Festival with their booming, classical voices.
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A love of dancing led to Copp taking dance classes, but he felt it didn’t tell a story.
“When I do mime, I get to do both. I’m using movement, I’m using my body to tell the same kind of story. I’ve always had a very alternative sense of the kind of theater I like.”
The mime artist says many people in North America think of mime as someone in white-face make-up and wearing a striped shirt who’s stuck in a box, stuck in a park, and stuck in the 1970s, with improvisations of a wall or pulling a rope.
“That’s always been the easy novelty they do on the streets to make some money,” he observed. “The actual form of mime is totally different, and that’s what I studied in Paris, the proper long-form mime. The kind of longer pieces that Marcel Marceau did.”
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The white-face make-up, he noted, was mottoed in times before there was artificial stage lighting to help project facial expressions to the back of a performance space.
“If I’m in a 50-seat theater you can see my face. That’s why I don’t wear it. As (mime) evolves in contemporary senses, so many different looks, applications, and ways of combining other forms, that’s the kind of evolution of mime that excites me.”
Copp has performed in many countries around the world, and while his audiences are people with English as a second language – or even people who are deaf – it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t speak their language.
“I find what’s beautiful too is the way that, because we don’t use language, it transcends language,” he said. “I’m speaking a language of movement that manages to get through to everyone. It doesn’t matter what your language or education is, or where you’re from, you’re with me, and I love wielding that kind of power on stage.”
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Copp will be performing his play Searching for Marceau on Friday, November 22 at 7 pm at the Glenhyrst Coach House.
“Searching for Marceau is my attempt to marry contemporary theater with mime. Over half of it is text,” he shared. “I’m talking and telling the story of my whole journey of becoming a mime, my first performances in Hamilton, and studying at the Marcel Marceau School of Mime in Paris. I tell the story about my character’s search for a father that he’s come to believe that, if he goes across the sea, through Marceau he will find someone who is his real spiritual father, and what he confronts on that journey.”
The artist said taking mime into contemporary theater at this level of physical accuracy is something audiences have never seen before.
“It’s life’s work I’ve chosen,” said Copp. “My goal is to reinvent mime in the 21st century and bring this back as a vital and relevant form.”
Advanced ticket purchases are recommended by visiting glenhyrst.ca/searchingformarceau
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