KVT – Silence was Totally Golden

KVT says thanks, yet again, to Japan

A crowded house of mainly young Vietnamese watched enthralled as Japanese mime artist Iimuro Naoki presented seven mimes at the Youth Theater on Saturday and Sunday. They even heeded the pre-performance plea not to use cameras, videos and mobile phone screens. For a lot of people the thought of being socially unconnected for over an hour must have been like being in purgatory….but as soon as the lights dimmed and Naoki took to the stage, time flew and purgatory became heaven……as did one of the mime sequences when a deep sea diver became an angel.

Naoki studied mime in France under Marcel Marceau and has steadily risen up the ranks of mime fame. His muscular, lithe, gymnast body and expressive face made mime magic. His muscle control and agility was incredible.

Many of the acts were slapstick farce which fit in with the simplistic general definition of mime as being an entertainment that represents scenes from life usually in a ridiculous manner and while you laughed you were amazed by the mime skills that made the invisible real and the visible animate.

His prologue was an essential lesson for the uninitiated in the essentials of mime and his use of simple props and clowning pulled you  into his world of make believe and mimicry and fulfilled another simplistic definition that mime is all about creating the illusion of reality using gestures and facial expressions without the use of speech.

Naoki, like a lot of mime artists has honed his skills in the theater of the street, on the busking scene and represents the contemporary mime scene, doing away with white facial make up that accentuates facial gestures. He still wore the traditional black clothing and this accentuated bare arm and facial gesturing and movement. An excellent lighting plot allowed the artist to use his hands as if they were entities divorced from his body. At times, individual dancers.

Like a lot of contemporary mime artists he incorporates sound into his work, either as sound effects or as background music and Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’ that played as a frog and a butterfly interacted, was enormously successful, as was Pachelbel’s Canon when Naoki slipped from playing literal mime into an abstraction that was pure magic and involved those balletic hands.

Literal mime is primarily used for comedy and story theater and generally tells a story with a conflict through the use of a main character. The actions and visual design clearly tell the viewers the story which is usually humorous. And with this genre Naoki had his audience in the palms of his expressive hands

Abstract mime is used to generate feelings, thoughts and images from a serious topic or issue and usually has no plot or central character….a more intuitive experience or image. Throughout the evening facets of abstract mime infiltrated Naoki’s performance and when he took us into a non literal space, we were totally won over

I’d queue up for a long time to get tickets to an Iimuro Naoki performance that was purely abstract.

While the performance we saw was magical, the other would be totally sublime.

It was the artist’s second visit to Hanoi and obviously the audience hopes it won’t be his last.

This visit was yet another feather in the cap of the Japan Foundation and its ongoing celebration of the Japan-Vietnam Friendship Year.