Mime artist

Jacques Copeau, strongly influenced by Commedia dell'arte and Japanese Noh theatre, used masks in the training of his actors.

[4] Mime (mimius) was an aspect of Roman theatre from its earliest times,[5] paralleling the Atellan farce in its improvisation (if without the latter's stock characters).

Trajan banished mime artists; Caligula favored them; Marcus Aurelius made them priests of Apollo.

[citation needed] Classical Indian musical theatre, although often erroneously labeled a "dance," is a group of theatrical forms in which the performer presents a narrative via stylized gesture, an array of hand positions, and mime illusions to play different characters, actions, and landscapes.

The Natya Shastra, an ancient treatise on theatre by Bharata Muni, mentions silent performance, or mukabhinaya.

[citation needed] In Kathakali, stories from Indian epics are told with facial expressions, hand signals and body motions.

The famous French comedian, writer, and director Jacques Tati achieved his initial popularity working as a mime, and his later films had only minimal dialogue, relying instead on many subtle expertly choreographed visual gags.

Canadian author Michael Jacot's first novel, The Last Butterfly, tells the story of a mime artist in Nazi-occupied Europe who is forced by his oppressors to perform for a team of Red Cross observers.

[11] Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll's The Clown relates the downfall of a mime artist, Hans Schneir, who has descended into poverty and drunkenness after being abandoned by his beloved.