When it comes to the Swiss theater troupe Mummenschanz (a German word that roughly translates as "masquerade"), you can call them performers. You can describe them as imaginative or eccentric, surreal or sublime. Go on and refer to them as a fond memory from your childhood. But whatever you do, do not call them mimes.
Perhaps Kermit the Frog put it best when he described Mummenschanz, who’ll be at the Wilbur Theatre February 4 through 9, as "distant cousins of the Muppets" when they appeared on The Muppet Show in 1974. That was two years after founding members Floriana Frassetto, Bernie Schürch, and Andres Bossard donned their first malleable masks, to alchemical effect, and three years before they made it to Broadway, where they stayed for an unexpected but triumphant three years.
"I get upset when people call us a mime group," says Frassetto on the phone from Switzerland, "because I feel we started a different technique. No one ever transformed masks like this before. We are actors, puppeteers, dancers. ‘Visual poets’ sounds too dada. I think our style should simply be called Mummenschanz. It’s just practical."
After Bossard died, in 1992, Frassetto and Schürch invited American mime (oops!) John Charles Murphy to revisit their original work and create Parade, a eulogy to the visionary founder. Shortly after, Mummenschanz became a quartet with the addition of Italian dancer Raffaella Mattioli, but the newcomers have never altered the Mummenschanz æsthetic. In their current show, Mummenschanz Next, the group’s signature remains intact: expressive transformations evoked through face and body masks devised from mundane geometric forms and household items like rolls of toilet paper, foam blocks, wire, and cotton sheets.
The new show has been two years in development in a new studio in St. Gallen, a space generously funded by the town. "We’ve always been like frustrated children," Frassetto explains. "When we come across interesting material, like a sculptor we have to find its soul, its expression. Out of pieces of plastic or insulation material, whatever comes across as a feeling is something we try to shape." That triggers an improvisational session with material, movements, and ideas that in turn gives rise to new skits. Once they have a story line, it’s ready for an audience. "That’s when the Rorschach test happens, that’s when it comes alive. The difficult part of our work is to try to get down to the essence so that it’s so simple, so elementary, that each person can make what he or she wants out of it. It’s so abstract that it awakens an emotion or a story for everybody."
Just don’t ask Frassetto to say nice things about that other group with a penchant for toilet-paper rolls. The guys with the show around the corner from the Shubert. You know the ones: abstract, non-speaking . . . Blue. "So what if there are eight slinky men around the world? It’s appalling what they do: there’s loud music, no time for emotions. It’s just faster and faster. It’s technological, even though performed by human beings. They mask emotions. We don’t. We really share our emotions. Somehow, that’s why people remember us after such a long time. In this [point-and-]click-on era, it’s how we still manage to leave an emotional print."
Mummenschanz Next runs February 4 through 9 at the Wilbur Theatre, 246 Tremont Street in the Theater District. Tickets are $25 to $57; call (617) 931-2787.
