1. Poetics: IV, 2. Quoted in Marcel Jousse, The Oral Style, trans. Edgard Sienaert and Richard Whitaker (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990) 24.

2. Mime and Beyond, 103.

3. In this introduction, phenomenon is used in the philosophical sense of perceptual event or occurrence.

4. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975) 358-9.

5. Mime and Beyond, 101. Mark Olsen, a theater professor and former Mummenschanz performer, is also author, along with Avital, of The Conception Mandala, a guide to techniques of conscious conception.

6. “Subtle is the Lord“: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) 37.

7. From an unpublished manuscript.

8. Avital’s personal recollection of Decroux’s frequently recited dictum.

9. Thomas Leabhart, Modern and Post-Modern Mime (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989) 62.

10. Quoted in Modern and Post-Modern Mime, 63.

11. Modern and Post-Modern Mime, 64.

12. Leabhart notes that in Bali art and life are so well integrated that there is “no separate word for art.” Modern and Post-Modern Mime, 126. See also Hands.

13. “I am a prisoner of my art. People do not want to see me speak, or use props or appear as a character other than Bip or the stylized mime that I have created. They are uneasy with a Marceau that is unfamiliar.”Quoted in Mime and Post-Modern Mime, 75.

14. Quoted in The Oral Style. p. 24.

15. Etienne Decroux, Words on Mime, trans. Mark Piper (Claremont, CA: Mime Journal, 1985) 81.

16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) 133-4.

17. Compare with these lines from “The Exstasie” by poet John Donne: “Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred/Our eyes, upon one double string;/ So to’entergraft our hands. . .”Renaissance anatomists theorized that sight was caused by a beam which was emitted from the eye and touched the object seen.

18. The American Heritage Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980)

19. George Leonard, The Silent Pulse (New York: Arkana, 1986) 44.

20. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

21. In the early 70’s, Avital was asked to train a group of astronauts to experience “weightlessness” on earth in preparation for “moonwalking” in space. (The moonwalk is a classic technique of illusionistic mime.)

22. Thomas and J. C. Cleary, trans. Blue Cliff Record, vol. 3 (Boulder: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1977) 571. My rendering of a slightly longer text.

23. Juliet Wittman, “Somatic Psychology: Taking Your Body to Therapy,” Nexus (Sept/Oct 1993) 20.

24. Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses (New York: Bantam Books, 1990) 343-4.

25. Henry David Thoreau, The Illustrated Maine Woods. ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974) 71.

26. Coming to Our Senses, 344.

27. Ibid., 344.

28. From “Le Langage du Corps,” transcription of a lecture given by Jean-Louis Barrault, June 2, 1980, at Zellerbach Playhouse.