After touring the world, Burlington mime brings his 1-man show back to where it all started

Trevor Coppof Burlington, Ont., is coming full circle in his long career as a mime the centuries-old performance art of acting out stories without uttering a word.

Copp, who started out busking on Hamilton streets over 25 years ago,will perform later this week in the areawhere it all started.

The 45-year-old'sone-man show, Searching for Marceau, has toured across Canada,but Coppsaidit will connect with Hamilton in particular when he performsat the Royal Botanical Gardensthis Friday andSaturday.

Searching for Marceauis "a Hamilton story," Copp said, "and this is the first time I get to tell it in Hamilton."

Todaythere aren't many Canadian mimes who perform regularly, Copp said. The genrehas its origins in the theatres of ancient Greece.

But while the country's mime community might be small, Copp'sstage career has had a wide reach.

He has performed as an actor and mime in 18 different countries, includingSyria, Lebanon, Morocco, Germany and Tunisia, he said.

Performance is a coming-of-age story

Copp said Searching for Marceauis a coming-of-age story based on hislife,andbegins when he started busking on the streets of downtown Hamilton.

He saidhe was hired as part of a Hamilton rejuvenation project, where performance artists were stationed around the city, standing on yellowspray-painted stars,in"what [the city] described as depressed areas."

"I was in the middle of nowhere. It was an industrial area. There was nobody there and I was like, 'I'm getting paid to perform for no one. This is really weird,'" he said.

But he saidthe busking gig opened his eyes to performing professionally, and led Copp onto the path to studying at the prestigious FrenchschoolL'cole Internationale de Mimodrame de Paris Marcel Marceau.

Copp takes inspiration from legendary mime

"Marcel Marceau is the name of thegreatest mime in history. That is the founder of the school," he told CBC Hamilton.

"When you think of a white facewith the lines down here," he said, motioning to his mouth, "that's not some kind of a universal mimecode. That's one specific mime. That's Marcel Marceau."

Marceau was born in Strasbourg, France, and died in 2007.

As a young Jewish man involved in the French Resistance during the Second World War, Marceauhelped save the lives of hundreds of Jewish children by forging documents and moving them to safety in Switzerland.

Copp said Marceau would use the silent art of mime to indicate there were German soldiers nearby.

Copp's show, he said,is about his own journey to become an artist and unite with his "second father" Marceau and the art of mime.

Robin Patterson, one of the directors ofSearching for Marceau, said "there are not that many people in the country who do physical theatre" like Copp does, and the show is a chance to experience an "interesting and complex" form of storytelling.

"It's about family and finding your place in the artistic world and your own family always, somehow,is part of that," she said.

Patterson calledCopp"a treasure" who lives here, butworks internationally. People"should go see him while he's performing in their backyard," she added.