Samuel Avital

Samuel Ben-Or Avital is a mime artist. He has also taught kinesthetic awareness and Kabbalah.

He was born in Sefrou, near Fez in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. He moved to a kibbutz in Israel when he was fourteen. From 1958 he studied dance and drama at the Sorbonne in Paris, and also mime under Étienne Decroux, Marcel Marceau and Jean-Louis Barrault.

He moved to the United States, and in 1971 started a school of mime, Le Centre du Silence, in Boulder, Colorado, where an annual international summer mime workshop was held.

Books

Avital has published books including:

Le Centre Du Silence Mime Work Book, Venice, California: Wisdom Garden Books, 1975 (translated into German as Mimenspiel: die Kunst der Körpersprache, 1985) Mime and Beyond: The Silent Outcry, Prescott Valley, Arizona: Hohm Press, 1985 The Conception Mandala: Creative Techniques for Inviting a Child into Your Life (with Mark Olsen), Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1992 The Invisible Stairway: Kabbalistic Meditations on The Hebrew Letters, 2016