Étienne Decroux was in some senses the purest of all mime artists of the twentieth century, but he nevertheless regretted not exploring more fully the hybrid genre of the ballet d'action and its most famous practitioner and advocate, Jean-Georges Noverre. In Words on Mime, Decroux writes:

Decroux never did publish his thoughts on Noverre or Jooss. Other writers on mime have occasionally discussed Jooss in the context of Tanztheater, but Noverre is never mentioned. Nor, for that matter, are a host of other ballet d'action choreographers. Decroux's eminent position in the development of modern mime and the regrets he expresses that Noverre has been left out of the history of mime ought to give us pause for considerable thought. It seems appropriate, therefore, to evaluate the eighteenth-century missing link in the history of mime according to its relation to a modern touchstone, Decroux. The comparison reveals as many differences of technique and principle as it does similarities between the two, but it also shows that they shared a sense of what the challenges are.