11-09-2017, 10:46 AM
Mime is a type of performance that does not use words or speech. Mime is all about physical movement and exaggerating its expressions. Mimes (people who practice miming) should use their actions to send a message or tell a story. They are not allowed to speak directly to the public. Probably the best known mime was Marcel Marceau. The Mime comes from Rome and Greece. Some people also believe that cavemen use mimicry to communicate because they could not speak.
A mime or mime artist is a person who uses the mime as a theatrical medium or as performance art, involving miming, or acting out a story with body movements, without the use of speech. In earlier times, in English, such a performer would typically refer to him as a mummer. Miming is distinguished from silent comedy, in which the artist is a seamless character in a film or drawing.
The performance of mimicry originates in the early years in ancient Greece; the name is taken from a single masked dancer called Pantomimus, although the performances were not necessarily silent. In medieval Europe, early mime forms such as mummer plays and later dumbshows evolved. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Paris, Jean-Gaspard Deburau solidified the many attributes we have come to know in modern times: the silent figure on the white face.
Jacques Copeau, heavily influenced by Commedia dell'arte and the Japanese theater Noh, used masks in the training of his actors. Étienne Decroux, a disciple of his, was greatly influenced by this and began to explore and develop the possibilities of mimicry and developed body mime in a highly sculptural form, taking it out of the realms of naturalism. Jacques Lecoq contributed significantly to the development of mime and physical theater with his training methods.
