So I’m doing an informal study of the different classifications of mime, the differences between mime, pantomime and corporeal mime and what not. It's a lot of quibbling over semantics, I feel, but interesting. If confusing.
For once thing, Etienne Decroux had a school where they taught corporeal mime, which is different from pantomime. Pantomime is what Marcel Marceau did…but Marceau was a student of Decroux. So...there's that.
Here’s my attempt at the definitions I’ve been sifting through.
The performer has been told to pick a flower.
A pantomimist would do it by being in an empty room, would bend over with thumb and forefinger together, make the motion of plucking a flower around an invisible shape, straighten up, hold their empty hand to their nose and inhale. There is no object and the performer is making very literal gestures to indicate a place and series of actions, like a story. The audience says “oh, he’s picking and smelling a flower. I get it.”
A mime-actor would walk into a room that had a flower on the ground, bend over with hand outstretched, squeeze the actual flower between their fingers, remove the flower from whatever it’s sitting on, straighten up, hold their hand with the flower in it to their nose and inhale. There is a physical object in their hand, the performer interacts with it limited by the laws of physics we function around everyday. The audience says “ok, so he picked a flower. I’ve done that.”
A corporeal mime would move their whole bodies, stemming from their trunk, using abstract motions that represent the greater universality of picking a flower. Perhaps it's a statement of man's interaction with nature. There aren't specific characters or locations or events, just feelings and ideas evoked. The audience says "Mmm, yes...I too interact with nature. How fragile is that balance. This inspires me to write a poem." Or something.
I have a hard time not describing corporeal mime in derisive language because...I think it's kind of stupid. Maybe that's not fair, maybe I just don't get it. But in my opinion it places itself squarely between dance and theatre, not lyrical enough to be have the grace and thought process of dance and not detail and character specific enough to give the audience something to relate to that theatre has. So it becomes murky and unspecific. It doesn’t feel like there’s any emotion behind the actions either, instead it prioritizes accuracy of execution over feeling. Who wants to watch someone go through the motions? It feels like it’s supposed to represent “fighting” or “love,” but it’s so universal that it’s bland. It points to the thing it’s representing rather than shows it or asks us to engage at all. Why should we care? How is this a new perspective on fighting or love? Clearly I'm not a fan.
Watch and judge for yourself.
But anyway, my feelings about corporeal mime aside, it leads me to thinking. I wonder if these things, these categories, get so muddy and cross-pollinated, that they lose what makes them interesting to watch and then the piece because about the form rather than the content. Instead of drawing you in and making you feel things, you’re distanced and going “this is very well done corporeal mime. I see that they’re using ____ technique and I think that’s because ____. It’s well executed and this is what the technique is about, and I see how those ideas are being illustrated by those motions.” But…who wants to see that? Only other theatre nerds like me even know the term corporeal mime, so who really wants to see an evening of technically well executed corporeal mime? At a certain point I just want to see something engaging. Not necessarily dumbed down, but give me a reason to care about it.
There I go with my feelings again.
Really the question I'm interested in is this thing of form and content. If the content isn't engaging, it often becomes about the form. And maybe that's not a bad thing, maybe that's the level you want to engage the audience in. I feel like that's the whole idea of Brecht or Noh theatre, it becomes about you the audience member noticing yourself consuming the performance. So long as that's intentional and not some accidental byproduct of a poorly planned out performance.
Anyway that's enough me being a grouch. Here's a cool thing.
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