The Stage and the School

Chapter 2: Pantomime and Mime

Overview

Pantomime is the art of acting without words, often called "the art of silence." This first form of acting is made up solely of nonverbal communication, including gestures, facial expressions, movement, and body language, and is critical to an actor's training. The techniques of pantomime are based on what humans do physically in response to emotional stimulation, other people, and the objects around them. Characterization in pantomime involves placing a character in a situation and showing that character's thoughts through nonverbal expression. An actor's posture and how an actor walks, sits, crosses, turns, and falls help define a character's personality. One of the major challenges in pantomime is placement, or the location of things. Many actors remember locations by kinesthesis, the neuromuscular awareness the body feels in a particular physical position. To execute a successful pantomime, an actor must assiduously plan and rehearse.

Mime is an offspring of pantomime. While pantomime imitates physical action as it occurs in life, mime elucidates abstract ideas through illusory motions. A mime's main goal is to convey a theme, such as loneliness or forgiveness. Unlike actors employing the art of pantomime, mimes may use nonverbal sounds, such as escaping air or a telephone's busy signal. Also, mimes generally wear makeup to exaggerate their eyes and mouths. Mimes work with several conventional actions, such as the illusory walk, the rope pull, the ladder climb, and climbing up and down stairs. Everything in mime must be exaggerated. And each primary mime action is preceded by a preparatory action. There are three types of mime exercises: inclinations, rotations, and isolations (separations). An inclination is the bending of the body to the front, the side, or the rear. A rotation is the turning or pivoting of a body part, such as the head or chest. An isolation, the most challenging of the three exercises, separates parts of the body for individual development and expression.