Mime

Early Miming

The tradition of mime predates formal theater and is found in all cultures. Mime was used extensively in performance by Greeks (the name of the masked Greek dancer Pantomimus is thought to be the origin of pantomime). Earliest records make little distinction between a mime and an actor, who was at once singer, dancer, and mime; but the word was more commonly used for a range of comic expression than for the more formal style of tragedy that stressed presentational, rhetorical, and vocal performance. Both tragic and comic mimes used masks (Latin larvae), but the built-up shoes (Latin cothurni), which created stature for tragedians and limited actors' physical expression, were less used by comedic mimes, who evidently were primarily dancers and acrobats. The comedies of Aristophanes and Menander, Plautus, and Terence clearly require physicality in both bodily and facial expression. They satirically mock human desires, ambition, and folly, differing little from modern comedy, which also usually requires considerable physicality. Distorted features and exaggerated props were clearly used in comic ways, especially the huge phalli notoriously used in Aristophanes’s Lysistrata (411 BCE) and evidenced in vase and wall paintings (indeed re-creating their extreme political and scatological license has not been possible until very recent times). Such physical expression is at the heart of mime, with or without words; however, the mimic emphasis on human physical expression tended toward the comic while the abstract tended toward dance. The concept of the physical entrapment of a soul in flesh lies at the heart of all comedy.

Mimic elements from Greek theater carried over into Roman and later medieval theaters, and many have speculated that itinerant street entertainers long preceded Greek theater proper. One can confidently say that mime, dance, and storytelling preexisted the earliest forms of entertainment in all cultures. In the polyglot world of the Roman theater audience, mime was taken to crude extremes, leading the Christian Church to associate the form with the pagan and demonic, although because of its attractions, it was never truly absent from the streets of most towns. Along with clowning, acrobatics, and comedy itself, mime became a crucial element of the commedia dell’arte and the even older folk plays [Page 507]such as English mummers' plays and Dutch Abele Spelen; no doubt it was part of the skills of a court jester, and gestural language is part of all “foolery,” even for puppets. The lasting impact of mimes and mimicry is evidenced in the work of William Shakespeare (the “dumb show” in Hamlet being the most famous example), Lope de Vega, and Molière. Always popular from the 15th- to the mid-19th century, groups of such “strolling players” offered short satirical sketches on makeshift stages, incorporating vulgarity, grotesquery, and farce. Crossing many national boundaries and languages as they did, mime must surely have been the principal element in their performances.

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