Mime

Mime, art of dramatic representation, usually by means of facial expressions and body movements rather than words. Mime has always played a part in theatre. In the great open-air theatres of ancient Greece and Rome, where the audience could see more easily than it could hear, mime was an important element of acting. The Roman pantomimus was an actor who used words, as well as stylized movement and masks to portray a character to the accompaniment of music and the singing of a chorus. Roman mime degenerated into an indecency of language and action (judged by fragments which have survived), and was banned by the Church in the 5th century for burlesquing the sacraments. The art of mimetic drama was developed in Asia long before it became a definite form in the Western world. In India, dance and character portrayals, accompanied by music and song, originated many centuries bc. One of the classical Hindu dance-dramas, the Bharatanatyam, grew out of this dramatic form. In China and Japan, too, mime acquired an integral role in the major dramatic genres.

Mime, or dumb show, was essential to commedia dell'arte, an improvised comedy that arose in 16th-century Italy and spread throughout Europe. Pantomime continued in the 17th- and 18th-century harlequinade in France and England, an offshoot of the commedia dell'arte, which depicted the adventures of Harlequin; his sweetheart, Columbine; and her father, Pantaloon. In London the harlequinade was preceded by a scene in which actors mimed and danced stories from classical mythology or fairy tales, culminating in the transformation of the leading character into Harlequin. After the mid-19th century, performances became limited to an extended time at Christmas. Gradually the opening scene, or pantomime, became longer and more important than the harlequinade, especially as developed in the early 19th century by the actor Joseph Grimaldi, who excelled in acrobatics, invented tricks and stage machinery, and created the foolish clown Joey. The pantomime emerged as an elaborately staged and costumed spectacle, based on fairy tales, incorporating song, dance, acrobatics, dialogue, and other elements from the English music hall. It became traditional for a young female actress to take the part of the hero, or principal boy, and a male actor to play the comic role of the pantomime dame.

Modern mime developed into a purely silent art, where meaning is conveyed solely by gesture, movement, and expression. It was developed to a high art by the 19th-century French actor Jean Gaspard Deburau, who refined an early commedia dell'arte character into the lovelorn clown Pierrot. In the 20th century two French actors, Étienne Decroux and Marcel Marceau, who created the clown Bip, were outstanding mimes. Actors in early 20th-century silent films, most notably Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, relied entirely on mime to convey the story.

Subsequent performers were heavily influenced both by the early silent film stars and by Marceau. During the 1970s the mime trio Mummenschanz earned a following for its interpretive performances. Other artists, including Bill Irwin, David Shiner, and Bill Berky, were part of a generation of actors known as new vaudevillians (see Vaudeville) who helped revitalize mime performance during the 1980s and early 1990s. After the fall of Communism (1991), experimental mime troupes, often giving sophisticated and innovative performances, sprang up in Moscow, Leningrad, and Prague.