from Jonathan Law, ed., The Methuen Drama Dictionary of the Theatre (London, 2011); Kenneth Rea, The Continuum Companion to Twentieth-Century Theatre, ed. Colin Chambers (London, 2002).
A wordless form of entertainment, in which movement and gesture are used to communicate.
The term comes from the Greek word mimos, meaning imitator. Early Greek mime is thought to have originated in about 581 BC in Megara; it had some basic dialogue but emphasized physical action.
Small troupes of Greek mime artists probably performed at banquets in the 5th century BC, making them the earliest known professional entertainers. The troupes included women, many of whom were also prostitutes. The performers wore distinctive costumes but no masks; mime performers were never admitted to membership of the Artists of Dionysus.
The earliest mime artist known to us by name was the Roman Livius Andronicus (284–204 BC). According to tradition, he turned to mime when his voice failed after a series of performances. In Imperial times the mimus, a type of bawdy knockabout farce, and the performances of the lascivious pantomimus became popular. The former often involved displays of nudity and sometimes included real on-stage executions. The licentiousness and anti-Christian satire of these performances led to the Church excommunicating all mime performers in the 5th century AD.
Many elements of the Roman pantomime survived in the 16th-century commedia dell’arte, which was in turn the main source of modern mime. In England the dumb show, a section of a play performed without words, was popular in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods but almost disappeared after 1620. Hamlet (1600) includes a dumb show enacted as part of the play-within-a-play, while Webster’s The White Devil (1612) features two dumb shows.
As an art form, it underwent radical changes throughout the twentieth century, mainly because it periodically attracted the interest of people dedicated to theatrical experiment and innnovation. Most of the important work has stemmed from France, where there had been a strong revival of interest in silent mime (known there as pantomime) in the early nineteenth century. This centred on Jean-Gaspard Deburau, who adopted the white-faced image of Pierrot, one of the most popular figures of the commedia dell’arte.
The development of mime in the twentieth century can be traced to the French actor and director Jacques Copeau. As a reaction against the increasing preoccupation with naturalism on the French stage at the beginning of the century, Copeau set up his own acting school in Paris, the Vieux-Colombier, to investigate the importance of the body as a means of expression. Copeau’s actors played on an almost bare stage, and as part of their training, they studied masks, gesture and Japanese noh theatre.
One of Copeau’s students was Etienne Decroux, who continued his own research into the architecture of the body, eventually developing a system he called mime corporel (corporeal mime). This lifted mime once more to the level of an autonomous art, though in many ways it was the opposite to what Deburau had done.
A bold new direction was taken in the late 1950s by Jacqes Lecoq. Through his Paris school, Lecoq extended the territory of mime to include related disciplines like clowning, masks, commedia dell’arte and bouffons. He also set out to reassess some of the physical principles of genres like tragedy and melodrama.
The growth of mime in Britain has been further encouraged by the London International Mime Festival which was founded in 1977 to provide a showcase for new mime.
In Britain one of the most influential and enduring figures has been David Glass, first through his solo performances in the 1980s, then through a series of startling productions for the David Glass Ensemble in the 1990s.
By the early 1980s it was clear that mime, no longer a silent art, was moving into a fruitful area of overlap with conventional drama, while certain strands of drama were increasingly drawing on mime. British theatre groups like Shared Experience and Cheek by Jowl, or French groups like le Théâtre du Soleil, have often resorted to mime in their efforts to restore the supremacy of the actor on a bare stage. Mime techniques of Asian theatre were used to stunning effect in Julie Taymor’s staging of The Lion King (1998).
Inevitably, a confusion has arisen as to what is now meant by mime. In order to dispel the Marceau image, some companies prefer to call their work visual theatre, or physical theatre. Others call it new mime or postmodern mime, hoping that the public will eventually recognize that the term ‘mime’ now means a lot more than a silent world of white-faced figures walking against the wind.
Puppetry is a form of theatre or performance that involves the manipulation of puppets—inanimate objects, often resembling some type of human or animal figure, that are animated or manipulated by a human called a puppeteer. Such a performance is also known as a puppet play.
The puppeteer uses movements of her hands, arms, or control devices such as rods or strings to move the body, head, limbs, and in some cases the mouth and eyes of the puppet.
The puppeteer often speaks in the voice of the character of the puppet, and then synchronizes the movements of the puppet's mouth with this spoken part. The actions, gestures and spoken parts acted out by the puppets are typically used in storytelling.
Puppetry is a very ancient art form, thought to have originated about 3000 years ago. Puppets have been used since the earliest times to animate and communicate the ideas and needs of human societies. Some historians claim that they pre-date actors in theatre.
There is evidence that they were used in Egypt as early as 2000 BC when string-operated figures of wood were manipulated to perform the action of kneading bread. Wire controlled, articulated puppets made of clay and ivory have also been found in Egyptian tombs.
Puppetry was practiced in Ancient Greece and the oldest written records of puppetry can be found in the works of Herodotus and Xenophon, dating from the 5th century BC.
There is slight evidence for puppetry in the Indus Valley Civilization. Archaeologists have unearthed one terracotta doll with a detachable head capable of manipulation by a string dating to 2500 BC. Another figure is a terracotta monkey which could be manipulated up and down a stick, achieving minimum animation in both cases. The epic Mahabharata, Tamil literature from the Sangam Era, and various literary works dating from the late centuries BC to the early centuries AD, including Ashokan edicts, describe puppets. Natya Shastra also elaborates on puppetry in some detail. Some scholars trace the origin of puppets to India 4000 years ago, where the main character in Sanskrit plays was known as "Sutradhara", "the holder of strings".
There are many different varieties of puppets, and they are made of a wide range of materials, depending on their form and intended use. They can be extremely complex or very simple in their construction. There are four common types of puppets: