mime

Mime, or narrative gesture, is also used. Mime can either imitate movement realistically—in a death scene, for example, where the killer assumes a ferocious expression and imitates strangling a victim—or it can function as a symbol—as in the circling movement of the arms in ballet…

Mimed gesture was often prominent in such dance dramas—for example, in ancient Greece, where the gestures of the chorus illustrated the drama’s major themes. There the mime was often naturalistic: a hand on the head to represent grief or the stretching upward of the arms…

• In branle

  Aristocrats frequently performed pantomimic branles in which they scolded each other like washerwomen or courted (as in the branle de Poitou, the possible ancestor of the minuet). Certain branles, especially in France, were designated for specific age groups, such as the lively branle de Bourgogne for the youngest…

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  In Western dance: Ancient Roman dance

  … 14) was the wordless, spectacular pantomime that rendered dramatic stories by means of stylized gestures. The performers, known as pantomimi, were at first considered more or less as interpreters of a foreign language, since they came from Greece. They refined their art until the two dancer-mimes Bathyllus and Pylades became…

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  In Western theatre: Mime and pantomime

  …theatres were taken over by mime (Latin mimus) and pantomime (pantomimus) as the level of public taste steadily fell. Pantomime grew out of the wreckage of tragedy as a kind of burlesque ballet in which a chorus chanted the story to musical accompaniment, while a solo actor silently used gesture…

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Mime remains closely connected to drama, being merely a highly specialized form of enactment. Relying on movement without words, it enjoyed an immense vogue in imperial Rome, contributed to the style of commedia dell’arte, and underwent a revival in the latter half of the…

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  In commedia dell’arte: Decline

  …dell’arte’s last traces entered into pantomime as introduced in England (1702) by John Weaver at Drury Lane Theatre and developed by John Rich at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was taken from England to Copenhagen (1801), where, at the Tivoli Gardens, it still survives. Revivals, notably in the 1960s by a…

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  In stagecraft: Classical theatrical costume

  In the Doric mimes and Old Comedies, the upper-class characters wore stage chitons and cloaks, and the lower classes and slaves wore short tunics, revealing pendant phalli. These character tunics were often worn under light-fitting vests and over grotesque padding of torso and buttocks. Mimic horses, satyrs, bird…

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  In stagecraft: Renaissance costume

  …a central character in English pantomime, carrying his original wooden sword and wearing his black mask. A fine pictorial record of the commedia characters may be seen in the works of the 17th-century French artists Jacques Callot and Antoine Watteau.

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  In Western theatre: France

  As a mime (trained by Étienne Decroux), he achieved international fame for his re-creation of the pantomimes of Deburau in the film Les Enfants du paradis (1945; “The Children of the Gods”), and as a director he became the foremost exponent of the poetic dramas of Paul…

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  In Greek literature: Comedy

  …seems to have been the mime, a short realistic sketch of scenes from everyday life. These were written rather later by Sophron of Syracuse; only fragments have survived but they were important for their influence on Plato’s dialogue form and on Hellenistic mime. At Athens, comedy became an official part…

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  In theatre: India

  …first through the use of pantomime and later through comedy.

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• In Latin literature: Comedy

  …yielded in popularity to verse mime of Greek origin that was realistic, often obscene, and full of quotable apothegms. Finally, when mime gave rise to the dumb show of the pantomimus with choral accompaniment and when exotic spectacles had become the rage, Roman comedy faded out.

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  In theatre: The Middle Ages in Europe

  …suggests that drama, most probably mime, had ridiculed the church or that it had tried to accommodate religious sensibilities by performance of “godly” plays.

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  In Southeast Asian arts: Masked mime

  Until recent years, a Thai version of the Khmer nang sbek shadow play, nang yai, occupied an important place in court as a Brahmanic-related ritual performance of the Ramayana. Thai scholars describe it as the source of khon masked pantomime, citing celebrations for King…

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  In stagecraft: Western traditions

  Like the Roman mimes, the traveling actor-comedians of the Italian commedia dell’arte in the 16th century developed a set of stock characters using masks. There may have been some continuity of tradition, for there are resemblances between the comedians’ leather masks and those of the Roman farces.

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