Salient. Official Newspaper of Victoria University of Wellington Students Association. Vol 41 No. 1. February 27 1978
How to Mime — Miming our Own Business
How to Mime
Miming our Own Business
Mime as a means of expression has very severe boundaries. Language, and often sound altogether, is done away with. Props and sets don't usually exist. Costume is limited to a very simple neutral garment. All that remains is a silent performer and audience in a complete void. Why perform mime when you could have a cast of thousands, brilliant dialogue, beautiful music, sets, props, and costumes, in fact the whole magic of the traditional theatre? It seems masochistic. There must be a value in this form cannot be achieved in any any other.
And that value is the glorification of the human imagination. The void can be filled by the rarest fantasies the mind can conjure up. In mime, objects, events, worlds are created, but have no intrinsic reality. They exist solely in the portrayal of the performer's relationship to these chimeras.
A chair is not created from nothing merely because the performer can do so. It would be far simpler just to put a chair on stage. Rather the thing being conveyed is the essence of the relationship between thing, chair, and a human being.
Thus to create a character, the essential features that make that character unique must be understood and conveyed. A phantom being can be brought into being but, as in life, it has the degree of substance consistent with the significance it has for the performance.
It is obvious that tremendous demands are made on the performer. As nothing else exists on the stage, any irrelevancy or vagueness is severely punished by the audience's loss in concentration. The performer must have an intense awareness of what is to be portrayed and have the skill necessary to convey it.
These aspects of the art were little in evidence in the Mime International performance. Much of the show seemed to be simply and excuse to show off a limited ability in the classic mime techniques.
For example, "Swing" seemed to be an attempt to combine the mimes, swings, picking flower and smelling it, riding in a gondola, eating an apple into a loose form. That form took a theme that was much in evidence through the whole show, that man meets woman, falls in love, man loses woman to another man.
This theme was elaborated on in a very sexist way. The man wants the woman to fulfill certain needs. The woman exists in the pieces soley as a need-fulfiller. But because the man does not come up to the steroetype image of "Man" the woman commits the crime of leaving him for another man. Never are these relationships explored in any real depth.
A classic example of this failure is in the the piece "Red Bird". The woman is actually portrayed as the slang expression "bird" or "chick" personifies. She exists solely to satisfy a male fantasy. If only this fantasy was explored and shown up for its destructive and demoniacal reality. But no, the fantasy was accepted as reality.
This lack of sensitivity came through most forcibly when the man and the woman actually mimed fucking. It seemed to have as much validity in the mime as the word fuck has in this review, and seemed to be included for the same reasons. Instead of drawing us, the audience, into awareness of the sensual and sexual relation relationship we are left to be voyeurs watching two people copulating. That is mere pornography.
If the performers could only remain within the scope of their abilities. When they do so, the mimes actually work. With a little tightening here and there the sketch "The Box" could be very funny. It attracts by its simplicity and gentle humour. Very little in it is embarassing.
"Balloon" has a similar charm. It begins as a fantasy about imbuing a balloon with totally unexpected properties, such as incredible weight and total immovability in space. If that simplicity could be kept it would be beautiful to watch. But it was ruined by making out that the male performer could not budge the balloon because of a major physical weakness.
To sum up, watching the performance of Mime International made me very angry. They are setting themselves up as the chief exponents of mime in this country when they have barely scratched the surface. They should either perform within their, at present, limited capabilities or work in private for a few more years until they can present something which shows them worthy of the title Mime International.
John Bailey