Forget everything you thought you knew about mimes.
Yes mimes, those characters who people often picture in white face pretending to be stuck in a glass box, because there’s a new festival coming that aims to chatter the misconceptions and speak loudly about the often misunderstood artform.
“A mime is acting first — if you can’t act you can’t be a good mime. It’s physical, it deals with imagery and poetry and movement of all forms. Another way to refer to it is gestural theater,”’ said James Donlon, a mime performer and organizer of the inaugural L.A. Mime Festival: A Celebration of Contemporary and Classical Physical Theatre.
The festival will take place Sept. 13-15 and 20-21 at Los Angeles City College Theatre Academy’s Caminito Theatre. It will consist of various programs and performances by more than a dozen artists, and most will not be performing in the traditional white face paint associated with stereotypical mimes, Donlon said.
“I think there’s only one performer out of 12 in the festival that wears a white face,” he said.
“He’s called Billy the Mime and he does it very irrelevantly. It’s almost like a silent standup but he wears a white face to make a point,” Donlon added.
Mime as an artform goes as far back as ancient Greece when actors performed dramatizations of daily life using elaborate movements and gestures but it also included spoken word and songs, according to Brittania.com. Today mime is more associated with silent characters in black and white striped shirts and faces painted in white. That’s the stereotype Donlon, who has been a mime for about 50 years, hopes to break with this festival with performances that highlight mime as physical theater where stories are told using body gestures, facial expressions and even the spoken word.
“That stereotype, the box, the white face performer, that became visible because of a lot of untrained street mimes,” he said, referring to artists who performed in open public settings.
The festival will include several separately ticketed performances that will range from pieces with elements of music, dance, film as well as cabaret and circus style performances and dialogue. It will also include workshops and panel discussions with the artists.
“Speaking and sound effects are allowed. I like to think of gestures as a voice and voice as a movement. So mimes speak, and good mime can be very noisy, let’s say. It uses sound effects, it has soundscapes, it even has language. But the base is the body, it’s a physical expression somewhere between dance and theater,” Donlon said.
“Mime is actually the basis of all theater, it’s about how to be present, how to be in a space,” he said.
L.A. Mime Festival: A Celebration of Contemporary and Classical Physical Theatre
When: Various hours Sept. 13-15 and 20-21
Where: Los Angeles City College Theatre Academy’s Caminito Theatre, 855 N Vermont Ave., Los Angeles
Tickets: $20 per performance
Information: lamimefestival.com
Related Articles
Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’ is, at 65, a shape-shifting album that transcends time and genre
Public art unveiled at Intuit Dome, in Inglewood, highlights LAculture, architecture
South Coast Repertory to perform final outdoor series at San Juan Capistrano Mission
Irvine’s Great Park Live debuts with tribute band; first commercial acts to play this fall
Leave a Reply