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The Word on Mime

By Patrick Rainville Dorn 

Patrick Rainville Dorn has a MA in Theatre from the University of Denver.  He taught English and drama at Colorado Christian University, has written and directed plays for Colorado ACTS for many years, was a theatre critic for a daily newspaper, and has more than thirty published plays. 

Now that the school year is practically over and your production is done, you might be wondering how to keep your students busy and focused on developing their acting skills.  In a word...  mime.

Not only will practicing the skills of pantomime keep your students quiet (literally!), their acting skills will be all the better for it as well!  With just a lesson or two, you and your students will see a vast improvement in their abilities to develop their characters onstage.  After all, they can’t be delivering lines all the time!

When most people hear the word “mime,” they think of silent street performers with pasty white faces and tight-fitting clown costumes, pretending to be stuck in an invisible box or pulling an unseen rope.  But there’s much more to it than that!

The skills that make up a classical mime’s bag of tricks can be of tremendous use to any actor who may be called upon in a play to tell a story through gestures, or more likely, to trick an audience into “seeing” something that isn’t there.

Anyone who has played charades knows that clear, simple movements and gestures convey much more information than wild thrashings and gesticulations.  You can use mime to create images in an audience’s mind, or even tell an entire story.

For example, imagine you are in a play, and your character has to come onstage as if walking in from a rainstorm.  Even though you and your costume are completely dry, you can shrug out of your coat, shake imaginary water droplets from it, “dry” your face with a handkerchief and then use it to “mop up” the puddle by the door.  All this is done “in mime,” because there never was any real water.  But if done well, the audience would swear that there was.

Onstage, I’ve opened doors that weren’t really there, “flipped” a light switch that was painted onto a flat, been struck by a (thankfully) imaginary bullet, consumed non-existent coffee from imaginary cups and eaten an “air steak,” all in plays that are considered representational or realistic.  In Pioneer Drama Service’s hit comedy Twinderella, a baseball game is enacted onstage without a ball!  These are all examples of using the skills of pantomime within a regular play.

The three most important rules to remember about using pantomime effectively onstage are:  simplicity, consistency, and the “bump.”

First, keep it simple.  Complicated movements are confusing.  Don’t “muddy the air” with meaningless movements.  Also, finish one movement before going on to the next.  Then be consistent.  Once an imaginary object is established, make sure that it remains there until moved.  If you set a “cup” down in one place, be sure to pick it up again in the same spot.  Otherwise the audience will think there are two cups on the table.  I’ve seen shows using imaginary doors where the doorknob magically moves up and down, depending on the height of the actors.  Finally, there’s “the bump.”  When you pick up a real cup, your fingers simply wrap around it.  But with a mimed cup, you have to very slightly exaggerate the grasp, the lift, the setting down and the release.  Don’t overdo the exaggeration, but think of it as a series of visual punctuation marks.  This helps the audience recognize the moment of contact, the beginning of movement, the end of movement and the letting go.

Every actor can benefit from some training in pantomime, and when you’re practicing mime, you’ll never hear them complain!  Remember, “mime’s” the word!