My lips are sealed...

This is what most of us know as mime. For me, I imagine if this guy were to speak, he'd be French and it wouldn't be long before he whipped out a cigarette.

This however, it's even close to how mime originated.

Mime began back in the festival of Dionysus, particularly during fertility rituals. They were always comic in nature and either parodied religion or simply added comic relief.
They were also used in tragicomic dramas such as indecent burlesques. In these types of performances female were permitted to take part ("Western Theatre"). The thing that surprised me most was, these performances were very sexual in nature. "They were often masked and wore padded phalluses to aid in lewd innuendo" (Felner 119). A couple of populer topics were adultery and executions. There were reports in Roman areas, that certain Emperors ordered troupes to actually perform these acts, by use of prostitutes and criminals (Harwood 56).

Mime was short improved skits that had mostly a physical aspect, including acrobatics, juggling, and use of stock characters. I was trying to cross reference and find the most common stock characters but one source had 24 different ones! These I think are the most common:

Pantalone - old crotchety man, sometime a father figure or merchant
Dottore - a 'doctor' or 'scholar' that spoke as if he knew everything but in reality knew nothing
Capitano - a cowardly soldier
Inamorati - are the naive young lovers
Columbine - servant to the inamorata (female lover)
Scaramouche - kind of a Robin Hood character
There were also groups of female maids that sometimes helped in the plot and male servants that usually just caused havoc in the plot. The most popular of these was Pulcinella.


Once mime traveled to Roman areas, the scenes were beginning to be written down and it evolved in to pantomime. I always thought mime and pantomime were the same, I was wrong. Our book defined it as "resembling a silent storytelling dance, and was a distinct performance genre from mime" (Felner 119).

Commedia dell'arte popped up around the 16th century during the Renaissance. This form used some of the same aspects of original mime: stock characters, improv, masks, etc.

Their phalic nature makes me think that this form was equally as sexual.

I also found in the book "All the World's a Stage" that only men wore masks. I assume because they only let beautiful women in the troupe so they didn't want them to hide their faces.

They used a simple outline; it would be like a game that I use to play in my improv group where all we asked for was: location, occupation, and murder weapon. The rest came from our demented minds. I was interested in the fact that every actor found his role and stuck with it. In every performance they played the same part. To me that sounds boring and tiresome, but it was a craft to them. They passed down secrets from generations to generations (Felner 120).

*I later found evidence that this is not a beloved career, as our textbook made me believe. "Most were believed to be immoral and socially inferior" (Harwood 56). (Probably because they were partly made up of hookers and law breakers.)

I liked how they had certain 'routines' to use to warm up a crowd, heighten an effect, or save a scene (Felner 120). There's an improv club in Orlando that I use to go to and they used maybe that same sort of idea. When a scene got stuck, or boring, or out of hand they had a pink converse shoe that they would toss on stage. The scene ended immediately so that the audience was saved from the performance going bad and we got a laugh because someone threw a shoe. That's funny, I don't care. Haha. When commedia made its way to France they of course put their own mark on it. It became part of other works other than having a life of its own. The French took away a lot of the physicality in an attempt to refine it a bit (Felner 121).

In the 18th century laws were placed restricting theatre so that it made its way back to more of a pantomime. I guess the law was against the spoken language, so if you don't speak, you found a great loophole! This is also where the terms mime and pantomime began to be interchangeable (Felner 121).

But finally mime, pantomime and commedia found itself shoved in to the circus, vaudeville, and in the 20th century, silent film. Most people have heard of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Marcel Marceau. And you can see its effects in modern things such as, "Whose Line is it Anyway?" But as a stand alone form, it is pretty much extinct. :(

In the end it seems the lines are all blurred. It is hard to say, "Mime was then, Pantomime was then, etc." Just like we've previously stated; theatre is a collection of everything, it pulls from everywhere, so to separate it is impossible.

I leave you with this piece that I found; I think it's probably one of the closest representation of commedia you'll find (in a modern setting).

Works Cited

Felner, Mira, and Orenstein, Claudia. The World of Theatre. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc, 2006.

Harwood, Ronald. All the World's a Stage. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984.

"Western Theatre." Encyclopedia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. 23 Sep. 2009. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/849217/western-theatre.

The Red Bastard - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH1itcv76ds&feature=related

All picture found by use of Google Images.