Word: mimes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...demonstrate, dancer Joan Blackmer--next to Miss Hahn, the troupe's most mature and accomplished performer--rudely pushed a chair across the stage. Then she repeated exactly the same gesture without the chair: we had passed to mime. Finally, again without the chair, she abstracted the gestures, exaggerating them, extending the slow, speeding up the fast, using her whole body to carry out a movement which her foot or her arm had performed alone. Now we had dance. The company passed through the same elaborations to show the use of space, time, and energy. Finally, combining these elements and varying...
...cast that truly supports. A rarity in the past, the players' acting rapport is a tribute to the skill of Director Gerald Freedman. Philip Bosco's Kent is a beautifully modulated performance with a Gielgud-like delivery of the Shakespearean line. Rene Auberjonois as the Fool is a supple mime of wisdom and Stephen Elliott's Gloucester is a man of probity incarnate, woefully abused. Barbette Tweed's Cordelia is appropriately sweet and good; Patricia Elliott as Regan and Marilyn Lightstone as Goneril are properly serpentine. Only Stacy Keach disappoints, by failing into smirky stage-villain mannerisms as Gloucester...
...humble way," says Ronnie Davis, director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, "to destroy the United States," That is the modest ambition of several groups of strolling players who consider themselves collectively to be proponents of "guerrilla theater," Performing on street corners or on flatbed trucks, earning their keep by pass-the-hat collections, these dramatic revolutionaries have but one purpose: to "radicalize" their audiences into action and rebellion, Recently, three of the best-known guerrilla organizations -the Mime Troupe, New York City's Bread and Puppet Theater and California's El Teatro Campesmo-gathered at San Francisco...
...guerrilla troupes prefer the realism of open-air settings for dramatizing their message to children, students, workers and activists. Naturally, the values of the Broadway stage are anathema to them. "You cannot respond to junk like Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller," insists Luis Valdez, an alumnus of the Mime Troupe and founder of El Teatro Campesino. "Art is communication. The more artful you are, the more straight-telling you are." This is roughly the esthetic theory of the poster or the comic strip, and guerrilla theater is hardly more subtle; radical drama willingly sacrifices art for impact, nuance for message...
Plastic Mentality. Oldest of the guerrilla theaters is the Mime Troupe, founded in 1959 by Davis, who had studied mime in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship. Initially, he and his company of 23 performers-as with most of the guerrilla troupes, few have had any previous professional experience-specialized in silent, Chaplinesque skits. Despite its name, the troupe has since broken loudly into song and speech; and its repertory, performed around the country, includes Renaissance commedia dell'arte, Moliere farces and group-created modern morality plays with so much bawdry that the actors have been arrested by local authorities...