Color Me Mime

Today I completed my first official theatre assignment: the pantomime. To be quite frank, I felt out of my element when I got up and performed in front of my theatre class. It was a new experience for I had never been in a theatre performance, let alone a pantomime where I was unable to express myself with words but with motions and facial expressions. As the lesser experienced theatrical students came together and brainstormed with the more experienced, we came up with the idea of miming someone who was painting a wall.

When I first practiced this, I had to become aware with my "props" and my "surroundings." I quickly realized the difficulty of miming as I had to remember where I had placed my objects to ensure that I was not trampling all over my painting supplies. Another issue that I encountered was the fact that my painting supplies had somehow vanished once I was done using them. As a result, I had to consciously think and plan out my actions throughout my pantomime to ensure that these problems would not occur during my actual performance. Once I had completed my mime, I received both positive and constructive feedback from my peers and instructor. The positive was that I was aware of my surroundings and therefore prevented my first concern listed above. My peers critiqued on the fact that I needed to become more aware of my "props" such as the paintbrush which I had held crookedly rather than in a straight line. Another critique was that I needed to give my supposed paint can more weight as I was pouring out the paint. My theatre instructor also noted the fact of how she wanted to see more of a storyline within the pantomime rather than having us merely perform the actions. Overall, I need to practice and work on giving objects a more realistic feel in terms of displaying depth and weight.

In watching other students' pantomimes, I realized some other important elements such as having sharp movements and including characteristic actions that further help the audience understand what the actor is doing. In one pantomime, a critique was that actor needed to show more force in her foot closing the refrigerator door. In terms of characteristic actions, this referred to another actor's pantomime in which he was making a peanut-butter sandwich. In order to show that the ingredient was in fact peanut butter, our instructor commented on how he could have shown the stickyness of his ingredients and that he could have taken smaller bites rather than if he were eating a larger sandwich. This demonstrates how because we cannot speak and narrate our actions, we must achieve a sense of communication of our actions to the audience through physical motions and facial expressions.