A Musical Mime

Our second acting performance consisted of a mime to music. This differed from our conventional idea of what a mime is supposed to be in that we think a mime is meant to be completely silent and without sound. I guess the idea of a silent mime is meant more for the actor to be silent and not necessarily for the entire performance to be composed in silence. As a result, the use of music brought a different element to the performance in enhancing the mood to give the audience a better sense of the actor's actions. I believe the purpose of this assignment was for us to find a stimulus, in this case our piece of music, and create a performance based solely on this piece of inspiration.

And so I began the search for my music and decided to opt for something with a more classical flair that displayed a variety of moods. This meant that the music went in a wave in terms of tempo and volume. After searching, I eventually came to the decision of choosing Hans Zimmer's composition of Maestro featured in the film: The Holiday. The song began as a mellow tune and worked its way up to this climactic moment of excitement. Because of this, I decided to mime the story of someone having a usual Sunday afternoon relaxing on her sofa with a magazine and a soda. She suddenly receives this call that her friend is coming over to visit, but must wait impatiently as this friend arrives. She continues to read until this friend arrives which is the end of the mime.

After performing this second mime, I received constructive criticism on how I needed to find a different activity to do while I waited for my friend because I winded up reading for a good portion of the mime. Another critique was that I needed to portray this sense of impatience as I waited either by shaking my leg or by checking my watch. In regards to finding a variety of activities to do while sitting down, my instructor pointed out a good example in another theatre student's pantomime. This particular mime consisted of a girl sitting down to eat this large, delicious-looking meal. As she was sitting at her "table" she was cutting up what seemed to be a steak, garnished her food, and was trying to force ketchup out of a ketchup bottle. Although she sat down for mime, she demonstrated how we can still show an array of emotions as well as actions.