music
music
The purpose of putting on the white face is obviously to make a mask, and obviously we
do that so that our bodies carry the story much more than anything else, but also because
when we take away our own personal identity, we get a chance to be someone else.
The eyebrows are actually a symbol, they're a symbol for an expression, and the expression
is something along the lines of, which is this feeling of astonishment or innocence
of seeing the world, seeing something amazing for the first time, and then in a moment you're
going to start to draw dots or tears, men are going to draw long streaming tears, and
women draw tear drops on their cheeks, and that's another symbol, it's a symbol for pretty
much the opposite feeling, it's a symbol for age, and loss, and experience, and seeing
something for the last time.
So the idea is that the mime tells the story from both points of view simultaneously, the
point of view of seeing something incredible and astonishing for the first time, and seeing
it also with age and wisdom and experience for the last time.
Sometimes we think of what we're kind of actually saying to each other, like in a piece with
multiple people, so sometimes we'll actually kind of talk through the pieces as we do them
when we rehearse, some of the things can be like really physically demanding, sometimes
we do fantasy mimes where we become objects, and so sometimes it's hard to figure out how
do you embody an object, and so that can be challenging and kind of scary sometimes, but
it's really fun when you get the hang of it.
In our mime company we create our own stories, and we figure out the story that we want to
tell, and then we figure out how to tell that story through movement and through gesture
and finding those little gestures that people will recognize and that people will laugh
at and have a response to because they recognize it as part of this vocabulary of gesture movement
that we all have.
I guess what's really cool is it's not always silent because if the audience is laughing
then as the actor you're listening to all the responses of the audiences having.
I guess the hardest part for me is sometimes doing funny pieces, like it's really hard
for me not to laugh, but you just try to stay in character.
