American Mime Theatre - Home Page HEAD MAPP TD TR The American Mime Theatre Paul J. Curtis, Director 61 Fourth Ave. NY, NY 10003-5204 (212) 777-1710 e-mail: mime@americanmime.org The American Mime Theatre is a professional performing company and training school. It was founded in 1952 and has performed continuously since then, under the direction of Paul J. Curtis, who created the medium. American Mime, Inc., is a not-for-profit tax exempt Public Foundation incorporated in 1970 to promote the medium, American Mime, internationally by producing the services of The American Mime Theatre. Friends of American Mime are people who have been moved by this medium and who contribute their, time, skills, and money to achieve the further recognition of American Mime. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent of current laws, and should be made payable to: American Mime, Inc. 61 Fourth Avenue New York, NY 10003 This year the American Mime Theatre #8212;a Manhattan-based professional performing company andschool #8212;is celebrating the 55th anniversary of its founding in 1952 by Paul J.Curtis, who invented the artistic medium that has come to be called AmericanMime. But what exactly is American Mime? And why, as a professional actor ordancer, should you consider studying it, even if you have no intention of becominga mime, at least not of the traditional Marcel Marceau ilk? American mime is a unique combination of playwriting, acting, and movingthat is quite different from the familiar French school of mime exemplified byMarceau. "He is a pantomimist," Curtis explains, "and pantomime and mime arenot the same thing. Pantomime is the handling of imaginary objects or situations.Mime encompasses any form of silent performance. It's a broader term.When a pantomimist is performing, you don't have to believe it or empathize theway you do with speaking theatre. You just see it and are entertained by it. But Americanmime is more like a play, in that if you don't believe the characters up there, thenit's nothing. In American mime, everything has to be motivated; it has to beme. And of course we don't wear white face." American mime actors performsymbolic acdons and express the feelings of their characters honestly through motivatedmovement they call "form." Actors interested in honing their movement skills and dancers interested inimproving their acting ability may find the study of American mime unusually beneficialand creatively gratifying. "Most of the people who study with us have nointention of being American mimes," Curtis says. "It's too 1imited.You couldn'tpossibly get enough work. But all kinds of performers study with us. For example,we've had a great many magicians study here simply to improve their performingskills. We've also had clowns and circus performers. We've even had singers." Curtis stresses that the study of American mime is for serious performers interestedin deepening their understanding of acting and moving and really embodyingwhat it means to be a professional performer. It is not for those looking for aquick, easy workshop that will help them secure a job. Courses in American mimehave been offered at more than 20 colleges and universities, including Cornell,Brown, and Sarah Lawrence, and at professional training academies such as rheAmerican Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Circle in the Square TheatreSchool. Open classes are offered continually at the company's New York studioand in Paris.Creating a New Art Form In honor of the anniversary, a documentaryis being produced about the creation and practice of this unique art form. #8220;I never set out to create a new art form. It just grew out of my need to train performersto do the kind of theatre I was interested in producing after I got out ofschool," says Curtis, who was trained by Erwin Piscator at the Dramatic workshopof the New School for Social Research. "That was a wondeerful training operationthey had going on there. Marlon Brando was an acting student there; TennesseeWilliams was a playwriting student. And the school had two theatres that presentedpublic performances almost every night of the week. It was a truly exceptional arenain which to train. I studied directing under Piscator, who took a liking to me,and I was fully trained by him." While at the school, Curtis got involved with a small group of studentswho considered themselves artists of the theatre. #8220;We weren't really interested inthe commercial theatre," he explains. '"We were interested in the traditions of theatreand the development of it as an art form. And one of the big things our little groupof theatricians was always trying to do was put together the ideas of acting and moving.We explored work from the Bauhaus and from Brecht's early theater #8212;Piscatorwas Brecht's early director, by the way #8212;and we went out and saw everythingwe could. We looked at the Noh drama, the Kabuki, and the French andItalian pantomime. I was trying to put them all together in different projects." Upon graduating in 1949, Curtis realized that as a young unknown director hewas not going to be given a job of any importance. "So I decided I'd put togethera presentation of a new kind of mime," he says. "I went to Equity, explained myidea, and asked to use a group of professional actors and dancers to mount a performanceat the 92nd Street Y, which was really a dance house at the time. And eventhough I told them I couldn't pay the performers, Equity gave me permission to doit anyway. So to make a long story short, we put together a series of seven plays andperformed them for an audience that was mostly dance-oriented. And we got a verystrong response. I was told that we had shocked them, because what we did wasmuch more direct than what they were used to seeing." It so happened that one of the people in the audience was the renowned modern dance pioneer Ted Shawn, who came backstage afterward and invited Curtis towork at his dance colony in Massachusetts, Jacob's Pillow. "I was unsure of howto respond to his invitation, because I had been planning to move to California totry to make films," Curtis says. "But my performers all wanted to continue withthe work, so we decided to go on with what we were doing." He quickly discovered,however, that there weren't many performers around capable of doing thetype of work he wanted to create. He would have to offer training, but therewasn't any training system in existence that he could call upon to develop thekind of performers he wanted. "Mv problem was that most actors couldn't dance, most dancerscouldn't act, and none of them could do both at the same time,which was really what we needed, #8221; Curtis says. "If you force a dancer to relate asdirectly to other performers as we need them to, in order to create empathy, then they feel as though they can't move anymore. And if you ask an actor to pick uphis form really high, then someone who has spent years learning to motivate feelsas though he can't act anymore. Both groups of performers were stcuggling veryhard. So we started to make up what we call 'procedures,' exercises that wouldproduce a kind of performer who had the ability to act and move at the same time." Over time, Curtis and his company developed the syllabus of procedures thatis currently used in American mime training. One of the main procedures iscalled "preparation" and is done together by the whole company. "The goal is toproduce individually and collectively a creative state," Curtis explains. "It lasts 15minutes and is done together silently.... We're on our 24th version of it. But nowthere exists a definitive textbook of the procedures." Curtis' company eventually did accept Shawn's offer to work at the Pillow andwound up performing and teaching there for many years. The work continuedto grow in popularity, and soon the company shifted from performing adaptationsof previously written works to creating original plays. The American MimeTheatre is now believed to be the oldest professional mime troupe in the world.The company once did a show for the illustrious French director and mimeartist Jean-Louis Barrault, who asked Curtis, 'What do you call your work?"When Curtis responded, "Mime," Barrault decreed that it was most definitelynot mime but suggested that it could be called "American mime." "And that'show we got our name," Curtis says.      Moving to Words: Deda Kavanagh in foreground; Jean Barbour, Dale Fuller, Arthur Yorinks. Scenes from Peepshow. TABLEPBODYHTML