corporeal mime

Corporeal mime is a physical theater technique developed by Étienne Decroux. The goal of the technique is to place drama inside the moving human body, rather than to substitute gesture for speech as in mime (sometimes called pantomime). In this medium, the mime must apply to physical movement those principles that are at the heart of drama: pause, hesitation, weight, resistance and surprise. Corporeal mime accentuates the vital importance of the body and physical action on stage. Étienne Decroux’s dramatic corporeal mime is taking the body as a main means of expression and the actor as a starting point for creation with the aim of “making the invisible visible” (Étienne Decroux), of allowing the actor to show thought through movement. Art of movement rather than art of silence, dramatic corporeal mime is first of all the art of the actor/actress. An actor, whatever his artistic ambition might be, must, before all, be present, “be” on stage and this presence is shown through the body. The body is what sustains the costume, what the spectator sees, what carries the voice. It is the skeleton, the hand in the glove. It was developed primarily by Étienne Decroux, who was heavily influenced by his training with Jacques Copeau at the École du Vieux-Colombier.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Corporeal mime”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

corporeal mime is theatrical genre, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 2 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶