A motley group of creative minds are taking to ‘silence’ as they enact stories in what has given mimes a shot in the arm in the city
EMOTICONS pose in a specially shot photograph
In all the noise that the city throws up, imagine a minute during the day where you have pindrop silence about you? Now imagine over 60. On August 29, a bunch of youngsters will be bringing six plays in an hour’s worth of non-verbal theatre to the Bengaluru stage in an effort to bring back the fading arts of the pantomime. And because they have been robbed of words and all that they have left are emotions, they call themselves EMOTICONs.
Brought together by mime and theatre artist, Vinod KS, the EMOTICONS are a motley crowd of college going teenagers as well as professionals in their late 20s with one objective — to promote the silent art of pantomimes.
Between rehearsals where he trains and hones the mime skills of 12 actors, Vinod tells the story behind his motivations. “I was inspired by Charlie Chaplin. I was always into mime but Bengaluru was oddly lacking of any mime workshop culture. We met as a troupe in March and from then on, we’ve been watching YouTube videos and perfecting our performance. One hurdle which we had to face was a lack of awareness of dealing with physical objects – in our daily lives we sit at tables and eat without noticing how we are interacting with the plate. This is of primal importance in mime, because unless you know how to deal with the physical object you would not know how to react to the absence of it,” says the director and actor whose recent pantomime production won Best Concept Award at the Short and Sweet Festival.
The challenges of conceptualising for six plays which would not have a single word between them are plenty. And no one is more aware of it than their script writer Devi Suganya. She says, “Even though I am the house scriptwriter, these plays were mostly devised out of rehearsals. One reason why Vinod and I can work together well is because I think highly of the importance of words and he thinks highly of the importance of silences. The triumph of silence is tantamount to good theatre, especially as this promises to be a space where I can take my 10-year-old daughter without fear of impressions left on her.” From Marcel Marceu’s teary cheek to Jogesh Kar’s polished white face, makeup for pantomimes is as important as their performance. Siddharth Swain, who specialises in doing makeup for mime artists and will be working with this troupe, says, “The acting of mimes is very loud, mind you. Yet, it is loud acting in silence. One trick is to lose the eyebrows entirely with white paint and then paint on new eyebrows to express emotions.”
( Source : deccan chronicle )
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