I'm in a Box

Only the second day of school, yet the wheels have already been set in motion. In our small theater class (and when I say small, I really mean six students) I feel as though we are all able to interact on a more personal basis with each other and our mentor of a sort, Ms. Karr. In this intimate setting, many of us feel more comfortable with putting ourselves and our ideas out there without the fear of being personally attacked. Within our overall group of six students, we are each further identified by our backgrounds in theater. Students range from having absolutely no former experience in theater to ones who have already been involved for five years or so. Luckily, I have been able to experience both sides of the spectrum in the sense that I learned theater from a basics standpoint to an actual class geared towards producing a final product.

So now to start off the year, Ms. Karr suggested a pantomime exercise to sort of get a feel for students in the class. In my previous experience, I had practiced pantomime enough to have a solid grasp for the entire concept of formulating a silent scene around a certain character. The twist on the assignment, however, is that the pantomime now we have to reveal some unknown trivia about ourselves. Right away some typical skits started coming to mind. Perhaps "the girl whose a little uncoordinated" or something along the lines of "lost in IB". These ideas are really in the early stages of development though. All I know is that whatever trivia I do decide to portray, I want to make sure its memorable and a bit different from the pantomimes I've done before.

Instead of focusing on the instructional aspect of pantomime, I decided to do some concrete reasearch on the subject. What seemed to be most common among the various sources was that pantomime was often performed around the winter holiday season. It also elucidated the strong links that pantomime shares with another popular form of physical theater known as Commedia dell'arte. This discovery brought me back to my days of beginning drama when we studied this period of Italian theater filled with stock/fixed characters. This knowledge aided in the development of my pantomime in the sense that I exaggerated my character a bit in order to get across the physical comedy and prosaic demise of my character. Although pantomime has often been associated with non-speaking roles, research revealed that British pantomime now incorporates song, dance, buffoonery, slapstick, jokes, audience participation, and mild sexual innuendos in its performances. It turns out that the plots of pantomime are also loosely based upon traditional children's stories such as Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Dick Whittington (a character based on Richard Whittington who gains fortune throught his travels with his cat). I feel as though this whole idea of adaptation combined with the parameters of pantomime has the potential to go somewhere. Possibly a future project?