29.03.2024

Theater history. mimes

Memes — among the ancient Greeks and Romans, the name of many types of grassroots folk theater of the village and city: performances of jesters, gymnasts, magicians, dancers, acrobats, trainers and so on. The theater of folk comedy also bore the name of the mime.

In ancient Greece, mimes were also called actors who participated in mimic performances.

Originally emerging as an amateur theater of farmers and artisans, the theater of mimes later turned into a professional theater of the «lower» classes, which became especially widespread in the Hellenistic era, that is, in the 4-2 centuries BC. NS. The broad popular character of the theater of mime is already evident from the fact that Aristotle contrasted «the laughter of free-born citizens with mimic laughter for slaves.» In the theater, mimes first appeared as actors, slaves and women.

The repertoire of the mime theater, which included small scenes with singing, dancing, acrobatics, and so on, clearly reflected the life and life of the masses. A prominent place in such a theater was occupied by a sharp political satire directed against the ruling classes, and an evil satirical parody, mocking kings and gods, heroes of high tragedy. Unlike the performers of the latter, the actors of the mime theater played without masks.

Memes influenced the comedy of Aristophanes. The comedy of the mime received its literary processing from the poets Epicharmas (5th century BC), Sofron, Xenarch (all three lived in Sicily) and the City (3rd century BC, Alexandria). The first three wrote in prose, the last in poetry.

In ancient Rome, mimes were a professional theater, which also had a source of the amateur theater of the laboring classes and was of the same character as in ancient Greece. Like Greece, in Rome, a woman also appeared on stage for the first time at the mime theater. Mime performances were given in city theaters not on the whole stage, but on the proscenium in front of the “mimic curtain”. In the era of the Empire, the theater of mimes appeared in large cities and in Rome itself under the name of «mimic mortgage».

The social and political acuteness of the mime was already deliberately dulled to please the ruling classes, who wanted to divert the attention of the masses from social and political issues. Using plots of modern life, as well as those taken from history and mythology , «mimic hypothesis» was a colorful theatrical genre, in which adventurous adventures were intertwined with erotic anecdotes, prose — with poetry, dances — with acrobatic numbers.

The art of mime in both senses — folk comedy and performances of jesters, gymnasts and the like — spread widely throughout the Roman Empire. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, instead of the decaying «mimic mortgage», more primitive forms of mimes are again restored, merging with folklore.

There is a theory (E. Reich and others) according to which a medieval juggler, an entertainer of folk fairs is a direct descendant of the Roman mime — jester, dancer, acrobat, and so on. Subsequently, the elements of mime penetrated into such theatrical and dramatic genres as farce and comedy of masks.

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