A BRIEF HISTORY OF (MOSTLY) WORDLESS THEATRE BY SARAH ROSE LEONARD
Geoff Sobelle’s HOME uses the body, rather than words, to tell stories. Nonverbal performance focuses our attention on how we behave physically, causing us to read emotions as much as narratives. It is said that 55 percent of our communication is from body language. Performers utilize this notion by using their physicality to shape characters and convey emotion. When we watch actions happen in real time, we are in sync with a performer’s presence. Did you know when an actor takes a big breath onstage the audience takes a breath too? Part of what makes physical theatre so immediate is that we subconsciously tune in to the actor, taking in their experience as our own. In stripping away language, HOME follows in the footsteps of a rich history of predominantly wordless performance traditions. Perhaps the best-known nonverbal acting genre is mime. The genre shifted over time, and its lineage shows up in physically oriented theatre to this day. Early Greek and Roman mimes consisted of a farce—an improbable plot marked by broad humor—alongside song. They were textless, and chronicles of those performances show that the topics covered scenes from daily life punctuated by mythological drama. Mime was a staple of the annual hypersexual Floralia festival (which celebrated the goddess Flora), in which festivities began with naked mime actresses. The first known mime to give words to his performance was the Roman knight Decimus Laberius (105–43 bce). When Julius Caesar prompted him to accept a challenge by his rival, 2 0 · T H E B E R K E L E Y R E P M AG A Z I N E · 2 0 1 8–1 9 · I S S U E 5
Publilius Syrus, to appear in one of his own mimes, he delivered a barbed prologue to Caesar himself: “None the first place for ever can retain/But, ever as the topmost round you gain/Painful your station there and swift your fall.” Ouch. Needless to say, Caesar judged in Syrus’ favor. Syrus, a former Syrian slave who rose through the ranks thanks to his talent, became Rome’s new leading mime under Caesar’s watch. His maxims held through to our modern lexicon, including gems like “to do two things at once is to do neither” and “a rolling stone gathers no moss.” Forty years after Syrus’ day, in the first century bce, mime and pantomime reigned as the most popular forms of entertainment in Greece and Rome. Pantomime most closely resembles what we think of as mime today. It consisted of a solo dance with music and a chorus, using masks to tell mythological stories through gestures. Surviving texts from the era reveal that the typical mime plot centered mostly on adultery. Actors took this all the way, having real sex on stage. Yes, you read that right: in Roman times, mimes had sex on stage in front of hundreds of audience members. One emperor, in fact, ordered only realistic violence and sex onstage. Obeying his command, mimes incorporated real killings into performance as well. Performers were sometimes killed by bears, and real-life convicted criminals were put to death on stage. As Christianity gained influence, so did opposition to mimes and such entertainments. Mimes retaliated by mocking Christian sacraments, such as baptism, on stage. When Christianity
