- Take your time: Slowness is much more interesting than speed, and a piece of careful mime can be an excellent way of building a really solid platform, while also giving the improvisers a moment to focus and calm themselves—especially if the previous scene has ended in high-energy chaos.
- Popping: Begin by holding both hands up, palms away from you, at about head height. Let each hand in turn close into a fist and then spring open, fingers splayed. The spasmodic motion should affect the whole forearm, all the way to the elbow, and should be as sudden as you can make it, as if you were receiving a brief electric shock. Keep springing open each hand in turn, but let the actual motion become less and less, and let the hand close less each time. Keep the idea of a shock to the forearm, but instead of having the hand spring open from a closed fist, just have the open fingers jerk a little, and then see if you can take it all the way down to a sudden, barely perceptible tightening of the muscles.
Go back to your shelf and try picking up and putting down a mime cup. Now do it again with a pop as your hand closes on the cup, and another as the cup hits the desk and your hand releases. The difference may be very striking. This technique also gives you another for free: mime demands precision, and that often means breaking actions down into discrete movements instead of—more naturally—letting each flow into the next or having them overlap. Popping introduces a stop at the end of each action, which will help you to arrange them consecutively instead of concurrently. Notice, too, the corollary of “mime objects only exist when you are touching them,” which is that mime objects are sticky. You need to let go of them cleanly and deliberately. - Exercise:
- Let’s make tea, drink the tea, pass the tea.
- First, mime it
- Second, do it for real
- Third, mime it again with the real version in mind
- Drag a dead body
- Lift a light object, lift a heavy object, pass the object
- If there is time, let’s try adding sounds
- Let’s make tea, drink the tea, pass the tea.
Miming/Object Work