Silence speaks louder than words

An event will involve collegians from across Maharashtra showcasing the oft-neglected art of miming

What does a theatre actor do when he has to express anger on stage? Typically, he will raise his voice, employ aggressive language as predetermined in the script, and possibly use violent physical gestures to indicate how the character feels. But what if it's a mime act? How do you then express the same emotion? The luxury of using your vocal chords has been stripped from you. So, you need to amplify your facial and body movements to send the message across to the audience. You need to look, and not sound, like someone consumed with fury. And this holds true not just in the case of anger, of course, but for every other human emotion, like pain, sorrow, love and pity.

It's not an easy trick to master. But for three years now, Krunal Patil and Vinayak Said have been promoting mime acts among youngsters in the state, through a series of events called Art of Silence. “See, wherever you go in Mumbai, the sort of shows you are exposed to involve dance, theatre, music and all these [usual] things. The same holds true for the rest of the country, too. But nobody is exposed to the art of mime as such. I mean, when I first started in 2007 and would tell people that I am a mime artiste, they'd say, 'We don't know what that is,'” Patil says, adding that this is the attitude he wanted to change when he first joined forces with Said.

The modus operandi they employed was to involve collegians so that they could generate interest from the ground up. And to celebrate the initiative's third anniversary, students from different colleges across Maharashtra will put up nine separate mime acts at a Matunga auditorium.

Krunal Patil

These performances will include one-act plays, and solo and group performances. But collectively, the actors will pay tribute to Marcel Marceau, a French mime artiste who left even someone of the calibre of Michael Jackson dumbfounded. “He's the one who popularised the art. For instance, he taught us that if you have to express anger, you have to make sure that your body is on fire. You have to perform a loud and powerful action, and express your state of mind through your eyes,” Patil says, putting in a nutshell how different miming is from the art of traditional theatre acting.

Time 7.30 pm
AT Yashwant Natyamandir, Matunga West.
CAll 24381659
FREE

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