Category: Experimentation

Having been given feedback after showing a snippet of our durational performance to the class, it occurred to us that we may not be able to continue referring to what we are doing as falling under the sub-title of ‘miming.’

mime
/mīm/

Noun
The theatrical technique of suggesting action, character, or emotion without words, using only gesture, expression, and movement.

Verb
Use gesture and movement without words in the acting of (a play or role).

By no stretch of the imagination are we attempting to create characters, or emotion through our incorporation of choreographed mechanical gestures. Our use of costumes will suggest a time of day, opposed to that of a fictional characters wardrobe. The gestures which we have constructed consist of ordinary movements which everyone inevitably comes across throughout the duration of their day. We will include one simple action for each period and repeat it over the course of 15 minutes at a time. The gestures being the hand moving to and from the face with a clenched fist (brushing teeth), both hands with open palms moving up and down in front of the face simultaneously (face washing) and lastly a cupped hand, whilst the other moves to the mouth and back down again (eating breakfast).

Our intention is to show the effects which a structured concept comes across when exposed to the notion of time. Repeating the same action for a period of time obviously much longer than intended can turn something very ordinary into something abstract, some might even say into a piece of art, much similar to those on show in both The Usher Gallery and The Collection. Although this may seem like quite a laborious task, it’s incredibly intriguing to see how warping such a simple thing like the amount of minutes it takes to brush your teeth can have on your outlook on the gesture used, the movements incorporated or even how strenuous it may be to experiment with something so unnatural.

When choreographing the movements which we decided to use, we tried to keep in mind the soundtrack to our piece, and our chosen galleries theme; the ticking of a clock. In order for a clock to create a sound, the cogs inside of it must be working together both effectively and efficiently together. In The Usher Gallery there is a skeleton clock on show, where all of the cogs are extremely visible. We hope to achieve the same kind of structure that a clock holds by the use of our mechanical gestures.

Automatons are a self-operating machine. They adopt a series of movements, or sometimes even just the one key gesture (similar to that shown above). The mechanisms inside of each automaton are similar to that of a clock, and are even used to produce to ‘cuckoo’ in a cuckoo clock. Automatons take a gesture which we are familiar with and have the tools to distort how we view it, their fixed facial expression and lack of inhibition express no life like characteristics, yet are still created with a somewhat human appearance and the ability to mimic a human gesture.

So, rather than us disregarding the use of props in order to create a convincing mime, we are currently experimenting with the use of mechanical expression. That being said, we fully intend on exploring what it will look like to use the same task, with the ‘robotic’ movements, whilst attempting to incorporate relevant props.

Author: Chloe Doherty