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Ballet mime and why do they cut it out?


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After reading Mr. Johnson's reply in the "Ballet" section, in a thread about the faries and mortals I noticed it was said that in most performanced the mime sections are cut out.

I'm wondering why this happens. I think mime in ballet is a way to help the message to get through to the observer. It is a most natural way to convey your thoughts and feelings, though somewhat stylised. (In my opinion this stilization is the cause why people say they cannot understand mime.) If it is natural then it can be concluded that people could understand it. So, why are they cutting it out? Is it found uninteresting?

In my opinion this is an aesthetic issue. Ballet mime has always been a special part of ballet aesthetic, so isn't ballet loosing something when this vital part of communication between the dancers and the dancers and public is cut out?

Please, share your opinion on that.

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There is hope :) When you're a choreographer, Nadezhda, please bring back mime!

The first Bournonville ballet I saw, "The King's Volunteers on Amager," begins with a scene that's at least 40 minutes long and it's all mime. There are two sets of two couples, a principal couple, three subordinate, older, couples, and assorted soldiers and peasants. It was the first year I was watching ballet and I hadn't been told yet that I was supposed to be bored by mime. I was absolutely enthralled by it. The story telling is very clear.

My theory is that mime started being cut because the coaches/ballet masters couldn't set it correctly any more. There's a famous quote from Edwin Denby -- that I can only paraphrase -- that explained why Fokine's "Scheherezade" looked threadbare by the 1940s. He said something like, There's only mime, and mime can't hold up for 50 years.

Not quite true, I think. There were very convincing performances of Bournonville ballets that had been thought too old-fashioned to hold the stage in the 1970s and '80s (in Hans Brenaa's stagings).

But most of the 19th century ballets I've seen that retain the mime have been very poorly done. It looks as though the dancers think the mime is absurd, or haven't been taught what it means. Also, American dancers, at any rate, don't have mime training in school. If you're taught how to do it from childhood, it looks better when you get to do it onstage.

So please, start practicing, and bring it back :)

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In my opinion mime should be taught in variations class. Maybe it isn't so very interesting as all those tricks (triple and quadrouple pirouettes, fouettes...) but it certainly helps train a better dancer. Maybe I can now understand why so very few dancers can move us emotionally. For example: there are only a few dancers who could dance Giselle convincingly in both acts. And not because they were technically uncapable.

I am fortunate enough to be very curious and to be reading lots of books about ballet and I'm learning little by little what all those gestures mean. And it is not at all surprizing that I can usually guess what they mean and then only check them with the book. I think it's high time the prejudice ballet mime is boring vanished. I am also fortunate enough to have a very thoughtful teacher who (even though I take little classes) tries her best to educate us in good dancers. She would sometimes even discuss issues in ballet like the mime, ballet aesthetics and other. Quite unlike most of teachers, I think. :)

If I become a coreographer I will bring back the mime. :(

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Does anyone know why mime was forbidden in Soviet Russia? Was it against Communist doctrine, and if so, in what way? Or was it an arbitrary rule, a way of differentiating the "new" ballet from the Imperial variety?

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I had never heard that mime was forbidden in Soviet Russia...

Alexandra, the training and coaching are essential indeed. And also there's the problem that since the audience sees less and less mine, people get accustomed to its conventions, and so it's harder to understand what it means.

As far as I know, the POB school students do have some mime classes. However, when Lacotte staged his reconstruction of "Paquita" last season, I had been told that many of the dancers who danced it fell a bit ill at ease with all the mime it included; they found it clear when Lacotte did it, but had trouble doing it as well (however, from the audience, they looked fine in my opinion...)

Also, perhaps another problem with mime might be the large stages and theater halls: when one is very very far from the stage (for example in the Opera Bastille) and has no theater glasses, sometimes it's quite hard to understand what happens...

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I never thought mime was forbidden in Soviet Russia, just that their way of modernizing/changing ballets seemed to be to eliminate it. I thought perhaps this was because that audience knew the stories and didn't need it. Three generations later, we don't have a clue what's going on!

In the West, mime got eliminated because it's not considered dancing. I don't know how many times I've heard in Copenhagen "It is terrible that such a fine dancer as X should have to do that mime part" or "I'm a virtuoso dancer and shouldn't have to do Viderik." Good grief. Viderik gets to break your heart AND climb a tree. What more could you want???

But when "pure dancing" became an end in itself, mime went. (Croce's essay on "Manon" has some very good arguments for the inappropriateness of pure dance in narrative works.)

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Mime may have had a harder time surviving in the US because of the sizes of the stage as well. The little subtle movements and expressions don't carry well in huge houses. I thought that the Soviets tended to get rid of mime because they thought the newer audience wouldn't understand it, that it was something left over from the Czarist times and old-fashioned.

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