The aforementioned is confirmed by one of the first female American mimes, Angna Enters, who developed her movement language in parallel with Decroux’s shaping of human body movement technique. She said, “Mime opens up a new world to the beholder, but it does so insidiously, not by purposely injecting points of interest in the manner of a teacher or tour guide. The mime is no more than the physical medium - the instrument on which the figures of his imagination play their dance of life” (Rolfe 1979, 134). As a result, it can also be said that mime has held a mirror to societal and cultural change throughout the depths of history, playing with gender ambiguity, and thus also a means to call into question the traditional binary division of “male” and “female”, never shying away from portraying androgynous, queer, or fluid individuals. To this day, its very nature encourages a transcending of gender stereotypes in the sense of creating characters free from traditional ideas of gender, identity, and physicality. This assertion can be supported by the view of French director Antoine Vitez, who declared that “Theatre makes bodies ambiguous” (Banu 2016, 104).
Nola Rae: The gender dynamics of female mime
Since time immemorial, mime has been a discipline that allows fluid and dynamic transitions from one genric or dramatic territory to another, including a completely individual, newly created iteration.1 Its universal expressive ability to convey stories and feelings is based in physical expression, more specifically, meaning-making movements, gestures, and mimicry. It does not use language nor voice,2 but rather silence and the accompanying sound, the body, this empty space lending it a poetic dimension. It is precisely the body that is malleable, changeable, and symbolic. From a gender perspective, it is not necessarily clearly defined. Within these circumstances, a stage character is created whose overriding mission is to filter and evoke emotions through themselves, never to present an explicit identity.
