Mime Act Research

Something that Rob and I were looking at the other day was a few mime acts. We wanted to get an idea of what kind of thing mimes (well-known mimes in particular) do apart from the stereotypical mime act that you instantly recall when you think the word "mime"; things like being stuck in a box, pulling a rope etc. We were also trying to get some idea of the variety between the more famous mimes, and what it is that distinguishes them.

The latter point is quite an important part, because in our story one mime has to be noticeably better, or at least exciting in order to draw the crowd away from the other.

Rob showed me one such famous mime in a few videos on youtube who is indeed very talented, and caters to a modern audience... Something that we could draw a lot of influence from for our younger mime, who is supposed to do the same.

This is Tyson Eberly, his mime acts are quite energetic and they remind me very much of a children's presenter or of slap-stick comedy similar to Charlie Chaplin (who I should also look at!).

Interestingly, in both of the acts above he actually does make quite a bit of noise... No dialogue though, which seems to be a fairly common thing amongst modern mimes. Who make a lot of comedic noises to add to their act and get bigger laughs (and probably drawing more attention).

I do like the robot dance that he does for his second act, it seems like a great way of bringing miming to a modern audience, though it could possibly be considered closer to dance than miming... A line which we should try to stay away from I think, our mimes are quite traditional!

None-the-less it could be an interesting way of differentiating between the 2 mimes, and makes for a decent avenue of research. Should we need to beef out our mime duel it could make for some good additional content. Here's a few more examples of the robot dance that I like:

This film, shot at some kind of talent show called 'Kollaboration' went viral and shot him into fame. I found out that the boy is called David 'Elsewhere' Bernal, and he has some insane moves:

Slightly off topic I followed some links on the video and found out that David Elsewhere is actually the dancer in a lot of adverts that I see regularly on TV, usually not as himself, but with other people's heads super imposed onto his body. Really famous adverts like the 'singing in the rain' remix advert, heineken and loads of others are infact all him! Here's the video, you can skip close to the end to see the ads:

And some more great body popper videos here from well known shows like Americas got talent and Indias got talent:

Enough of robot dancing and pop locking for now... I'll post some more mime examples tomorrow, as I must away now!