The body, they say, is only a vehicle for the soul. But for a mime artiste the body is his soul, as through a series of fluid movements and exaggerated facial expressions, he tells his story, unencumbered by words.
The members of the young core team of MacTrics, a city-based mime and body theatre group in Chennai, that has just finished hosting the second edition of the Mime Theatre Festival in the city, are all ardent proponents of the art form, believing it to be one that improves body language, helps one get over stage fear and inculcates a culture of teamwork.
Sravanth T.R., Dipali Gupta, Vikas, Naresh and Sridhar were students at various city-based engineering colleges when they discovered the world of mime. According to Sravanth, the co-founder, “I was in college when my senior Victor Jeyraj introduced mime to me. We began to perform at cultural festivals and also began training our juniors in this art,” he says.
It was at Saarang, the annual cultural festival of the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, where the team got their first big break. “We won the first prize in 2009 at the dramatics contest there. It was there that we got noticed by the late Mithran Devanesan of The Madras Players, who encouraged us to start our own theatre group,” says Sravanth, who along with Victor founded this group.
While Victor moved on to do films, Sravanth began expanding the group which now boasts of more than 60 professionals and 300 shows.
“We collaborate with other theatre groups in the city,” says Dipali. “We also perform at product launches, birthday functions, weddings. Our first large-scale production was Vidur , based on the character in The Mahabharata ,” she says, adding that their seminal production till date, was The Circus , an adaptation of Charlie Chaplin’s film by the same name, that was first performed at The Hindu MetroPlus Theatre Fest 2013.
Sridhar admits that his predilection for the art came from watching Chaplin’s silent films. “This art of silent expression was hugely popularised by Charlie Chaplin and Marcel Marceau,” he says.
According to Sravanth, the group doesn’t perform traditional mime. “There are always a number of variations of mime. We have our own distinct style in which we have combined mime with body theatre,”
Chips in Dipali, “We don’t use props at all. Instead, the human body makes the formations that are needed to tell the story.”
Besides stage performances, the team also does street performances and flash mobs. “We have spread voting and cancer awareness through theatre,” says Vikas. “There is a lot of mime happening in colleges but now our plan is also to take it to schools.”
This year’s festival had a special category for kids, he adds, stating that he also hopes to expose more children to this art by teaching it at summer camps and as part of the academic curriculum.
“Mime encourages interpersonal development and makes children very confident,” says Sravanth. “As Mithran once said, you have four walls, we want to break all of them through our work.”
