Encarnita Figueroa Santiago

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I offer workshops in mime.

All of the workshops are directed at young students, but each is tailored to the requirements of elementary, middle-school, or high-school age groups. The workshops demonstrate, in practice, an important relationship between mime and education. In most subjects, traditionally, the development of spoken and written language is emphasized.

Since spoken and written language are critically important, this emphasis is necessary and understandable. Using technical and compositional exercises, I show and suggest ways that the art of mime (and skill borrowed from it) sharpens ability with language. In addition, mime develops all skills that bear directly on control of the body’s expressive capacity, and on the ability to analyse and conceptualize movement, and thus, contributes to the student’s overall education.

Mime is a system that surrounds spoken language, and in a composed context, sometimes, even suspends spoken language. Mime demonstrates, through physical stances and motion, the many dilemmas and distinctions of information conveyed with the body.

Mime is a language of the body that collaborates with spoken language, sometimes helpfully, and other times, disastrously. Developing control over the body, and the meanings it creates, allows people to participate intelligently, not only in the educational activities of the classroom, but beyond that, in all the forms of interaction encountered daily in society.

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