pantomimus

Pantomime comes from Latin pantomimus, borrowed from Greek πάντομιμος (pantomimos), meaning 'one who imitates all things' — from πᾶν (pan, 'all') and μῖμος (mimos, 'mime, imitator'). The Greek mimos named a class of popular performer who imitated types, characters, and scenes from daily life; the pantomimos was its superlative extension — the all-imitator, who could perform any character, any narrative, any emotion. The Roman pantomimus was one of antiquity's great theatrical art forms, practiced by virtuoso male soloists who wore masks and performed in silence while a chorus sang the text and an orchestra provided the musical frame. A single performer might depict multiple characters in the same narrative — changing masks between scenes, using costume, gesture, and posture to differentiate Medea from her children, Hercules from his adversaries — while the audience, who knew the myths in advance, followed the action through the dancer's body alone.

The Roman pantomimus reached its height in the first century CE under Augustus, who patronized the art and whose court favorites — the dancers Pylades and Bathyllus — were figures of enormous cultural prestige. Lucian's dialogue On Dance (written c. 160 CE) is the most detailed ancient account of the form and its demands: the pantomimus must know all of mythology, must have studied rhetoric to understand the narrative structure of the texts he performs, must have command of every part of the body, and must be able to make his gestures speak with the clarity of words. Lucian compares the pantomimus favorably to the philosopher, the orator, and the athlete — arguing that his art synthesizes all of their disciplines in a single performance. The form was also notoriously associated with erotic celebrity and scandal: star pantomimi attracted the kind of obsessive devotion that would today be called fan culture.

The word's meaning transformed almost entirely as it traveled through history. The Roman pantomimus was a serious, formally demanding solo art with mythological content. Medieval references to pantomime are scarce. What emerged in early modern Europe as pantomime was the Italian commedia dell'arte tradition — specifically the character of Harlequin and the wordless acrobatic scenarios performed around him — which became, through French and then English adoption, the theatrical form of Christmas pantomime in Britain. The British pantomime — the 'panto' — is a self-satirizing theatrical entertainment traditionally performed at Christmas, involving fairy-tale narratives, audience participation, cross-dressing (the pantomime dame is a male comic in female costume, the principal boy is traditionally played by a woman), songs, topical jokes, and the most elaborate theatrical conventions in British popular culture.

The modern usage of pantomime most widely understood internationally — silent physical performance, the mime artist's art of creating invisible objects and traversing imaginary spaces — descends from a different tradition: the French mime artiste, specifically Marcel Marceau (1923–2007) and his predecessor Étienne Decroux (1898–1991), who developed corporeal mime as a serious theatrical discipline in the mid-twentieth century. Marceau's character Bip, performing for fifty years on stages worldwide, established the white-faced silent mime as an icon of theatrical art. In common English usage, 'to mime' or 'to do a pantomime' often means to act out something silently, but the word's actual history spans the Roman dance-drama, the British Christmas show, and the French art of the invisible, all under one name.