Le geste et la parole: mime et pantomime dans l'Empire romain

Abstract

This paper tries to determine, from texts and inscriptions, relevant criteria to differentiate the two major dramatic "genres" of the iinperial period, mime and pantomime: we will focus on the gesture rather than the textual features of these spectacles where performance was assigned the function which was in the past (that is to say, in the classical genres) given to the text. For the pantomime we will take into account a text by Plutarch (Symposiaca, 9.15) which constitutes an exercise of transposition of the notions of mimesis and deixis from the literary realm to the field of danced gestures (no doubt a transposition of an Aristotelian opposition between logos and lexis). From these findings, it seems that the comfortable distinction, frequently applied by the texts, between mime and pantomime, respectively presented as decadent continuations of comedy and tragedy, is much less pertinent than the distinction between, on the one hand, the mime's realism of gesture which provides a magnified copy of reality and, on the other hand, the pantomime's rhetoric of gesture, a codified, minimalist, effective language founded upon illusion and apt to arouse the spectator's imagination. In Antiquity, a parallel for these distinctions can be found in the theoretical reflection on figurative arts, namely painting and sculpture.