All Faculty, Staff, and Students are invited to join the Communication and Theatre Department for:
“The Selfish Mime: What’s the difference between Clown and Mime?” with Donald Cameron McManus, February 25th, 4-6pm, Bergmann Theatre
A lot of people think that:
1) Mimes are all French and aren’t funny
2) Clowns are desperately trying to be funny by throwing all social conventions aside resulting in grown adults claiming to have “coulrophobia” (fear of clowns).
What's the real deal? What's a mime? What's a clown?
“The Selfish Mime” is an interactive workshop that confronts these preconceptions through a "faux" lecture-demonstration by Professor Donald McManus of Emory University. The arts of mime and clown are explained in the context of the recently popular phenomenon of MEMES, first hatched by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976). The style, technique and purposes of clown and mime are clarified with the help of volunteers from the workshop participants and everybody blows off steam, while also learning a lot about how mime and clown actually function. The workshop satirizes the tyranny of contemporary theory over art making, specifically comedy, and debunks current fallacies regarding these art forms. Participants are given a crash course in clown logic and learn how to discover the comic nature of mime and the common humanity in clown.
Donald Cameron McManus was born in Montréal, Quebec and has worked professionally as an actor, director, musician and clown in Canada, the U.S., Asia and Europe. His research interests include: comedy, popular entertainment, clown, twentieth-century theatre, foreign plays in translation, scenography, interculturalism, and multi-media performance. Dr. McManus completed a BA at The University of Toronto and was awarded the Donald Matheson Springer Fellowship to pursue graduate studies at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where he completed his Doctorate in 1998. His English translation of Man and Gentleman by Eduardo De Filippo was published in Forum Italicum in 2001. His book No Kidding! Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-Century Theater was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2003 and was selected as an OutstandingAcademic Title in 2004. He collaborated with Josef Glowa to produce the only English-language version of Thomas Bernhard’s play The World-Fixer (published by Ariadne Press in 2005). Professor McManus hasalso published articles for The Journal of Drama Studies, Scenography International, The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare and The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare. He is currently working on a sequel to No Kidding! entitled No, Seriously! Comedy and Death in Theater and Film.
