Bindu 23 - engelsk 7.p65 - Scandinavian Yoga and Meditation School

I became a member of a professional
pantomime group and later active in
the Student Theatre in Copenhagen.
When I joined the pantomime group, it
took up almost all of my time. A day
would look like this: two to three hours
of yoga exercises, then some hours of
free improvisation with the pantomime
body language, and finally certain
disciplined classic tasks within the
repertoire of the pantomime.
Yoga was part of the warming up
and had become part of the pantomime
from the Peking Opera via the French
pantomimes Etienne Decroux, Jean-
Louis Barrault and Marcel Marceau.
The purpose of yoga was to make
the body supple and master its every
movements. It turned out to be many of
the same exercises, that I later learned
in India. But it involved more than that.
First of all a little revolution happened
in my consciousness: I became awake,
present and concentrated in quite a new
way, and it became easier to express
myself in art, both in painting and in
the theatre.
Let me quote Jean Soubeyran from
the book “The language without words”:
“If an outsider should happen to come
into the room, where the dramatic
improvisation takes place, he would be
very surprised by the unusual picture
confronting him. In almost total silence
and immobility, a group of people are
sitting in a semicircle. They watch a
single student, who is sitting in front of
them on a stool. He too is motionless,
and his eyes are firmly focused on one
point. For the uninitiated this may look
like a spiritualistic meeting. It appears
as if nothing at all is happening in this
hall. But such a dense and sensitive
atmosphere of work and concentration
reigns here, that this stranger’s
intrusion would immediately disturb it.
© 1995 Bengt Magnuzon
From the 3-months course 1995 with Síta as teacher
For these almost motionless people
work. After having trained their bodies
for several hours in body technique,
they now train that other part of the
body, which is not carried by the legs,
but by feelings and emotions.”
The repertoire of pantomime is to a
certain degree limited by its language
and therefore has given rise to certain
fields of expression or styles that show
itself in plots which have cycles as form.
One can choose a certain style as the
basis for the play one wants to create.
These styles illustrate fundamental
attitudes or types of man. You have the
mime of the little man, mime de salon
(the parlour room mime) where one is
preoccupied and involved in the small
daily events, often presented in a
comical way, as by Marcel Marceau’s
clown Bib. Or the beach boy, the
sportsman, physically exaggerated, the
achiever, mime de sport, the mime of
fight, but fight as a sport, carried out by
one who rests in his body with calmness
and fullness in every movement.
In mime de passion we meet the
idealist, the passionate, who will do
anything to reach his goal. It illustrates
a fight different to the one of the
sportsman, a performance where
consciousness is not always present. At
last, if the goal has been lost or given
up, mime de reve, the mime of dream
or rather of the dreamer which in its
extreme becomes the psychosis - where
everything is based on illusion. The
concrete act is no more, it has been
given up and substituted by dreams and
imagination. In this way the difference
between fantasies and real experiences
is illustrated in pantomime.
In Yoga, to see through this
difference, time and again one may
have to walk alone, but preferably, and
at least in the beginning, with the help
of a teacher or guru. It can be
disastrous to underrate the importance
of a guru here, for society possesses no
fundamental knowledge of this -
17