Reviews

American Mime Theatre is redefining movement-based performance for contemporary audiences. Their work is poetic yet visceral — a fascinating blend of gesture, theatre, and storytelling. What they present goes beyond mime or pantomime… it becomes a language of its own.

The American Mime Theatre continues to challenge assumptions about physical theatre. It rejects traditional formulas in favor of a bold narrative style — one that balances theatrical realism with striking abstraction. The result is a performance that feels both emotionally raw and artistically elevated.

Anyone attending The American Mime Theatre should leave behind every expectation shaped by European pantomime. The vision developed by Curtis is entirely original — unlike anything ever seen in this country. What he brings to the stage is nothing less than a completely new language in Mime.

They are shaping an entirely new performing art — not an adaptation of French pantomime, but something born here. Nothing comparable has emerged in the U.S. since the breakthrough of modern dance over three decades ago.

This company has worked out their own language and techniques. French mimes couldn’t give them what they wanted: a blending of believable acting expressed through a new kind of movement.

- Curtis is playing with fire and watching him you can feel the heat. Curtis’ contribution is a valuable, engrossing, and totally serious, and how many Mimes can make that claim?

The control of each performer is brilliant… shrouding each like white barbed wire are this medium’s uncompromising limitations.

Every single member is a perfectly trained dancer and an expansive actor, and the sensitive and all-pervading interaction between the Company is very impressive…an exciting extension of the American theatre scene.

Paul Curtis and his American Mime Theatre have brought to the concert stage a new medium so fresh in its approach, so studied in discipline and so exciting to see that it must be destined to affect the entire approach to the art of Mime. It cannot be described as founding itself of the French school of Marceau an Decroux because the art of these two gentlemen in self-indulgent and introspective when compared to the communications offered by this new form.

Do see this company; it isn’t often you will get such a gift.