Broken box mime theater’s mission is to activate the imagination of our audiences, contemporize the art of mime, and remind us all of the power of simple storytelling.
THE TEAM
Performers
Leah Wagner, Nick Abeel, Géraldine Dulex, Blake Habermann, David Jenkins, Kristin McCarthy Parker, Josh Wynter
NU Technician - Mitchell Finger
Artistic Director - Becky Baumwoll
Associate Artistic Director - Tasha Milkman
Resident Stage Manager - Esti Bernstein
Chief of Staff - Nick Abeel
SPECIAL THANKS
Emilio Williams, The Blue Parrot, Tanya Palmer, Jess Fisch, Henry Wishcamper, iO, Quad City Arts, Margot Day, Ben Gougeon, Chelsey Dietz, and our various Chicago hosts, and all 19 beloved company members of BKBX whose work is represented onstage tonight!
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
BKBX acknowledges that we meet today on ancestral lands traditional lands of the Council of the Three Fires: The Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi Nations. On every tour, BKBX makes a land tax donation to an indigenous-led organization local to that place. For more on where we’re donating to or to learn more about our practices, email brokenboxmime@gmail.com.
Our BKBX family sends our best to those who have been most impacted by the COVID19 pandemic. We thank our beloved community for their ongoing support, and join our theater colleagues in celebrating the value of the arts as a healing and transformative change-maker.
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PIECES
Cooking with Jan makes even the most first-time of cooks a haute chef de cuisine.
In Our Corporate Promise… we see what happens when good worth ethic pushes ever-forward, no matter what.
A chance encounter leads to a brief romance in Someday, our ode to the power of music and memory.
Oh, it’s the Superbowl? Maybe they’ll pull a Trick Play.
In Kepler…, we consider the difference between isolation and loneliness in the most intergalactic of settings.
Not only is a moment Interrupted, so is a life. And just like that, the shapes of our world can change all at once.
MPOP is our super-serious send-up of all things boy-bandery. Sex symbols be warned.
In The Brass Section, stakes are high, and so are the notes.
Automatic is our exploration of our society’s ritual-like obsession with weaponry and violence.
It’s so nice to be in Chicago, connecting with old Bro’s and new.
In Above/Below we look at what lies beneath the surface, placing a MPOP-like reveal in a different time and state. What does it take to face the world?
To close, The Whole Shebang takes us on a journey from the big bang to climate change in a playful exploration of scale and wonder. We are all star stuff, no?
music
Cooking with Jan - Cooking with Jan by Grace Oberhofer*
Our Corporate Promise… - Underwater by Jack McGuire*
Someday - Some Day by Seikai Ishizuka*
Trick Play -
Kepler - Galactic Federation Research Station Orbiting Kepler 186f by Jack McGuire* and Sekai Ishizuka*
Interrupted - Interrupted by Jake Shandling* and Jack McGuire*
MPOP - Boyz Side by Wes Braver* and Jack McGuire*
Automatic - Band Hammer by Lucky Dragons
Bro! - Jazz Addicts Intro by Cosimo Fog
Above/Below - Just Go by Eleni Arapoglou*
The Whole Shebang - Sonata No. 17 in D Minor, "The Tempest" by Beethoven
*Collaborating Musician
director’s note
WHY THE MIME MASK?
The mime’s creativity is ignited by constraints: communicate the story with no words, props, sound effects, set pieces, or costume changes. What’s left is our body and the audience’s imagination. The costume we’ve chosen as our uniform, therefore, must not only make room for the audience’s imagination, but also encourage it. The solid black and white of our costumes becomes a shared screen upon which to project the various characters (...animals, objects, elements...) that we play in each show.
The white mask is a part of pantomime’s lineage: in the European performance tradition, its history can be traced back centuries as a strategy for enabling spectators in the last row of a theater (or circus tent) to see the facial expressions of the performer. Even in a smaller theater like ours, the colorful lights bouncing off of our white acrylic paint helps to define and clarify our expressions. Though it can stir up connotations of Mime that we are actively trying to redefine--unnaturally exaggerated movement, artifice, cheesy gags--we delight in honoring and recontextualizing this tradition from the past in our own theater space.
The uniform mask is also a ritual of releasing the ego in performance. This is a central aspect to our work throughout: a mime relies on ongoing feedback from outside eyes, and BKBX’s ensemble is designed to constantly alternate between playing audience and performer during rehearsal. The best creation comes when the performer integrates the audience’s feedback into their own vision. This is how ensemble mime rewards generosity, empathy, and egolessness.
We know of other traumatic, oppressive, and problematic ancestries to masks that are intended to hide, appropriate, or mock. For example, reference to the mime mask as “white face” can recall blackface, and the visual symbol can activate this connection in our conscious or subconscious mind. This is where things can get complex. By being “remixers” of French pantomime, BKBX is inheriting a Eurocentric art form and redefining it with a contemporary ethos--in this case, one that supports decentralizing white normative discourse. We work to do this in our performance practices, rehearsal policies, contracting, budgeting, and onstage in our storytelling itself - through both the stories we tell and the bodies that tell them.
Though our masks signal a premise of uniformity, we do not wish to signal to the audience that we are trying to (impossibly!) erase our differences. Herein lies the heart of many a BKBX discussion: how do we sometimes make the audience actively, consciously see our skin color, body shape, height, and hair? Join us in conversation around this in the lobby or at any BKBX event. We look forward to hearing what the mask concealed or revealed to you.
Becky Baumwoll
Artistic Director, Broken Box Mime Theater