The American Mime Theatre is the Performing Company and School of American Mime, an acting medium expressing itself through movement. it is neither a pantomime company nor a dance company. It performs its own original plays culled from its repertory, with new works continuously in development. It was founded in 1952 by Paul J. Curtis (August 29, 1927– April 28, 2012). [1] Some of the notable performers in the company's past include Anita Morris, [2] Lily Tomlin (albeit for exactly three weeks), [3] James Noble and his wife Carolyn Coates, [4] [5] as well as Marion Knox, Deda Kavanaugh, Charles Barney, Arthur Yorinks, Marc Maislen, Daniel Richter and Jean Barbour. [6] After a period of inactivity, AMT relaunched in 2023 with Yorinks as artistic director and Lynn M. Stirrup as executive director. [7]
In 1984, The New York Times wrote: "As one of the few who toiled in the vineyards over the decades when mime was considered chiefly a European import, Mr. Curtis deserves credit where credit is due. The program that the American Mime Theater is offering... demonstrated an independent view of mime that owes little to conventions associated with the form ... it allows for a free-form approach that roams between the realistic and the stylized." [8]
Theatre X was an American theater company based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Until its demise in 2004, it was one of the oldest operating experimental theater ensembles in the U.S.
Mummenschanz is a Swiss mask theater troupe who perform in a surreal mask- and prop-oriented style. Founded in 1972 by Bernie Schürch, Andres Bossard, and the Italian-American Floriana Frassetto, the group became popular for its play with bizarre masks and forms, light and shadow, and their subtle choreography. The name Mummenschanz is German for "mummery", or a play involving mummers. Mummer is an Early Modern English term for a mime artist.
Theatre Owners Booking Association, or T.O.B.A., was the vaudeville circuit for African American performers in the 1920s. The theaters mostly had white owners, though about a third of them had Black owners, including the recently restored Morton Theater in Athens, Georgia, originally operated by "Pinky" Monroe Morton, and Douglass Theatre in Macon, Georgia owned and operated by Charles Henry Douglass. Theater owners booked jazz and blues musicians and singers, comedians, and other performers, including the classically trained, such as operatic soprano Sissieretta Jones, known as "The Black Patti", for black audiences.
Oregon Ballet Theatre (OBT) is a ballet company in Portland, Oregon, United States. The company performs an annual five-program season at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts and conducts regional and national tours. It was featured in the October/November 2007 issue of Pointe magazine, with principal dancer Kathi Martuza on the cover.
The National Theatre of the Deaf (NTD) is a Connecticut-based theatre company founded in 1967. It is the oldest theatre company in the United States with a continuous history of domestic and international touring, as well as producing original works. NTD productions combine American Sign Language with spoken language to fulfill the theatre's mission statement of linking Deaf and hearing communities, providing more exposure to sign language, and educating the public about Deaf art. The NTD is affiliated with a drama school, also founded in 1967, and with the Little Theatre of the Deaf (LTD), established in 1968 to produce shows for a younger audience.
African-American musical theater includes late 19th- and early 20th-century musical theater productions by African Americans in New York City and Chicago. Actors from troupes such as the Lafayette Players also crossed over into film. The Pekin Theatre in Chicago was a popular and influential venue.
Bill Bowers is an American mime artist and actor based in New York City. As an actor, mime and educator, Bill has performed throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. He is a Movement for Actors Instructor at NYU Tisch School for the Arts and also teaches at the William Esper Studio and the Stella Adler Studio in NYC.
Kenny Leon is an American director and producer. He is notable for his extensive work on Broadway, on television, and in regional theater. He has received a Tony Award and a Drama League Award as well as nominations for three Primetime Emmy Awards and a Drama Desk Award.
Harold Russell Scott Jr. was an American stage director, actor and educator, who broke racial barriers in American theatre. Scott first became known for his work as an electrifying stage actor with a piercing voice, and later as an innovative director of numerous productions throughout the country, from Broadway to the Tony Award-winning regional theatre, the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, where he was the first African-American artistic director in the history of American regional theatre.
Robert Garland is the artistic director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, where he was a principal dancer and their first official resident choreographer. He has also choreographed for the New York City Ballet, The Royal Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and the Oakland Ballet, among many others.
Richmond Shepard was an American writer, director, producer and mime with a 50-year history in entertainment. He was one of the oldest living working mimes in show business. He built, owned and operated his own theaters in Los Angeles on Theatre Row where he produced over 30 shows. He moved to New York and worked as a theatre and film critic for WNEW, conceived and directed the off-Broadway show Noo Yawk Tawk at The Village Gate for three years. He traveled across the world performing with mime troupes and performs improvisational comedy in various clubs around NYC. Richmond Shepard's last role was when he played the "Sandman" in Fuzz on the Lens Productions fantasy comedy Abnormal Attraction starring Malcolm McDowell, Bruce Davison, Leslie Easterbrook, and Gilbert Gottfried which was released on 26 February 2019.
Anita "Angna" Enters was an American dancer, mime, painter, writer, novelist and playwright. She studied at the Art Students League of New York and was a 1934 Guggenheim fellow. She wrote a novel and three autobiographies as well as the films Lost Angel (1943) and Tenth Avenue Angel (1948).
The Asolo Repertory Theatre or Asolo Rep is a professional theater in Sarasota, Florida. It is the largest Equity theatre in Florida, and the largest Repertory theatre in the Southeastern United States. Asolo Rep is a resident regional theatre company which also invites in guest artists. It works in conjunction with Florida State University's MFA Acting program, the FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training. It is currently housed in the Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts, which is a multi-theater complex, located on the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art property. The 2008–2009 season marked Asolo Rep's 50th anniversary.
Woza Albert! is a satirical South African political play written by Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon in 1981 and first performed at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. The play is a two-man show that contains 26 vignettes.
Fly is a 2009 play written by Trey Ellis and Ricardo Khan about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first black fliers in the U.S. military during World War II.
Familie Flöz is a German-based theatre company that uses humour, masks, improvisation, mime and physical comedy to create family-friendly shows. The company was begun in 1994 by Hajo Schüler and Markus Michalkowski, acting and mime students at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen in the Ruhr Area of Germany, and fellow Michael Vogel joined soon thereafter. Their first production, a comic piece on life on a construction site, premiered at the university in 1994. A few years later, the Familie Flöz performed at the Cologne Comedy Festival and the Kulturbörse Freiburg.
Joan Mankin (May 16, 1948 – September 26, 2015] was an actor and clown prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area, from the early 1970s through 2014. Mankin started her professional career in San Francisco in 1970 with a production of the San Francisco Mime Troupe's An Independent Female. Thereafter, she appeared in major roles in many Bay Area theater companies including the American Conservatory Theater, Aurora Theatre Company, Berkeley Rep, San Francisco Playhouse and California Shakespeare Theatre as well as the feminist Lilith Theater in the late 1970s early 1980s, of which she was Artistic Director for two years. In 2006 she had a major singing role in the Los Angeles Ahmanson Theatre's production of The Black Rider: The Casting of Magic Bullets.
Cincinnati Shakespeare Company is a professional ensemble theater located in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, focusing on Shakespearean and other classical works.
Arthur Yorinks is an American author, playwright and director. He is best known for writing Hey, Al, which won a Caldecott Medal.
Carolyn Owen Coates was an American stage, film and television actress. Noted for portraying formidable women, Coates earned a Theatre World Award for her performance as Hecuba in The Trojan Women.
'Dreams,' with Paul Curtis as the dreamer and Rick Wessler as his alter ego is probably the most vividly imaginative. [...] The skilled mimes in addition to Curtis and Wessler included Marion Knox, Deda Kavanaugh, Charles Barney, Arthur Yorinks, Marc Maislen, Daniel Richter and Jean Barbour.
Now, after a year of internal development, Artistic Director Arthur Yorinks and Executive Director Lynn M. Stirrup are spearheading efforts to rebuild AMT's Performing Company and School, and to initiate special projects such as the monthly series AMT Talks!