Mime is of the essence
At last year's Beijing Youth Theater Festival, director Huang Ying's work Journey to The West won wide acclaim for using everyday household items as props and costumes and for turning the stage into a children's playground. In one scene, the performers used toilet paper rolls as masks. Audiences were amazed by Huang's imagination but she admitted that she had got her ideas from the Swiss mime troupe Mummenschanz.
In 2003, Mummenschanz performed an exclusive show when Pascal Couchepin, then the president of Switzerland, visited Beijing. Huang was one of the lucky few who saw them perform and has been in love with them ever since.
"Before Mummenschanz I had never seen such great physical theater," she says. "They have revolutionized the world of mime by blending dance, mask-play, theater and puppetry into an enchantingly beautiful, silent world of eccentrically playful humor and fantastic shapes."
