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
Becky Baumwoll, Marissa Molnar, Julia Cavagna, Jae Woo, Tasha Milkman, Blake Habermann
AAI Technician - Cassie Bishop
Artistic Director - Becky Baumwoll
Associate Artistic Director - Tasha Milkman
Resident Stage Manager - Esti Bernstein
Chief of Staff - Nick Abeel
SPECIAL THANKS
Mae Early, MR Stine, Jane Swensen, Leah Wagner, Ira Wagner, and the Wagner Family, Julia Cavagna, Geraldine Dulex, Danny Cackley, Jonathan Zucker, Chris Cambises, Michael Lamason, Tara Giordano, Julia Proctor, Sarah Olmsted Thomas, and all 19 beloved company members of BKBX whose work is represented onstage tonight!
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
BKBX acknowledges that we meet today on the ancestral lands of the Lenape people. We pay respect to their elders past, present, and future, and honor the 13,000 Indigenous people who live in Philadelphia today. We invite you to join us in making a donation to We Are the Seeds of CultureTrust Greater Philadelphia , which you can visit at www.wearetheseeds.org. Where do you live, play, and work? Visit native-land.ca and find out.
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.
get involved!
Join our mailing list HERE
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Email us at brokenboxmime@gmail.com
PIECES
A chance encounter leads to a brief romance in Someday, our ode to the power of music and memory.
Dungeons & Dragons time, kids. Adventure is never too far away when imaginations are ignited. What are actors anyhow, if not grown-ups playing make-believe? Roll high, heroes.
Cooking with Jan makes even the most first-time of cooks a haute chef de cuisine!
Who needs Netflix when you’ve got a mime murder mystery to solve? A Private Eye puts the pieces together to uncover a grim tale of corruption and greed in BKBX’s take on film noir.
In The Brass Section, stakes are high, and so are the notes.
The Whole Shebang takes us on a journey from the big bang to climate change in a playful exploration of scale and wonder.
In Survival Mode, a virtual reality is - quite literally - not what it seems. What is our ideal escape?
In Our Corporate Promise… we see what happens when good worth ethic pushes ever forward, no matter what.
The campaign isn’t over! Dungeons & Dragons returns for an epic finale. How epic? You’ll have to watch to the end to find out.
music
Someday - Some Day by Seikai Ishizuka*
Dungeons & Dragons - Various by R.C.M., E.S. Postumus, Colin Blunstone
Cooking with Jan - Cooking with Jan by Grace Oberhofer*
A Private Eye - I Knew A Guy by Kevin Macleod, Throwing Snow by The Hush, She Wolf in My Heart by Sergey Chereminisov
The Whole Shebang - Sonata No. 17 in D Minor, "The Tempest" by Beethoven
Our Corporate Promise… - Underwater by Jack McGuire*
Survival Mode - Resonance by HOME, Lullaby by Beam
*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