The San Francisco Mime Troupe

The San Francisco Mime Troupe began operation in 1959, temporarily named the R.G.Davis Mime Troupe, after its founder. It did not mime in the sense of silent pantomime blanche, but based its work on the mime corporel which Davis had studied in Paris for six months in 1957 under Etienne Decroux:

In the Frenchman’s studio the ability to exercise an isolation or a weight change was based both on internal and external expertise. The quasi-ideological explanation for a stance or a gesture by Decroux gave the work a seriousness that few Americans could abide, yet Decroux’s dictum, a pre-Cartesian concept, ‘Nothing in the hands, nothing in the pockets’, cleaned the stage for the new concept of Mime Corporal. ¹