Music and Mime. Dorothy Glover. October 1936

Dancing Times London

October 1936

MUSIC AND MIME

In the Dancing Times of October 1936 there is a single paragraph devoted to promoting a book called Music and Mime, by Dorothy Glover.  I would like to find a copy of this book and to hear what some of the tunes are, so that I could try and recognise them from when I learned the Irene Mawer Method of Mime in the early 1980s.  

All of the mime exercises could be done to music, in fact, it was preferable if this could be the case.  I learned in the tiny kitchen of my own teacher’s home, without a piano and without anyone to play the piano – so my teacher, Mrs Durling, simply intonated the rhythm.  It is impossible to write down the intonation, but those of you who know The Archers theme tune will know that it is written ‘dum de dum de dum’, etc.  Well, this is very similar to how Mrs Durling used her voice to teach me the rhythms, only she used ‘de’ instead of ‘dum’.

The newspaper clipping states that the book contains nearly the whole of the Syllabus for the examinations of the Institute of Mime – so, it would have been that when students went for their exam, there would have been a piano in the room.  The pianist would play prepared rhythms for each individual exercise.  I doubt that it was required that a specific piece was played, but there would not have been any reason not to play a specific piece.  It was the rhythm that was important and as the ones in the book had been approved by Miss Mawer, they would have been the best ones to use, to be sure of being correct.

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