Mime is essential for the modern theater maker’s toolbox, and in this workshop, you’ll tap into your body’s full potential for storytelling and improvisation. Through a disciplined and playful approach that includes floor work, barre work, and devising challenges, you’ll hone skills to create characters, build environments, and teach the audience how to watch your work.

Informed by Evans’s own career as a mime, clown, and actor, the workshop also draws on the techniques of Marcel Marceau, Etienne Decroux, Stefan Niedzialkovski, and the unique style of American mime.

Core to the workshop is the use of writing structures to compose original performance pieces. By combining exercise in technique with composition, you will learn to create moving visual poetry and supercharge your acting, clowning, and much more.

ABOUT DEAN EVANS

With twenty years of experience writing, performing, and directing within the art of mime, Dean Evans holds a unique perspective on the art and its practice. Steeped in the techniques of Marcel Marceau, Stefan Niedzialkowski, and Etienne Decroux, they are a Los Angeles-based professional performer, writer, and director. They were named one of the top fifty “players” by Newcity magazine. They have performed with the Second City, iO, the Goodman, and Cirque du Soleil, and as a solo artist around the world. They are an ensemble member of the renowned performance art collective the Neo-Futurists. They are known for their physical performance and characters, including the entity who goes simply by Honeybuns. Honeybuns has enjoyed their own career performing in New York City, Chicago, Moscow, Austin, and Los Angeles.

Dean has created over a dozen full-length theatrical productions, various immersive experiences and alternate realities, three full-length circuses, and dozens of comedic characters. They have appeared on NBC, Russia’s минута славы, the Onion Network, and various commercials and television. Recently Dean choreographed mime vignettes for the television show Ultra City Smiths now on AMC. Dean has been on faculty at Columbia College, the Second City Training Center, Aloft Circus Arts, and the Actors Gymnasium. They have taught as a guest artist at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Big Apple Circus clown care unit, UIC, Oberlin College, the Ohio State University, Lake Forest College, and more. Dean was the founder and artistic director of Chicago Physical Theater. To learn more, visit deanevans.net.