JOIN USThe fourth instalment of ‘Open Up’ a comical caricature by PunchTantraa, India’s first radical mime team was held over the weekend at Rangasthala, MG Road Metro Station, Metro Art Gallery.
The performers were brilliant and managed to keep the crowd on their feet.
The performers comprised Raj Sekhar, a comedian with Hyderabadi tadka, Indushree, 2014 ‘India’s Got Talent’ semi-finalist and a record-breaking female ventriloquist, comedians Praveen Kumar and Ahmed Shariff and RJ Nishanth. In their recent act, the team base their mime acts on things that happen around them and those that people can relate to on a daily basis.
Ram Charan, who works with ‘PunchTantraa’, explains that the main aim of the team has always been to entertain the audience.
“We have always recreated some of the frequent experiences that a Bangalorean undergoes like the traffic jams, political campaigns and education. All of these have been incorporated into our act with a dose of humour,” he explains.
The group call themselves ‘radical mime’ rather than just a ‘mime’ group. Why? Ram explains, “That’s because we have one source of sound — the narrator who delivers all the lines in the act (both male and female voices, and also all the sound effects). The actors on stage are in sync with the narrator’s voice. This kind of art form makes it radically different from any existing art form such as mime. We do not use any kind of properties on stage such as chair and table.”
Ram further states that the actors recreate every emotion, right from a simple bench to a complex motorbike or an airplane.
“All of these are created in a matter of seconds. This is radically different from any other art-form that exists today,” he adds. The group get their ideas, for all the acts from the things they see around them. Ram explains, “We get a lot of ideas from the experiences of a common man's day-to-day life. Be it, travelling in a bus, watching a Bollywood movie or an advertisement on television, we find the element of humour in each of these situations.”
The group believes that ‘mime’ as an art form is extremely entertaining. “Mime as an art form traditionally makes the audience appreciate the artist's view and emotions in a particular plot, void of sound. ‘Radical mime’ exudes high energy, witty and funny plots loaded with exaggeration and artistic reproduction of a variety of sounds that instantly connect with people,” he adds.