Variety Show Lineup
Running time: 1 hour and 15minutes (approx.)
(There will be no intermission)
Mannequins
The Chameleons Mime Theatre
Jess Esa, Rachel Marie Galindo, Michael Hays, Meadow Holczer, Cota Montenegro, Arrow Schulman, Grace Spencer-Klein, Wendy Toh, Jiange Yang
The Flame
The Chameleons Mime Theatre
Written and directed by Keith Berger
Gideon Berger
La Lavandière
Created by Etiene Decroux
Performed by Young Tseng
The Face
Michael Hays
Temperance Corrupted
Music composed and performed by Jeff Mills
Karen Hoyer
The Interview
Michael Dias
**Saturday and Sunday only
Given By Wind
Jiange Yang
Sound Design by Lieyang Yan
Misophonia
The Chameleons Mime Theatre
Written and directed by Keith Berger
Gideon Berger & Michael Hays
Deep Fake
Berenice Dupuis
Happy Dead Men
The Chameleons Mime Theatre
Written by Keith Berger
Directed by Keith Berger, Sharon Diskin, and Gideon Berger
Music by Echo & the Bunnymen, with additional vocals by Allegra Ondine
Keith Berger, Sharon Diskin, Young Tseng
Variety Show Artists
Explore our performing artists in this years variety show.
Style and Approach
I create dances where machine-like movement intersects with vulnerability, and our fundamental needs. I explore how a body of flesh can inhabit a world of numbers, algorithms, and images, giving physical form to the artificial. Drawing on more than 23 years in breaking, mime studies in Paris, including Étienne Decroux’s corporeal mime method and a master's degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne, I bring mime, animation dance, and philosophical inquiry into dialogue. Through mechanical articulations and embodied video effects, I ask whether the moving body can raise philosophical and existential questions: what makes us appear alive, autonomous, or merely programmed? The struggles, malfunctions, and aspirations of my machine-like characters become both dramatic and comic reflections of our world, revealing human desires, contradictions, and fragility.
Piece: Deep Fake
draws on the imagery and promises of advertising and social media to explore the desire to become robotic: efficient, tireless, flawless. Through robotic mime and animation dance, I transform into a living digital image, a carefully constructed avatar. Oscillating between a person, a machine, and an image manufactured for display, the body becomes a caricature of the human desires beneath its artificial surface: control, attention, and invulnerability. The solo asks what happens when we reshape ourselves to resemble the images we create.
Berenice Dupuis
Style and Approach
Michael’s work operates at the intersection of physical theatre, classical mask traditions, and dynamic clowning, heavily influenced by the pedagogy of James Donlon. Grounded in precise somatic awareness and a background in martial arts and stage combat, he approaches mime not merely as an illusionary technique, but as a visceral, kinetic language capable of articulating psychological nuance and high-stakes comedy. He treats physical performance as an act of radical complicity with the audience—inviting them into active play, disarming them through absurdity, and using physical articulation to explore power dynamics, obedience, and collective human behavior.
Piece: The Interview
Is an eccentric, darkly comedic clown piece that weaponizes classical mime illusion and physical play to examine complicity and performative cruelty. Initially conceived in response to political rhetoric that openly normalized torture, the piece relies on buoyant absurdity to disarm the room. By filtering dark themes through the precise, highly physical vocabulary of mime and clown traditions, The Interview invites the audience to confront just how easily collective joy can curdle into mob mentality.
Mike Dias
The Chameleons Mime Theatre
Keith Berger & Sharon Diskin
chameleonsmime.com
Style and Approach:
The Chameleons Mime Theatre – Keith Berger and Sharon Diskin – began working together in 1985 and have since performed for over one million adults and children worldwide. They have always adhered to one guiding principle: Mime is the language of our feelings put into form. Mime has the power to transcend the spoken word that in turn creates a uniquely compelling theatre experience. Keith and Sharon received their training from Paul J. Curtis who founded The American Mime Theatre in 1952. The term “American Mime” was coined by French mime and actor, Jean-Louis Barrault, when he observed Paul’s company in that same year. Curtis’s groundbreaking approach to the art of mime combines a highly disciplined and dynamic physical technique with the extension of truthfully motivated feelings through the body into form – “Method acting” meets modern movement theatre. Incorporating hard sharp cessations of movement with contrasting degrees of tension constituted a dramatic break from the popular lyrical French pantomime of Marcel Marceau. While rooted in American Mime technique, Keith and Sharon’s body of work is wildly eclectic, borrowing elements from other disciplines such as cinematic imagery, Butoh, and traditional Western theatre. At its heart their work aims to engender a vibrant, intimate take on life that is both telling and beautiful.
The Work:
Mannequins: A kinetic entertainment based on the concept of chain reaction.
The Flame: An abstract personification.
Misophonia: A depiction of the utterly fraught annoyance and insanity that is incurred by gross acts of mastication.
Happy Dead Men: A work inspired by the Butoh philosophy of can’t.
Style and Approach:
My work is centered on physical theater, combining the meditative slowness of Butoh with the precision of Mime. I perform from an inner emptiness— treating the body as a precise yet open vessel, allowing character, impulse, and feeling to flow through me without obstruction.
The Work:
In Given by Wind, wind weaves through tree and insect, flower and snake, bird and beast as a slow-dawning awareness, until it peaks and wrenches the beast into human form. The very senses it grants become the cage the body struggles against, until the body returns to a tree form. Drawing on Butoh's transformation logic and Mime's physical precision, the piece traces this arc entirely through the body, without words.
Jiange Yang
Karen Hoyer
Style and Approach:
Karen Hoyer performs, teaches, and creates work in the genres of mime, clown, puppetry, masks, and movement theatre. She began her mime studies with James Donlon at the North Carolina School of the Arts and went on to work extensively with Sigfrido Aguilar at the Estudio Búsqueda de Pantomima Teatro, Guanajuato, México. Along the way, she’s taken workshops with Bert Houle & Sophie Wibaux, Tony Montanero, Chris Bayes, Daniel Stein, Tom Leabhart, Klauniada, Bill Irwin, John Towsen, Avner Eisenberg, Moni Yakim, Julie Goell, and… well for a while there she was kind of a workshop junkie. The experience with all these teachers taught her to perform with clarity and precision, with an emphasis on storytelling. In all her performing and teaching, she seeks the clown’s direct connection to the audience via both comedy and empathy.
The Work:
Her current goal is to create a series of pieces that do not require fun costumes and props – although this has proved difficult for her clownesque soul. A note about today’s performance of “Temperance Corrupted” which features music created and performed by Jeff Mills. During covid times, James Donlon started an excellent on-line mime school. The assignment was “The Seven Deadly Sins Conquered and The Seven Heavenly Virtues Corrupted.” Fourteen possibilities – pick a card, roll the dice, the choice was made! We hope you enjoy the one we chose!
Style and Approach:
I became a mime by accident. In Singapore, I stumbled upon Christina Sergeant’s open sessions with her mime group Mime Unlimited. They met weekly in any available space Christina could find, usually a classroom or school rehearsal studio. Any interested person was welcome, no mime or theatre experience necessary. We learned Marceau mime technique, improvised, and made new work. About once a year when we had enough material, Christina would find a space to present a performance. I learned about theatre, production, and performance in this way, from show to show and later, as the group became a company, from school assembly shows, workshops, community
performances, and commercial gigs. Christina’s craftsmanship coupled with her insatiable curiosity, openness, and generosity shaped my approach to performance. Like Christina, I believe that art is incomplete until the audience is in the room to close
the circle. Later, also by accident, I met Thomas Leabhart who was visiting Singapore to teach a one-week workshop in Etienne Decroux’s Corporeal Mime technique. The precision and beauty of form in Corporeal Mime captivated me and I became a Mouse, one of Leabhart’s apprentices, for over a decade. Thanks to the generosity of Christina and Thomas I am a mime with two grandfathers, Marcel Marceau and Etienne Decroux. Their techniques and perspectives inform all that I do in performance, teaching, and collaboration.
The Work:
La Lavandière is a solo study in Corporeal Mime composed by Etienne Decroux. First performed by Decroux in 1931 as “Le Lavage / The Washing” the piece evolved as Decroux continually refined and developed his technique, along with his teaching and other Corporeal Mime studies, through generations of his students and close assistants until his passing in 1991. I learned this version of “La Lavandière” from my Corporeal Mime teacher Thomas Leabhart, who was Decroux’s assistant from 1968 to 1972. For me, “La Lavandière” continues to evolve and reveal itself in each practice run, each rehearsal, and in every performance. It is a gift of presence and attention. I would like to offer this performance of “La Lavandière” as a meditation on change and a reflection on the multiple presences and stories that follow and surround us in every work and at every moment.
Young Tseng
Style and Approach:
Michael Hays blends vaudevillian schtick, neoclassic mime, and new age absurdism into a style he likes to call Grunge Mime. “I have always been drawn to compositions that are visually beautiful, impishly eccentric and stylistically satisfying. When devising a mime piece, I like to think that these qualities are the bare necessities needed for creating anything worth watching. I strive to be somewhere between the methodical dancer, and the excessive clown.” Michael Hays studied and trained for several years under master teacher James Donlon at his Flying Actor Studio.
The Work:
A cartoonishly symbolic take on putting oneself together to face the public
Mikey Hays
Style and Approach:
Gideon Berger is a filmmaker and mime who believes that the two disciplines go hand in hand. Unlike traditional theatre whose primary engine is dialogue, mime and film both situate the image as the driver of the narrative. Visuals, lights, sounds, music, and even words create the moving images of mime and film. Both create a 4-dimensional architecture of the senses. And both are the media that most closely resemble our dreams. The two can learn from one another. How do you create a close-up or a jump cut on stage? How can actors traverse space and instigate a sense of immediacy on a flat screen? Both disciplines serve as a mirror to the imagination of the audience; and to create a compelling film or mime piece, both must function as a dream in which the entire audience is the dreamer.
The Work:
Performing with The Chameleons Mime Theatre in Misophonia and The Flame.
