Charlie Chaplin’s Pantomime: Silence is Magic!

100 Ann Edwards Lane,Mount Pleasant SC 29464

27 August, 2021

Description

MIMI Mime Troupe opening, Toni Bowers, PhD, speaking on life of Charlie Chaplin, Pantomime, & Communication. Toni Bowers (Ph.D., Stanford University) is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Bowers teaches and advises undergraduate and graduate students and supervises doctoral dissertations. While on Penn’s permanent faculty, she has been occasionally “loaned out” to serve as a Visiting Professor at other institutions, including the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), Kings College London, and Colorado College, where she was MacLain Distinguished Professor. In addition to teaching, Professor Bowers has published dozens of essays and reviews, and has written original scholarly monographs published by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. She publishes student-friendly editions of literary texts for use in college classrooms, and collections of thematically related essays by groups of scholars. Professor Bowers has a long-standing interest in the limitations of representational language. Recently, this interest has led her to new research on pantomime as an alternative communication system, a system based in metonym rather than metaphor. This research, in turn, has led to close study of Charlie Chaplin’s pantomime, the ancient art’s greatest 20th-century manifestation. At Penn, Dr. Bowers now teaches an advanced cinema studies course on Chaplin’s silent films and their place in pantomimic tradition. And she has recently been granted permission by the respective literary estates to edit and publish two first-person memoirs about Chaplin’s life and his silent art. These works, written by contemporaries who knew Chaplin well and worked closely with him, have never before been published. Onewas even thought to have been lost, until Dr. Bowers located it in the possession of a descendent of the author, now living in Saudi Arabia. Professor Bowers is often invited to speak about her work. She has lectured across the United States and in Canada, England, Finland, France, the Netherlands, and Scotland. She also serves on publishers’ editorial boards and on professional governance committees in the US and internationally. She has been the recipient of a number of national and international fellowships and prizes, including awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the British Academy. Toni Bowers, Ph.D.m Professor, Dept. of English University of Pennsylvania PLUS Our Pantomime Education Teacher: Hester Kamin, coming in via ZOOM throughout our summer camps! Each week our students had a focused lesson Pantomime and body movements. Opening of presentation includes multiple video stories of the MINI MIME TROUPE, and their adventures in Charleston, SC. Only one is shared here. Members of the troupe will be present with Dr. Bowers!