Marcel Marceau anything but silent in dialogue on art
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Theater preview
Marcel Marceau performs Tuesday-Sunday at the Moore Theatre, Seattle. $20-$35. 206-292-ARTS.
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As anyone who has encountered him offstage can tell you, the great French pantomime Marcel Marceau is rarely at a loss for words.
Marceau's beloved alter ego, Bip, the durable character he has portrayed for more than 50 years, still speaks volumes - strictly through facial expressions and body lingo.
But get Marceau on the horn from Paris, where at age 77 he continues to run his own government-subsidized training school and mime company, and he is far from mute - especially when speaking about his enduring life as a performing artist.
"I have just played last week at the Olympia Theatre in Paris, which carries 2,000 people, and it was sold out," reported Marceau, who opens a six-night run at the Moore Theatre on Tuesday.
"The public has been wonderful to me since the time I arrived as an artist. We have now three generations who know me. There were people who saw me in the 1950s, who now bring their children and their grandchildren."
When asked if his kind of white-faced, narrative mime (which has been much-lauded, as well as widely parodied) is in danger of extinction, Marceau said absolutely not.
"Art is not a fad, art is eternal," he stressed. "You will be surprised to see that the public is still very poetic, very responsive to the dream of silence, and the poetry of music, slow motion and the weight of the soul."
"It is like music - if you play Mozart or Bach, they are still an inspiration for our time. I depict man at his depth, in fables, metaphors, comedy and tragedy. That has nothing to do with our time, but with timeless time."
Marceau's art is actually informed by a long history of French pantomime largely unfamiliar to American audiences.
It harks back to the strolling French players at 18th-century fairs and small theaters, maverick artists who worked the crowd without dialogue.
Eventually, several formal styles of pantomime evolved, and some practitioners became Parisian superstars.
One was Jean-Gaspard Deburau. (A famously melancholy Pierrot, Deburau was portrayed by Jean Louis Barrault in the classic French film, "Les Enfants du Paradis.")
The art of mime took another turn when the silent movie era was born. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were among the early screen clowns to communicate brilliantly by nonverbal means.
Marceau (born Marcel Mangel, to a Jewish family in the French-German border town of Strasbourg), discovered the joys of such mime at age 5, when he saw his first Charlie Chaplin film.
After a youth scarred by World War II - he joined the anti-Nazi Resistance, but his father perished in a concentration camp - young Marcel went to Paris to study theater, and came under the tutelage of the great French mime guru Etienne Decroux.
At the time, pantomime was considered fairly passe. But the ambitious young performer now known as Marcel Marceau borrowed from several traditions to forge his own white-faced, Everyman character, Bip - a whimsical, mute variant of Pip, a character in Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations."
And in his simple, costume of white pants, striped shirt and nautical jacket, with a lithe and fine-tuned body as his instrument, Marceau could bring to life numerous characters in a single scene.
He also could make people laugh uproariously, or collectively sigh over life's indignities and sorrows.
And he could distill the human condition into such signature mime vignettes as "Youth, Maturity, Old Age, and Death."
After success in Europe, Marceau and Bip crossed the Atlantic to win over American audiences.
"I arrived in America for the first time in 1955," he recalled. "What I was doing was so new that critics said it was the essence of theater. Since then, I've played throughout the United States, including Seattle in the 1970s."
Though he sometimes tours with a larger company, made up of performers he has trained, Marceau is bringing to the Paramount a solo show of favorite old and new pieces. (He will be aided onstage by two assistants.)
"In the second half, you see Bip on a sea cruise, as a street musician, at a dating service," he explained. "And in part one you see pieces about the Japanese samurai, a birdkeeper, an eater of hearts."
Even his most dedicated fans are amazed Marceau can still sustain a whole evening of rigorous performance, and keep up a lively international touring schedule.
"People are obsessed by age," he commented with a hint of exasperation. "But what is important is not age, it is energy. You can be old at 17 and young at 70.
"It all depends on the training you have, the life you have. I play so much that I have kept my body fit. I teach, I create. I feel very fit and young and have a strong energy."
Marceau also derives pleasure from the veneration of his students, and younger entertainers who come to watch and learn from him.
"When I first went to America, all Hollywood was there to see me. Then later, Michael Jackson and David Bowie came. They are all very much interested in my work."
Marceau also pointed out, with pride, that one of his "very, very good" former students was doing well in Seattle: the teacher and director Chuck Hudson.
But most often in conversation, Marceau returned to what is clearly a matter of great importance to him: the notion that he has been "a witness" to the world he's lived in.
"A mime, an actor, a writer has to be the historian of his own time," Marceau stressed. "I feel like I am a witness. A silent witness, yes. But a witness."