So the benign invasion of silencers sponsored by Movement
Theatre International is cause for general rejoicing. Their Mime and Clown
Festival (June 13-July 11, at the Annenberg Center and the Painted Bride), with
multiple performances, a conference and two sequences of master classes on
“gestural theater” marks the Philadelphia debut of a husband and wife team who
have tried their act out of town successfully for five years—at Davis and
Elkins College in West Virginia.
They got too big for their leotards down in the mountains,
and when the local airport shut down, making them nigh inaccessible to their
international clientele of teachers and students, Mike and Judy Pedretti
started shopping around for a venue more befitting their organization’s title
and their outsize aspirations to channel the emerging energies of gestural
theater.
That’s when Oliver Franklin, Philadelphia’s deputy city rep
for culture, started wielding his magic—mainly, opening corporate doors. It’s
taking $200,000 to field this world-class event, with its 50 performers and 100
students. Tuition for a master class is $300—and most of the festival’s earned
revenue the first time around here will come from tuition.
In past summers, students have come from 48 states and 20
countries. When I interviewed him, Mike Pedretti had just finished taking a
call from India from an enrolling student. His median mimer has been 29 years
old, what Mike describes as “entry level pro,” with five years experience and
eager to translate his or her studies with world masters back into
performances.
The course agenda is deliciously eclectic—circus technique,
masks, advice on how to take your act into the streets, puppetry (both creation
and animation), “sociopolitical buffoonery” (a course that may not be needed in
this town), mime, acting in contemporary movement theater, directing movement
(by no less a teacher than Tom “Hair” O’Horgan), and courses in “corporeal
mime” by two students of the genre’s originator, Parisian Etienne Decroux.
Because Eastern Europe is also big in this burgeoning
movement—MTI has teachers from Romania and Poland—I asked Mike if the nonverbal
aspect might develop as a way of circumventing political expression. “A
possible factor,” he allowed, “but there is also a theory that gestural theater
flourishes in times of decadence—imperial Rome, the late Middle Ages, our
time.”
Mike also sees strong connections with the fitness boom, our
growing understanding of the importance of non-verbal communication, a greater
sensitivity to the joy of the body in motion, as in the dance revolution, as
well as this generation’s heightened kinesthetic sense as movie and video buffs.
If it moves, mime is interested. And so seems the public:
Mike estimates that the number of pros living from corporeal mime has jumped
dramatically, from perhaps a dozen in 1970 to over a thousand today.
As befits a rapidly expanding cultural development, there’s
a lot of controversy about what’s “in” and what’s “out” in gestural theater.
Marcel Marceau has become a fashionable whipping boy for the partisans of
Etienne Decroux (who was himself Marceau’s teacher). The public assumes Marceau
is mime, but Mike argues that Marcel is simply a very powerful presence whose
idiosyncratic style has been falsely construed by the uninformed as the art.
Hence, MTI types don’t mind the kind of mock laid on by
wordy, wordy types like Woody Allen. You may remember his New Yorker put-down:
“The mime now proceeded to spread a picnic blanket, and, instantly, my old
confusion set in. He was either spreading a picnic basket or milking a small
goat.”
The third ring MTI’s circus, beside public performances and
courses, will address itself directly to these lively contested issues at a
conference at Annenberg, June 26-29, followed by the National Mime Association
Annual Meeting.
The conference kicks off with Jacques Lecoq’s
internationally acclaimed performance, “Everything Moves.” And Daniel Stein
(direct from a stellar performance at EXPO 86, not to forget a U.S.-Japan
fellowship) will present “Inclined to Agree.”
Decroux disciple Tom Leabhart (who also edits The Mime
Journal out of Pomona College) will dazzle with “How I Was Perplexed and What I
Did About It.” His perplexity centers on the nature of the mime form itself,
and his act is a working out, non-verbally, of where mime is headed. It’s part
of what Mike Pedretti calls the “healthy ferment” in his field, in which “no
one is secure enough that they can afford not to experiment.”
Don’t get the mistaken impression that these mimes are mute.
I’ve been noodling through the transcript of the First National Mime Conference
(1983), and these gesturers are hardly at a loss for words. Listen to Martha
Coigney of New York’s International Theatre Institute on grooming your troupe
for international tours:
“America’s artists are a corps of ambassadors that are not
just unsung, but really viciously ignored by our government. A country’s
quality of civilization is known through its artistic excellence—and that’s a
fact of life that the United States has yet to confront and use. So, I would
tell you to prepare carefully and modestly.”
The most contentious issue is “the garbage problem,” the
upstaging of the well-trained professional by the hokey “Sunday mimer.”
Says Mike Pedretti: “There’s nothing we can do to stop bad
mime, any more than we can stop bad poetry. Everybody writes poetry, everybody
puts on whiteface or a red nose one time or another in their life.
“Mime is currently the most unsung, the least understood,
the most innovative and exciting field in the performing arts today. If the
‘60s was the era of the regional theaters and the ‘70s was the era of dance,
then the ‘80s is the era of mime.
“The range of styles is immense. The frontiers of
exploration are mind-boggling. The integrity of the leading performers is
unquestionable. The clarity, the innocence, the penetrating power of the best
work is pure.”
For the next two weeks you can test for yourself this new
frontier of movement theater. In these noisily noisome days, if silence is
golden, then mime at its best is pure platinum. Try it. You’ll probably love
it.
Mime and Clown Festival: June 13-July 11, at the Annenberg
Center, 3680 Walnut Street, and at the Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine
Street. Two sessions of master classes and conferences at Annenberg Center.
Complete listings and phone numbers under “Events” in listings section of After
Dark.
Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, June
11, 1986
No comments:
Post a Comment