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A History of Mime in Ann Arbor with Performances by Michael Lee

When: December 22, 2024

Join us for a series of short performances and interviews with local mime Michael Lee and special guests O.J. Anderson and Perry Perrault. The performance, which will consist of short 4-6 minute pieces will be for many, an introduction to “the actor’s art” of mime. With credit given to the mime artists that inspired and taught Michael Lee, we’ll connect the dots between legendary mimes, and the local Ann Arbor mimes who knew and trained with them.

This project is part of AADL’s commemoration of the city’s bicentennial year.

Program from A History of Mime in Ann Arbor with Performances & Interviews, Sunday, December 22, 2024
A History of Mime in Ann Arbor with Performances by Michael Lee, Program

Transcript

  • [00:00:05] ELIZABETH SMITH: Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Elizabeth Smith, and I work in the library as an Archives Technician. I'm going to be interviewing Owen Anderson, Perry Perrault and Michael Lee, and then we're going to launch into some performances by Michael. You can check your program for a whole rundown of tonight, or today--It's the middle of the afternoon. If we end up getting too tight in here, we have some overflow out in the lobby, and then if you need to, we can go into Conference Room A, but it looks like we're good. If you need a restroom, it's out in the fourth floor atrium. If you need hearing assistance, there are some out on the table right outside the program room doors. I'm going to just launch into interviewing. We're going to talk about pre 1980s Mime in Ann Arbor. We're going to start off by asking Perry, since you were here first, when did you come to Ann Arbor first, and when did you start becoming interested in mime here?
  • [00:01:06] PERRY PERRAULT: That's a pretty good question. I came here as a student and I went to U of M in 1969 and went to 1970 into '71 and '72. I was doing experiments with the automotive group because I drove a lot to get money to buy my books. I tried to do it by taking them out of the library. Then I finally said, okay, I'm not doing this anymore. I dropped out of school in '72 and then I worked as a mechanical--I was a draftsman, but I worked at a job that was like an engineer but they couldn't call me an engineer. Anyway, I ended up saying "Well, I quit." Then I went down to Artworlds. I wanted to maybe learn some pottery or something. That'd be fun. I got there, and there's this guy there Michael Filisky. He was doing mime classes. I went up and watched the mime class, and I ended up taking mime classes from him, and that would have been like in 1972 or 1973.
  • [00:02:23] ELIZABETH SMITH: Then after you met Michael, what happened from there? You started a Mime Troupe at the University of Michigan, is that correct?
  • [00:02:30] PERRY PERRAULT: Yes, I have all this stuff written down on my phone [LAUGHTER] because my brain works real good. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, working with Michael Filisky, I took his classes and then he held auditions. I also worked with some people from Magic Mountain Mime with Chuck Metcalf who the university employed for a while. I went to Michael's audition and well, I didn't know they were working out. We used to always make use of the U of M buildings that weren't being used by anybody. He said, why don't you do a piece? I improvised a piece. I don't even remember what it was. About a guy at a bar and a wallet got stolen. I forgot what it was. But anyway,.
  • [00:03:19] MICHAEL LEE: Where's my wallet? [LAUGHTER]
  • [00:03:20] PERRY PERRAULT: Anyway, when I was done, they said--
  • [00:03:22] OWEN ANDERSON: What a rare scene for you. [LAUGHTER]
  • [00:03:24] PERRY PERRAULT: When I was done, they said, well, you passed the audition and so there's a group of us and I know all their names, but it's written down. There's a cluster picture of us. With Michael Filisky, we did a lot of stuff at Lydia Mendelssohn Theater. We performed a lot and we had a couple of different shows there. I'm trying to just keep it to the Ann Arbor stuff because we did a lot. After that, we actually the biggest thing was, this is in '76, so I shouldn't mention that now.
  • [00:04:01] ELIZABETH SMITH: We'll get into it for the next interview segment.
  • [00:04:03] PERRY PERRAULT: We'll let that go. Then I did local shows with Michael Filisky Mimetroupe.
  • [00:04:08] ELIZABETH SMITH: Now we're going to ask Owen, how did you first come to Ann Arbor and how did you get involved with mime?
  • [00:04:14] OWEN ANDERSON: I was one of the founders of the Black Sheep Theatre in Manchester, Michigan. We were all poor and we were hungry and tired and my buddy, Jim Fleming, who was one of the other founders, says, hey, I got you a gig. I went, oh, great. I said, doing what? He says, I don't know. What do you do? I said, I don't know. He says, you studied mime? I said, yeah, I studied some mime. He says, well, you're going to do a mime show. I put together about 15 minutes of what I thought was okay and I didn't have any money for pancake makeup like Mikey does. I had some baby powder and water and I just smashed it on my face, borrowed this girl's lipstick and I went out and I did the show and nobody clapped. Nobody applauded. I went, hey, this is pretty good. They gave me 100 bucks and that fed the actors and actresses at the theater for about two days. Then I would escape from the Black Sheep and go to Ann Arbor just to get away from it because all we did there was direct, we'd act, we'd produce, we'd build. I had to get away. One day I'm walking down the street and I'm sad and I'm lonely and I'm introverted, which I am now, and I saw this sign. It said, "Free Dance Concert." It was at Artworlds. It was a free dance concert. I walked up and I saw this little woman spinning around and she was beautiful. Now, 45 years later, she still wishes she hadn't put that free dance concert sign out. [LAUGHTER] I've been with my wife for 45 years, Noonie. I don't know if you know her. She's head of the Dance [APPLAUSE] department at Washtenaw. I knew I would embarrass you. That's how I got here.
  • [00:06:15] ELIZABETH SMITH: Thank you. This is a question for everybody. What was the mime scene like before 1980 in Ann Arbor? We had Marcel Marceau come here quite a few times. That was kind of the dominant view of mime. What did you find people were performing? What were other people working on in the area?
  • [00:06:34] PERRY PERRAULT: I didn't see much mime here in the area. There was a troupe. There was a guy named Claude Kipnis and he also performed at the Power Center and he might have taken one class from Marceau or something, but he's got a book called The Mime Book. I brought a bag, but he had theater. He was a troupe. There weren't many companies performing. Marceau was a solo. The atmosphere was, I wasn't part of that atmosphere. My mom took me to my first Marceau show in Detroit. But a lot of the mimes were upset because he dominated the market and so they didn't like and they were more like Étienne Decroux-style mime artists and they just didn't like him dominating. There weren't many mimes here locally performing other than the big shows like Kipnis and Marceau.
  • [00:07:34] MICHAEL LEE: Can I jump in a little bit about Artworlds? Because we've mentioned that a couple of times. Artworlds was also my entry. It's where I met Perry. It was upstairs above [INAUDIBLE]-- What was it?
  • [00:07:47] OWEN ANDERSON: Capitalist [Capitol] Market.
  • [00:07:49] MICHAEL LEE: That's right. Right down on Main Street, it was a wonderful colony. You could learn anything you wanted to there; poetry, painting. I also walked in there one day and I signed up for Perry's mime class. I'm sorry to embarrass you a little bit, this is in about 1983 or so, sorry to jump ahead a little bit, but people used to wear leg warmers [LAUGHTER] and Perry had cut off socks [LAUGHTER] that were his leg warmers, and I thought this guy's cool. That was the same entry. Artworlds was such a wonderful place where a lot of people made their entry into Ann Arbor arts of all kinds.
  • [00:08:30] ELIZABETH SMITH: I don't know if you have anything else to add to that, Perry, about what you taught there and what that experience was like and how long that was?
  • [00:08:35] PERRY PERRAULT: Well, I taught for a few years there.
  • [00:08:39] MICHAEL LEE: Use your mic.
  • [00:08:41] OWEN ANDERSON: For God sake's Shakespeare, use your mic. [LAUGHTER]
  • [00:08:49] PERRY PERRAULT: My classes, I taught basic gestures; how to pull a rope, how to walk upstairs, how to climb a ladder and those types of things, all illusionary, of course. I had a beginner's course and I had an advanced course, and that lasted for a couple of years. I used to have a whole pile of these tickets, the sign-ups, registration slips. There was a whole stack of them. There must have been, I'd say, in the hundreds of students I taught there. Wow. It's pretty cool.
  • [00:09:24] ELIZABETH SMITH: Owen, did you have any experiences with Artworlds?
  • [00:09:27] OWEN ANDERSON: Yeah, I met my wife there.
  • [00:09:28] ELIZABETH SMITH: Yeah, other than that? [LAUGHTER]
  • [00:09:31] OWEN ANDERSON: No, but my wife and I were talking and I said, I can't remember performing in Ann Arbor that much. Then she started making a list for me, and I performed in a ton of places here. I was at The Ark. I was at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival, Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival. I performed at Hill, Power, Mendelssohn. I performed at Washtenaw. I performed at Michigan Theater too. Just a ton of places. I remember, Performance Network and the Ann Arbor Libraries, a bunch of Ann Arbor libraries. It's just such a great city. It's such a great town where there are so many places, so many opportunities for all performers musicians, mimes, jugglers, whatever--dancers, whatever. It's perfect.
  • [00:10:28] ELIZABETH SMITH: That's great. I think we're going to go ahead and transition into the first performance. We're going to welcome Michael in his first performance of "Masks."
  • [00:10:39] OWEN ANDERSON: I get you back here.
  • [00:10:41] MICHAEL LEE: You guys are gonna be down there. Jackie, I think we're going to need that light up a little bit longer. That's good.
  • [00:10:58] MICHAEL LEE: A lot of what we have experience with in our training are different styles, and that's what I wanted to share a little bit today. Besides Perry, there's been many other mimes from all over the world that have come through Ann Arbor. A lot of people remember Marcel Marceau, of course, but there was also a gentleman named Stefan Niedziałkowski that actually lived here for three years, and I'll talk more about that later. But he has a whole completely different style. This piece that I'm going to perform called Masks, I took the inspiration before I saw Mr. Marceau perform a piece called, The Mask Maker. When I created this, and then I saw that performance, I was really glad that I had created it first because I didn't want to copy. There's enough copying of what Marcel Marceau did already and just as a side thing, that's where this idea of a wall comes from. For mimes, Marcel Marceau did an amazing beautiful piece called The Cage. It's very, very dramatic, and it's actually a tragedy. But unfortunately, a lot of people didn't see that and so they say, oh, you're a mime. You wear white face, so you have to touch a wall. Now that I got that out of the way, no one will ever bring it up again in this room. [LAUGHTER]. Right? [LAUGHTER] Okay good. I created this piece called Masks, and over the years, I've changed it. It keeps changing, which is really--it feels like a privilege to create a piece of art and continuously change it because it was an example for me how to continuously assimilate the techniques that we learned into our work. There's just one thing in this piece, I'm going to put my makeup on, like a clown in a circus. One of the hands that we would learn to do looks something like this. Perry, I'll give you a little quiz. Do you remember what one's called?
  • [00:12:48] PERRY PERRAULT: Poisson--is a fish.
  • [00:12:50] MICHAEL LEE: Yes. The actual name was Hands Orientale. I don't remember why, but Croissant was one of that, as well. Mr. Marceau used this hand position in a piece called Creation of the World, which I'm going to reference in my second piece. But I use this, I wonder, how can I use that hand? In this piece where a clown is putting on his makeup, I'm feeling the texture of grease paint on my fingers. As it's right there. I just love this position. I teach it a lot still, and it's just wonderful to articulate our fingers in this way to create an image. This first piece is about a circus clown with a problem. [LAUGHTER]. I just leave that one out there for a while. Circus clowns have problems, and it's called Masks. [MUSIC]. [LAUGHTER]. [ [NOISE] [ [LAUGHTER] APPLAUSE]
  • [00:22:55] MICHAEL LEE: Thank you so much. I have to do a quick costume change. [LAUGHTER] Don't peek, please. [LAUGHTER] You can talk amongst yourselves for a moment. I'm just behind the curtain. Don't peek, okay? Could you see me? Oh, I brought my see through curtain again. You wish you made that joke, didn't you? I was just going to say, open it back up, thank you. This is second piece is very near and dear to me. Goes back to a little bit of the history of mime Ann Arbor and actually Ypsilanti. There's a wonderful teacher named Lynn Ayres that taught English--middle school English over in Ypsilanti and I was involved with the Washtenaw Council for the Arts back then, and there was a wonderful grant, and Lynn got me. She got a mime. She said later that she didn't have pencils, and she didn't have supplies in her classroom because the funding was so low. She was buying supplies for her students out of her own pocket. One day, the principal showed up and said, here's your mime. And Lynn said to me, later, also, I never turned on anything so I got to do a residency with her students for a long time. It was really wonderful. We actually started doing things every year for three or four years and one year I wanted to demonstrate how to portray someone of a different age. So I did that, and I was showing how I changed my body a little bit, and I would walk a little bit differently. Then one day, Lynn said, "Why don't you do that piece about the old man?" I said, "I don't have a piece about an old man." She said, "Yes, you do. You've been doing it for three years." I got a little inkling about how to create a mime piece. So I did it, and I worked on this, and I think it may have sort of in the notes, but I also got the opportunity to meet the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner many, many years ago. When I said goodbye to him, he was walking down a sidewalk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he had this trench coat on, and the snow was falling. It was this old building, and he was walking slowly off into a distance, which just struck me as an image that was so dramatic. It's also an image that Marcel Marceau would speak to us about about how to walk off into a distance and create something different with our body. I started working on this piece, and I took it to Mr. Marceau for him to critique it, as we were expected to do, during our work. One of the assistant teachers, remember Mark Jaster that was who said it. He was from Maryland. He said, "You need to write that down." I said, "why? I'm doing a mime piece." He said, "Write it down." I'm not a writer. He said, "Write it down." I started writing long hand on lined paper, and three pages later, I had the story. But I started off by saying, "My name is Tony. I'm 84-years-old. I live in a small apartment building in Philadelphia." And I just kept going and going and filling in these details. That's how this piece came about in the original idea of just writing it out and fleshing it out to find out that I'm playing a man named Tony. I've never lived at Philadelphia, but Tony does, and he's 84-years-old. This is called Remembrance. [MUSIC] [APPLAUSE] Welcome. Thank you all so much. It's a real pleasure to share that. Can I invite my friends back up again? By the way, this is an incredible honor to share this stage with Owen and Perry. These two have really meant a lot to me in our careers. [OVERLAPPING] He's getting that guy's wallet. Go out there. There you go.
  • [00:32:11] OWEN ANDERSON: I'm 71. He's 72, so we both need help.
  • [00:32:14] MICHAEL LEE: You guys have worked your butts off so long. This happened for many years. This is an unknown part of Ann Arbor mime history, is that every time I told somebody about mime in Ann Arbor, libraries, we all perform at the schools and everything, and people would always say, "Oh, do you know O.J.?" Or even I'd show up and they'd go, "Are you O.J.?" [LAUGHTER] This happened for a long time. We don't even look alike! Every time. "Are you O.J.?"
  • [00:32:41] OWEN ANDERSON: You fit in your mime pants a lot better than I do, buddy.
  • [00:32:46] MICHAEL LEE: He loves my mime pants. They're loose fitting.
  • [00:32:54] ELIZABETH SMITH: For this part of the interview, we're going to focus on the 1980s, which we are deeming the "mime boom in Ann Arbor." This is when things are really happening, Marcel Marceau is here. We have Perry here, we have OJ. We have Michael. Everyone's here. [LAUGHTER] We're just going to start out with going back to the mime troupe, which we kind of touched on briefly in the beginning. How did you start the U of M mime troupe?
  • [00:33:18] PERRY PERRAULT: That was interesting. There was well, young man from fresh out of the marines, and his name was Thomas Drotar and he wanted to learn mime. I had him out in my basement in Shadowood, and teaching mime to him, and he actually got the idea that we should form a company at the University of Michigan. Just right now so I can get rid of this part of the phone. Throughout the years, we would train like 12-14 people to be in the mime troupe, and it rotated. There's a lot of names here that didn't necessarily perform together, but they were in different years of the mime troupes. I'm going to name their names. There was me and Tom Drotar and Anne Zald and Lisa Sanderson and Bill Cash and Kristen Vandenberg, Miriam Kaplan, Matthias Schubert, Anne Woelk, Cece Lobin, Kevin Skarritt, Larry Bean, Rick Cageao, Dianna Clark, Glenn Clark, Jeff Lupovitch, Mark Moverman, and Beverly Sayed.
  • [00:34:29] OWEN ANDERSON: You missed 30 more names.
  • [00:34:35] PERRY PERRAULT: Let me get there.
  • [00:34:46] PERRY PERRAULT: One of the cool things we did was we had a chance to work with the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, and we did two children's shows with them for their children's concerts at Hill Auditorium. We did--I can't manipulate this thing very good. I'm getting there. I'll just go from memory for that. We choreographed Peter and the Wolf. We had about 12 people in the company, so we could play all the characters with the instruments. It was actually choreographed pretty much note for note. I've never done anything like that in my life. That was the first chance at that. Then we came back again with the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra and did Babar, the Elephant. For that, we cut out these big things. We had a big cardboard thing or a plywood thing of a bathtub and a car, and--Babar, we'd be in the elephant, and we'd be doing the different scenes. They had a narrator too, which was kind of helpful. That was fun. We also did our own shows. I'm trying to get there. Hallelujah. Solo Mime. Ann Arbor. One thing, there's some posters pictures out in the hall that we did every year was with the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, we would perform under the arches. We did that, and we also interacted with the crowd. We'd walk through the crowds doing stuff and having a good time there before and after our show. I'm trying to get the premiere for performance. Let's see, Saturday morning. Oh, gosh. We did a lot of performances for a lot of places. I guess it was 1980, we did our--the U of M Mime Troupe had their premiere performance at the Michigan Theater. That was so cool, to be in that theater and get it--I had--a lot of friends came, and it was really hyped up. We had a great time. Then Tom Drotar wanted to put together this piece, and so it was a feature in a show at the U of M also, I think it was in 1980, and it was a debut performance of Portraits of Artists. There's a couple of posters out there for that one. We did some shows in small auditoriums around the university. Every year, the troupe we trained would present these pieces. We had shows that lasted two hours long of mime, and these little kids would be watching the whole thing and really having a good time. We did in 1981, U of M Mime Troupe performance called Forever Mime and Schorling Auditorium at U of M. We did another one in '82, U of M Mime Troupe performance. "It's Mime All Mime" at the Schorling Auditorium. Then we did--that's interesting. We did the U of M Mime Troupe performs for the Energy Administration, Michigan Department of Commerce, Michigan, League National Community Energy Management Center.
  • [00:38:26] MICHAEL LEE: That was a big poster.
  • [00:38:29] OWEN ANDERSON: I was there.
  • [00:38:33] PERRY PERRAULT: I'm scrolling as fast as I can. I know we did some more. This was fun. There used to be a group called the Ann Arbor Silent Film Society, and they get together and watched silent films. It was a blast. But they asked us to perform at their annual banquets. We did that. In 1992 we performed a lot of slapstick pieces. We had pieces about going to the theater and stuff. That was good. U of M Mime Troupe performed at the U of M Children's Hospital in a program called Caring For Kids. This is an interesting one. Oh, my eyes are watering now. We performed a piece at a benefit for peace/celebration of life presented by Strategic Moves for Peace and Jesse Richards, she was a dancer here in the area. The piece we performed was called A Possible Potent Potential for Practical Peace. It was at this peace benefit, and it was all worked out. We had this long piece of red material. It was like 20, 30 feet long. The whole piece revolved around that, and in the end, we were celebrating our peace by dancing around in a circle. But that was fun. That's probably it for the Mime Troupe. I should mention also in the same time period, I did a lot of work with a woman named Lisa Gottlieb, and we did a lot of little mime shows for schools and for the Flint Institute of Art. We had a lot of--some of the poster signs that you hold up, she had a great piece called Slapstick and another one called The Meal. Slapstick was we just did a lot of slapstick stuff. The guy takes his hat off and the other person puts their hand out, and then they keep switching back and forth. Then they get in the rock and roll fight, and then one person lands with their feet up, and then you play the piano on their toes. It was really a good slapstick piece. The Meal was, I was much bigger than Lisa. She would get behind me, and I would sit in front and we had two pairs of hands for The Meal, your hands would come through, and we just do this whole bit about different things that happened during the meal. I wanted to mention that. There's some other things that happened that--without the U of M Mime Troupe--in connection with the Ann Arbor Summer Festivals and Marcel Marceau. But I can talk about that later if you want to go to somebody else.
  • [00:41:19] ELIZABETH SMITH: We can all just jump into the Summer Festival if anyone else wants to comment on their experiences with that, because I know it was a big thing in town, and Marcel Marceau was the face of the first Summer Festival, so it's a big deal. What do you think, Michael?
  • [00:41:36] MICHAEL LEE: I was just reading about this recently how Mr. Marceau came to be that headliner. I believe it may have been in the information you have, there was a specific French theme, I believe, to one of the early festivals, but Marcel Marceau was the headliner for the first two. It may have been like around '83. It's the first time I saw him perform as well. What it said to me is that the honor of Summer Festival, just getting started, was bringing in world-class talent. It really set the mark high for everything else to follow. Gail Rector was the man who was president of the UMS, and that's who brought in Mr. Marceau in the first place. But it just said to me, this is really going to be an amazing festival. As you know, it's gone on year after year after year. But that was a really powerful message to me that it wasn't going to be a local thing, although there were some darn good local mimes around at that time. But that's what it really said. That he also knew he wanted to start a school. That's when the seeds of that started to happen, too.
  • [00:42:50] ELIZABETH SMITH: Did you mention that you performed at the Summer Festival?
  • [00:42:52] OWEN ANDERSON: I performed at the Art Fair. Is that the Summer Festival?
  • [00:42:57] ELIZABETH SMITH: They're technically different. The Summer Festival--[LAUGHTER] They both happen in the summer.
  • [00:43:03] OWEN ANDERSON: Michael and Perry, you were very technical mimes. You were real good. I was a mime for a while, and then I started--my background is I received my degree from University of Detroit in performing arts. I studied mime in England and studied improvisational comedy at Second City in Chicago. I studied with the Ringling Brothers Clowns. Then I started getting involved--my shows were in colleges and in clubs, and I had to be wilder. It was more like Red Skelton on acid. I had to be really crazy. For instance, I would start using props, too. My base, at the core of my performance was mime. But I would start using props and music and I'd sing. When I do colleges, I had a real hang grenade from World War II, one of my props, it was empty. I would ask the audience, how you liking my show so far? They, Oh, yeah. I'd take out the hand grenade go, how are you enjoying it now? It had to be wild. It had to be almost more inconsiderate than the college kids. You had to be wild and stuff like that. But because of it, I got to do not only colleges, but I got to open for B.B. King, Spyro Gyra, Weird Al Yankovic. I got to open for the Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin debates, which was really cool. That's kind of where I was headed. If I had just done basic mime in some of the places I would have been killed, I think.
  • [00:44:48] MICHAEL LEE: I don't think you could have contained yourself.
  • [00:44:50] OWEN ANDERSON: I don't think I could have contained myself, either, Michael.
  • [00:44:54] MICHAEL LEE: I would follow him, by the way, some of the Ypsilanti New Year's Eve shows.
  • [00:44:58] OWEN ANDERSON: New Year's Eve--.
  • [00:44:59] MICHAEL LEE: I was following you. There was a heck of a mess of a stage to clean up after you. There was a lot of stuff everywhere.
  • [00:45:05] OWEN ANDERSON: I'm sorry.
  • [00:45:06] MICHAEL LEE: I think they should have me go first.
  • [00:45:07] OWEN ANDERSON: I'm sorry.
  • [00:45:10] MICHAEL LEE: Lots of props [LAUGHTER]
  • [00:45:11] ELIZABETH SMITH: Before we move into the next set of performances, I wanted to touch on the Marcel Marceau Center for Mime here and just ask you each if you had any direct interaction with that and what was that like?
  • [00:45:22] PERRY PERRAULT: Yeah, I had quite a bit of interaction with it. Just my experience with the Ann Arbor Summer Festival was that I was a popular mime at the time, and the School of Music got ahold of me, and they had me be a facilitator to work between Marceau and the students, and Marceau and them, and so all the audition tapes came to me, and I reviewed all the audition tapes and it was a blessing because we had spaces for everybody, so we didn't have to reject anyone. Then he separated people into their different groups of beginning or more advanced. That was kind of fun. Now, what was the next? We wanted to move on to something else.
  • [00:46:04] ELIZABETH SMITH: Just the performances. After this interview, Michael's performances.
  • [00:46:08] MICHAEL LEE: I was going to add at that, actually, when those auditions that we all had to send in. I was really nervous about that and it felt like a lot of pressure to audition by videotape. It costs some money. But it was really amazing. We're talking about the seminars that Marcel Marceau started, I believe, in 1983, and he was coming here every year. The Marcel Marceau World Center for Mime grew out of that and for a while, there were offices at Domino's Farms and that's a really long story how things played out up into about 1988 or '89 somewhere in there is when that came to the close of that.
  • [00:46:47] PERRY PERRAULT: I think that was really a little bit earlier than that, Ann Arbor Summer Festival stopped bringing Marceau somewhere around '84, '85, but '84 was the last one and in 1985, I had a company, a business called Ann Arbor Mimeworks. We were located in the Performance Network. We had a small studio, about 200 square feet and it used to be, like a cancer awareness center, and they had these little booths in this 200 square foot room, that little four by four booths that went to the ceiling, we ended up tearing all those down and then putting in a wood floor over the concrete floor. Then Michael and I made a raid at the, what hotel was that?
  • [00:47:30] MICHAEL LEE: I forget the name. It was at Huron Parkway and Washtenaw, there was a hotel they were tearing down and we got mirrors--.
  • [00:47:37] PERRY PERRAULT: Big mirrors.
  • [00:47:38] MICHAEL LEE: Eight foot mirrors in my Toyota pickup.
  • [00:47:41] PERRY PERRAULT: We put those.
  • [00:47:41] MICHAEL LEE: We were crazy.
  • [00:47:43] PERRY PERRAULT: We put those up vertical along one wall and then had a dance bar on the other wall and underneath it, I was with one of my sons. He was real little guy Donnell, you know, Donnell. We're painting before we put the mirrors up. I wrote on the wall supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. We had a great time then we put that up. What we did was we carried on the festival and brought Stefan Niedziałkowski who, Michael just mentioned a little while ago, but we brought him from Philadelphia and did our own Ann Arbor Summer Festival. It wasn't the Ann Arbor. Well, anyway, it was here in Ann Arbor, and we did things out of the--used to be in the Frieze building, which there was a theater.
  • [00:48:39] ELIZABETH SMITH: The Trueblood Auditorium? [OVERLAPPING]
  • [00:48:42] PERRY PERRAULT: Yeah. That was good, we brought Michael--Stefan [OVERLAPPING]. Niedziałkowski, he brought his mime company, and they did performances in Detroit as well at the Performance Network in Ann Arbor. That was good.
  • [00:49:01] OWEN ANDERSON: Frieze Building was the old high school.
  • [00:49:06] MICHAEL LEE: The theater was in the--there was a space in the basement.
  • [00:49:08] OWEN ANDERSON: Yeah, the Black Box.
  • [00:49:11] MICHAEL LEE: That's it.
  • [00:49:13] ELIZABETH SMITH: I think that's all we have time for for 1980s. I know we could go on forever because so much happened during that period.
  • [00:49:18] MICHAEL LEE: Let's go to 1990s.
  • [00:49:20] ELIZABETH SMITH: That'll be next. [LAUGHTER] We're just going to turn the stage back over to Michael. Thank you.
  • [00:49:25] MICHAEL LEE: Thanks, guys.
  • [00:49:26] OWEN ANDERSON: Don't blow it, Mikey.
  • [00:49:29] MICHAEL LEE: Hope I'm good [LAUGHTER]
  • [00:49:35] MICHAEL LEE: I'm just going to make this one little joke, like, "you get I'm talking and..." I warned Elizabeth this might be a four-hour program. One of the amazing pieces that Marcel Marceau performed was called Creation of the World and he used these expressive hands. He used the music, I believe, of J S Bach, and it was the only piece that he actually ever taught us start to finish and not that we would go out and perform that piece, but he used it as an example of the creative process. I know at least a couple of my friends have done similar pieces, and this is my tribute to that. It's a piece called Life and this is going to, be a little extra dramatic. I'm having a little glitch with my music, but I want to take advantage of it. When I get ready to start this, I'm going to ask you all to close your eyes. We're going to pretend that we don't have a very big budget for lighting. Let's just practice that now. Don't close your eyes. Yet, wait, not yet. Open them up. Now close them quickly. Close them. Now, we're going to practice this. The lights are going to start to come up, and then you start to open your eyes slowly. Did you all do it? Cool. All right good. That's going to work then. That was it. It's like low tech lighting [LAUGHTER] But I need you to do it to make this really be extra dramatic.
  • [00:51:08] MICHAEL LEE: I hope it's dramatic.
  • [00:51:12] MICHAEL LEE: Close your eyes, and this is called Life. [MUSIC]
  • [00:54:43] MICHAEL LEE: [MUSIC].
  • [00:57:23] MICHAEL LEE: We've been talking about the history of mime in Ann Arbor, and I'm going to jump ahead. We'll come back, I guess in time, a little bit also. In 2003 or 2004, I was teaching at Huron High School, and I met a young person named Anny Malla, and she performed with me some then, and over the years, we'bve performed. We're going into the future now as one of my students and my dear friends is going to join me for this piece that's called Cool It. This was written at one of Mr. Marceau's seminars, by our friend Rebecca Surmont, who is an artist that lives in Minneapolis now, but this is a little story about two people that don't know each other. It's kind of that feeling in summertime in July or August when it's really, really blazing hot. Some people, it really bothers them. Other people, it doesn't really bother them that much. This is a story about two of those kind of people. This is called Cool It.
  • [00:58:35] MICHAEL LEE: [MUSIC].
  • [01:04:38] MICHAEL LEE: [LAUGHTER].[NOISE].
  • [01:05:31] MICHAEL LEE: Thank you so much.
  • [01:05:37] MICHAEL LEE: Bring the mimes back up.
  • [01:05:44] ELIZABETH SMITH: Ready for one more interview?
  • [01:05:45] MICHAEL LEE: Absolutely.
  • [01:06:07] ELIZABETH SMITH: Now we want to start talking about the 1990s to present.
  • [01:06:12] MICHAEL LEE: We will remember that.
  • [01:06:15] ELIZABETH SMITH: Hopefully. How does this period differ from the 1980s? How did each of your performance styles evolve during this period?
  • [01:06:23] OWEN ANDERSON: Speaking for me, from then from the colleges in the summer I started teaching clowns for the Ringling Brothers Circus, and then I would do international street performance festivals. I created a character called the fashion cop where I'd dress like a SWAT team and I'd give tickets for fashion discrepancies. [LAUGHTER] I had flashing lights and I had a siren, and I'd have a big wad of tickets, and I'd pull people over right in the street. Then if they were really bad, I'd put crime scene tape around them. [LAUGHTER] It was really good.
  • [01:07:02] MICHAEL LEE: I'm sorry, I have to interrupt, but I have to come clean. You taught me that character.
  • [01:07:06] OWEN ANDERSON: Oh, I did?
  • [01:07:07] MICHAEL LEE: Yes, because, you needed another one.
  • [01:07:09] OWEN ANDERSON: Did you pay me for it?
  • [01:07:11] MICHAEL LEE: Oh, yes. I still owe you, though.
  • [01:07:15] OWEN ANDERSON: It was fun.
  • [01:07:15] MICHAEL LEE: But you taught me that.
  • [01:07:15] OWEN ANDERSON: But I was fortunate to teach clowns all over the world. And one of the great thing I got to do--this all comes back to mind because everything I did was based on mime, but with different inflections, of course, and props and costumes and stuff. I got to perform with the three oldest living Ringling Brother Clowns over in England and Scotland. One of the clowns, his name was Mark Anthony. Well, one was Lou Jacobs. When you see a poster of the Ringling Brother Clowns and there's a guy with a little hat and a bald head, that was Lou. He was a good friend of mine. But Mark Anthony, we stayed in a castle in Dalkeith, Scotland, and he was one of the best foam rubber sculptors in the world. He could take a piece of foam and take an electric knife, like one you used to cut turkeys with and his glue, and he could change that foam into anything. He was about 86 at the time. He was my roommate in this castle. We were going up to our room and we opened the door and he started shaking. I said, "Mark, where's your pills?" He goes, "It's not that." I go, "What? What is it, Mark?" He goes, "Our beds." I said, "What about our beds?" "They're made of the best foam rubber you could possibly carve." That day his bed became an ostrich where you get into it and you ride around. Then the next day, my bed was an elephant. He carved it into an elephant. I had to tell the castle and they said, give us the elephant. We didn't have to pay for it.
  • [01:08:58] MICHAEL LEE: That's cool.
  • [01:08:58] OWEN ANDERSON: All my performance, everything I did with the Ringling Brothers, when I sang opera, whatever I did, it's based on movement of mime. For instance, if you were the fashion cop, you just didn't stand there. You had to stand, and you had to walk like you're 230 pounds. You had to check everything out and look.
  • [01:09:28] MICHAEL LEE: I hope I do it well.
  • [01:09:30] OWEN ANDERSON: Everything was based on movement.
  • [01:09:32] MICHAEL LEE: I hope that I'm doing it well enough.
  • [01:09:34] OWEN ANDERSON: No, you're failing.
  • [01:09:36] MICHAEL LEE: I'm failing.
  • [01:09:39] OWEN ANDERSON: Perry?
  • [01:09:42] PERRY PERRAULT: Can I use your mic? Thank you. I just want to say this about the foundation of the Marcel Marceau World Center for Mime. It was out at Domino Farms, and Brian Trim, a local mime artist in Ann Arbor, who studied with Marceau worked with former Mayor Lou Belcher, who interfaced with Tom Monahan. They were all instrumental in founding that for Marcel Marceau. One of the things that came out for me was, when I studied with Marceau, I was in my extremities. I do a lot with my face and my hands and stuff. He said, you need to study with Stefan Niedziałkowski who we've mentioned before. I went to this conference--National Movement Theater when they had Stefan Niedziałkowski, Daniel Stein, and Thomas Leabhart, who were instrumental, I think, in a lot of the stuff that I do. I do have to mention this, too. Michael Lee, this guy sitting next to me, actually had a company and probably still does called Opus Mime. I can't believe he didn't mention Opus Mime this whole time.
  • [01:10:50] MICHAEL LEE: It's the mid-90s, we are getting there.
  • [01:10:53] PERRY PERRAULT: Well, I don't know what year it is, but I'll tell you, what it reminded me about it was Cool It, right? Michael would book way too many gigs than he could do, and he got lots of gigs. You mentioned Rebecca Surmont, and I know her and I did some school gigs for her. Somewhere, it's probably not up, but I have a thing, Opus Mime. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that. I don't know when I stopped doing mime.
  • [01:11:26] MICHAEL LEE: You never stopped.
  • [01:11:27] PERRY PERRAULT: Oh, that's right. In the '90s I--well, I'm a born again Christian, and we did mission work, and I did mime. We went all over South America. Peru and Ecuador and Colombia. I took my 13-year-old daughter to Colombia just after the time when they had those kidnappings and stuff. But anyway, she got to experience a third world country and what that was like. It did wonders for her. But we did mime. We had medical workers who came and they did medicine. While all the people in the villages were lined up, I would go up and down the lines entertaining them with improvisational mime. That was a lot of fun. It opened a lot of doors for me. We also went to Thailand--all over Thailand and the Philippines, which is a little bit farther out than Ann Arbor. I guess I'll stop there.
  • [01:12:24] ELIZABETH SMITH: But mime is translated to all languages and all cultures.
  • [01:12:29] PERRY PERRAULT: That was the thing. Michael Filisky's mime troupe, I didn't really talk too much about it, but we went--we were invited to go to the Festival of Fools, which was in Amsterdam. We went with--who got us hooked up with it was Friends Road Show here in Ann Arbor, Jango the Clown and I forget what the name of their company was. I have it written down, but I can't pull that out again. Friends Road Show. They got us hooked up and we went over there with Michael Filisky's Mime Troupe. We actually were on a private jet with some Ecumenical priests who were going to a conference of some kind. We get up in the air and then everybody started pulling out. The council guys were doing--drinking stuff and we were smoking whatever you smoked in those days. It was crazy. It was a good mime act.
  • [01:13:26] OWEN ANDERSON: Ecumenical.
  • [01:13:27] PERRY PERRAULT: When we got there, they changed our name. I got some programs and stuff. I have some information stuff if anybody's interested, but they called us Mime Troupe of America because they didn't like it just being Mime Troupe. We were Mime Troupe of America.
  • [01:13:44] PERRY PERRAULT: It wasn't mega?
  • [01:13:45] PERRY PERRAULT: No. Somebody talk for a minute while I looked that up.
  • [01:13:54] MICHAEL LEE: Well, I'll jump in there. The mid '90s is when we founded Opus Mime. That was my company that I started. I came full circle that when I auditioned to study with Mr. Marceau, and then I got to perform with Perry, he didn't mention that I followed him around for a couple of years and I was like a fly. I just wouldn't leave him alone. I said, are you going to teach again? I kept showing up and he finally just put me on a show. In 1995, I founded a company called Opus Mime here in Ann Arbor and then I started hiring him. One of the biggest shows we did was at Ann Arbor Civic Theater when it was down on Platt Road. I did a Passion play for a number of years. I worked on that. We had 24 actors playing 36 different characters. It was a full length Passion play that we did during the Lenten season. Should I tell them who you played? He was the greatest Judas. You always play your opposite. Because Perry is such a kind person. I don't just say that because he's sitting here, but he got to play some pretty powerful stuff. We did that for a number of years. We played that. We would actually go off to churches and other places around Michigan and actually in Illinois, also Chicago area. I would go ahead of time and train all these young actors and then Perry would come along and play his role also, and Rebecca played that with us, as well. The mid '90s or early '90s, into mid '90s, probably to 2000 was really a very, very busy time for me. I was performing in a lot of schools all over Ann Arbor, actually the Midwest. A lot of school assemblies at that time, but also what has always floated my boat is artist residencies when I worked mostly with high school students. That's just my favorite thing, of ever. Besides getting a tour bus, which I haven't gotten yet, but that's just really a lot of fun to do that stuff.
  • [01:15:54] PERRY PERRAULT: That was a blast. Michael really created some great pieces with these students from high schools and stuff. We're walking around the stage with briefcases and then, This, Uh... Body.
  • [01:16:05] MICHAEL LEE: That was one of our big pieces.
  • [01:16:07] PERRY PERRAULT: A guy dies in the street, and we're going back and forth, and then finally somebody notices him, and I don't really remember the rest of it.
  • [01:16:14] MICHAEL LEE: I can just fill in a little bit. I don't need to tell the whole piece, but this piece is called This, Uh... Body. I created this piece very small. It was just a small cast and it grew into a bigger thing. But it was based on an actual event that happened in Ann Arbor, near a sidewalk cafe, there were some people eating dinner. A guy walked along, had a heart attack, laid down and died. The story was that the people didn't interrupt their dinner. It's a very powerful piece. It's a dark comedy that we did about this, but it was this attitude of we don't always see each other. That's what the piece is based on. It actually has since gone to the International Thespian Festival and was performed by a troupe from Texas down there. Let's see. It's a 40-minute piece now with 18 actors in it. That was one of the pieces that we developed during the '90s as well.
  • [01:17:12] ELIZABETH SMITH: We have time for one more question. Let's go ahead and ask you what you think you see for the future of mime?
  • [01:17:22] MICHAEL LEE: You guys take that one. [LAUGHTER] Oh my goodness.
  • [01:17:29] MICHAEL LEE: Boy.
  • [01:17:29] MICHAEL LEE: I'm going to jump in. I'm good. Oh, boy.
  • [01:17:36] OWEN ANDERSON: AI mime.
  • [01:17:38] MICHAEL LEE: You're going to have to develop the AI. There is mime very active all over the world, and I honestly-- I don't mean to be too hard about this. But I stopped caring about making mime an international, wonderful art form. I stopped that because I realized there were so many factors. What O.J. has been talking about today is what's happening all over the world. Mime is really, really vibrant, and it's gone off into all of these directions where there's props and full length stage shows and everything. It's all mime. He calls us a purist, but mime is a vocabulary of the body to be dramatic, but it doesn't just have to stop at solo or a couple of artists on a stage with no props or anything like that. That's really what's happening all over the world right now. For me, I wasn't going to probably travel the world doing it, but I decided to just work on being the best artist that I could and creating a body of work that hopefully will be used in some way. I'm performing pieces that Perry and I created. We did that piece called Shadow Play that I'm still performing, by the way, the only piece Perry and I ever created, and he plays my shadow. We had so much fun because we never rehearsed until we had a gig. [LAUGHTER] And it was like starting over. We laughed. How's this go? We were so terrible at documenting this. If we tried it now, it would probably take us three hours to figure out the parts to it.
  • [01:19:21] OWEN ANDERSON: You steal things from Perry. Steal my fashion cop, so you're like a thief.
  • [01:19:26] MICHAEL LEE: Yes.
  • [01:19:26] MICHAEL LEE: You notice the theme here?
  • [01:19:27] OWEN ANDERSON: That's what I like about Mikey.
  • [01:19:28] MICHAEL LEE: These are my elders. I might as well steal from them. By the way, I wasn't sure I was going to tell you this. I stole O.J.'s car one time. Do you remember this?
  • [01:19:38] OWEN ANDERSON: Yeah, I remember. I did walk home.
  • [01:19:40] MICHAEL LEE: Yes, you did. I saw him talking to somebody on the street. He jumped out of his car, left the door open, and left the car running. I mean, what could happen? I just happened to be walking along.
  • [01:19:51] OWEN ANDERSON: You did. You weren't joking.
  • [01:19:52] MICHAEL LEE: I wasn't joking. It was down on First Avenue, and I jumped in, and took off.
  • [01:19:57] OWEN ANDERSON: That's good.
  • [01:19:58] MICHAEL LEE: I wasn't sure how soon I'd come back.
  • [01:20:00] OWEN ANDERSON: Never did see that wallet again.
  • [01:20:02] MICHAEL LEE: It was a Subaru. I do remember that.
  • [01:20:05] OWEN ANDERSON: That's all I drive.
  • [01:20:06] MICHAEL LEE: I did steal your car. I stole his material. I stole your fashion cop. Yes, I'm a thief.
  • [01:20:13] OWEN ANDERSON: Is this helping you at all in this game?
  • [01:20:14] ELIZABETH SMITH: Absolutely. We are going to turn the stage over once again for the final time to Michael. Thank you so much.
  • [01:20:23] PERRY PERRAULT: Set it up for something, let's just be real quick. He asked about the future of mime, and so that's all out there. That's all you watching that get inspired. But Michael said to bring some stuff. There's this good book called Movement for the Performing Artist.
  • [01:20:38] OWEN ANDERSON: A Mime Book by Claude Kipnis.
  • [01:20:45] OWEN ANDERSON: Then Every Little Movement, who's that by?
  • [01:20:50] OWEN ANDERSON: Here, hold this. I'm going to put the books back on the bag.
  • [01:20:52] MICHAEL LEE: Ted Shawn.
  • [01:20:53] MICHAEL LEE: Ted Shawn.
  • [01:20:54] PERRY PERRAULT: Then The Mime by Jean Dorcy. This is a good one.
  • [01:21:00] MICHAEL LEE: This is going to look like O.J.'s stage.
  • [01:21:05] MICHAEL LEE: How did I get two microphones? I'm sorry.
  • [01:21:09] PERRY PERRAULT: This one is Angna Enters on Mime. Very good books.
  • [01:21:12] MICHAEL LEE: I might want to steal that one.
  • [01:21:13] OWEN ANDERSON: Mikey hand me those books.
  • [01:21:14] MICHAEL LEE: I'm going to put this book over here. [LAUGHTER] Hold this for me. Catch me this. Sorry. I knew this would happen.
  • [01:21:26] PERRY PERRAULT: This one is just good one. It's all about the clowns.
  • [01:21:31] OWEN ANDERSON: Never read it.
  • [01:21:34] PERRY PERRAULT: This one we talked about Michael.
  • [01:21:36] MICHAEL LEE: Stefan.
  • [01:21:38] PERRY PERRAULT: Michael Niedziałkowski. [LAUGHTER] Stefan Niedziałkowski It's called Beyond the Word: the World of Mime.
  • [01:21:46] MICHAEL LEE: Can you Hold that one up, please. Stefan wrote this book while he was living in Ann Arbor and teaching here over three years. There are pictures in here from the original Performance Network. All of the photos in here were taken at the old factory building, which is now the Y. That's where the performance Network was, all the photographs. If you get a chance, take a look at this out here.
  • [01:22:08] OWEN ANDERSON: I hope didn't wear this on Main Street.
  • [01:22:11] MICHAEL LEE: I have that book also, and I just told my students recently to get it 'cause I found it like five years ago. It was like $3 at a used bookstore. My students went out to look for that book, $800 now. It's out of print. It's a very rare book, and it's a brilliant book.
  • [01:22:26] PERRY PERRAULT: I'm going to check my bag before I leave. [LAUGHTER] More proof. The last book I got here is called Mimes on Miming by Bari Rolfe. They'll be in my bag, if you want to get the names.
  • [01:22:41] MICHAEL LEE: If anybody wants to go out to dinner with me, I got O.J.'s card. [LAUGHTER]
  • [01:22:46] PERRY PERRAULT: Just carry that to my seat.
  • [01:22:47] OWEN ANDERSON: Alright Mikey, tear 'em up.
  • [01:22:51] MICHAEL LEE: Do you want this one back?
  • [01:22:52] PERRY PERRAULT: Yeah, Is this the the $800 one?
  • [01:22:56] MICHAEL LEE: No, that's the $600 one. That's the one I want.
  • [01:23:00] ELIZABETH SMITH: Everybody give a big round of applause to Perry and O.J. [APPLAUSE].
  • [01:23:14] MICHAEL LEE: Perry, do you want your phone back? Because that's way too easy.
  • [01:23:18] MICHAEL LEE: Everybody's going to think I'm a thief now. I'm a thief of hearts. I love these guys. You've been in my life for so long, and it's just so precious to be here with you. I've got to get this one ready. This takes a little props inspired by Owen. Let's see here. In 1996, I went to study in Copenhagen, Denmark, and one of the people I got to study with was a man named Dario Fo. You get extra points if you know who Dario Fo is. The Italian Red Skelton, you might say, only a very large man. He won the Nobel Prize for literature a couple of years after that. I was training with him, and you know, I'm actually not going to tell you that it might change the piece. He was a very talented man, and it was a pleasure to study with him, but he inspired what I'm about to show you now. But can we have the house lights up now, Jackie? I just need to check. Does anybody here speak Italian? To everyone else, I apologize for what's about to happen. Let's see. There you are. Thank you, sir, for volunteering. Come on up. Come on up here. Oh wait woah, no, I'm sorry. This is one of my students. I can't have you do this. No. Well, no, I don't know. You speak Italian anyway. Just French and Dutch. I was looking for him. There you are. That's right. Thank you so much for volunteering. Come on up with me. [LAUGHTER] You know what? He would probably be better. Come on up. What's your name?
  • [01:25:26] JACK ANDERSON: Jack.
  • [01:25:26] MICHAEL LEE: Jack, thank you so much for volunteering, Jack. Come on up [APPLAUSE]. Isn't this great? Jack, this is going to be so cool. You're going to be like a star in 100 years. See, you know what it is? This is being archived or videotaped, so people in 3020-- sometime in the future, people are going to be able to see this. You're going to be on it. This is cool. Jack, come on over here, and let's do a little check on that first.
  • [01:25:59] JACK ANDERSON: Check one two, one two, one two.
  • [01:26:01] MICHAEL LEE: Great. Wow, he's got a great voice, doesn't he? Cool. Jack, here's your costume. Let's put that on. [APPLAUSE]. You're killing 'em. You're slaying them already. Great. We get this ready. Look at this here. See, I'm going to do this stuff in between here, and you're going to do this stuff. Take a look at that.
  • [01:26:27] JACK ANDERSON: You're pink and I'm just normal? This is me.
  • [01:26:33] MICHAEL LEE: No, that's me.
  • [01:26:34] JACK ANDERSON: Great.
  • [01:26:35] MICHAEL LEE: See, this is Michael Lee. I'm Michael Lee.
  • [01:26:37] JACK ANDERSON: Wonderful. Thank you, Michael.
  • [01:26:43] MICHAEL LEE: Great. Hold on. Jack wait. [LAUGHTER].
  • [01:26:56] JACK ANDERSON: Perfect.
  • [01:27:04] JACK ANDERSON: Hello. My name is Jack. We had eyes.
  • [01:27:08] MICHAEL LEE: You see this part here. That's in highlight also.
  • [01:27:11] JACK ANDERSON: Okay. Perfect. Thank you, Michael.
  • [01:27:13] JACK ANDERSON: Thank you [LAUGHTER]
  • [01:27:18] JACK ANDERSON: [NOISE] The greatest pizza maker in the world. [LAUGHTER] Hello. My name is Jack Anderson. I'm a professional interpreter of the Italian language. Tonight, I will be interpreting for our special guest. Greetings. I'm Antonio Spagoloni the greatest pizza maker in the world.
  • [01:27:45] MICHAEL LEE: Spigeletoni.
  • [01:27:46] JACK ANDERSON: Spigeletoni.
  • [01:27:47] MICHAEL LEE: No, no, no Spigeletoni.
  • [01:27:56] MICHAEL LEE: Voila.
  • [01:27:56] JACK ANDERSON: Now, that my father has died.
  • [01:27:58] MICHAEL LEE: [CRYING] Perdono.
  • [01:28:02] JACK ANDERSON: Pardon me. My father, Antonio Spigeletoni was the greatest pizza maker in the world.
  • [01:28:17] JACK ANDERSON: He taught me everything I knew. He even taught me things I didn't know. [LAUGHTER] He had so much love for food, for life, and for my mother. [CRYING] Pardon me. Now, I will show you how to make the best pizza. Pay attention.
  • [01:29:11] JACK ANDERSON: First, [LAUGHTER] the dough we handle with care. [LAUGHTER]
  • [01:29:38] JACK ANDERSON: Caress it. Give it love.
  • [01:29:45] JACK ANDERSON: Give it more love. Kneading the dough.
  • [01:30:02] MICHAEL LEE: Voila!
  • [01:30:11] JACK ANDERSON: Love.
  • [01:30:17] JACK ANDERSON: Rolling the dough.
  • [01:30:28] JACK ANDERSON: Give it more love.
  • [01:30:32] JACK ANDERSON: Spinning and tossing.
  • [01:30:58] JACK ANDERSON: Pinching the edges.
  • [01:31:09] MICHAEL LEE: Amore. Amore.
  • [01:31:18] JACK ANDERSON: Sauce. Love. Love!
  • [01:31:25] MICHAEL LEE: Amore.
  • [01:31:25] JACK ANDERSON: Give it more love.
  • [01:31:26] JACK ANDERSON: Tomatoes, peppers, on--
  • [01:31:36] MICHAEL LEE: Sauce!
  • [01:31:38] JACK ANDERSON: Sauce. You're missing a couple lines here, Michael. Tomatoes, peppers, onions. Yes. Black olives, [LAUGHTER] green olives, pepperoni, mushrooms. Shrimp. Cheese. Pineapple.
  • [01:33:45] MICHAEL LEE: Voila!
  • [01:33:54] JACK ANDERSON: There we go cheese. [LAUGHTER]
  • [01:34:22] OWEN ANDERSON: Oven temperature and time.
  • [01:34:24] MICHAEL LEE: [LAUGHTER] [LAUGHTER] Waft the aromas.
  • [01:35:07] JACK ANDERSON: A waft of the aromas. [LAUGHTER]. Got it.
  • [01:35:09] MICHAEL LEE: [LAUGHTER]
  • [01:35:09] JACK ANDERSON: Cutting and sharing. Oh, thank you, [APPLAUSE] appreciate it. [APPLAUSE]. [OVERLAPPING].
  • [01:35:41] MICHAEL LEE: Do you know what happens when some performer comes out in the audience? You're going, pick him. You get picked. There are two pieces in my repertoire that I performed that I did not write. Regardless of what Owen said. [LAUGHTER]. This is what we call a traditional piece. Like in music, a traditional piece means we don't know who wrote it. There's this traditional piece I like to do with a balloon. There's a technique I kind of alluded to earlier. It's called fixed point. That's that thing where people touch a wall or pull a rope. There's a fixed point right there. I try to use that technique without being obvious about the wall. In the piece I did earlier of Remembrance, I was using it to walk with a cane like that. This is where we want to use a technique in a mime piece, not just to show off the technique. Like using the notes in a song instead of just playing the notes. This piece I learned it from a man named Robert Shields who, as far as I know, never came to Ann Arbor, but he had a TV show called Shields and Yarnell. In 1978, they were on TV in the summer. I learned this from him, and he probably learned it from somebody, and somebody learned it from somebody. I'm going to do it with a balloon, and I've seen this done with a bowling ball, and I've seen it done with a suitcase, and I've seen it done with many other types of props. But this is called The balloon. [MUSIC] [APPLAUSE]. [NOISE]. [APPLAUSE].
  • [01:43:13] ELIZABETH SMITH: Thank you all for coming today. I know we went a little bit over our time slot, so thank you all for sticking around for an extra 15 minutes. Let's all give another huge round of applause for Michael. [APPLAUSE]. [NOISE]. [APPLAUSE].
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Media

December 22, 2024

Length: 01:43:40

Copyright: Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)

Rights Held by: Ann Arbor District Library

Related Event: A History of Mime in Ann Arbor with Performances by Michael Lee

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Subjects
Mimes
Artworlds
University of Michigan
University of Michigan Mime Troupe
Magic Mountain Mime
Lydia Mendelssohn Theater
Michael Filisky Mimetroupe
Black Sheep Theater
Washtenaw Community College
Power Center for the Performing Arts
Capitol Market
The Ark
Ann Arbor Folk Festival
Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival
Hill Auditorium
Michigan Theater
Ann Arbor District Library
Washtenaw Council for the Arts
Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra
Ann Arbor Summer Festival
University of Michigan - Schorling Auditorium
Michigan Department of Commerce
Ann Arbor Silent Film Society
C. S. Mott Children's Hospital
Flint Institute of Arts
Ann Arbor Art Fairs
University of Detroit
The Second City
Ringling Brothers Circus
University of Michigan Musical Society
Spyro Gyra
Marcel Marceau World Centre for Mime
Domino's Farms
Ann Arbor Mime Works
Performance Network
Trueblood Auditorium
Frieze Building
Opus Mime
Friends Roadshow Circus
Ann Arbor Civic Theatre
International Thespian Festival
Ann Arbor
Drama
History
Live Performance
Local History
Michael Lee
Perry Perrault
O.J. Anderson
Michael Filisky
Charles Metcalf
Jim Fleming
Noonie Anderson
Marcel Marceau
Claude Kipnis
Stefan Niedzialkowski
Lynn Ayres
B. F. Skinner
Mark Jaster
Thomas G. Drotar
Anne Zald
Lisa Sanderson
Bill Cash
Kristen Vandenberg
Miriam Kaplan
Matthias Schubert
Anne Woelk
Cece Lobin
Kevin Skarritt
Larry Bean
Rick Cageao
Dianna Clark
Glenn Clark
Jeff Lupovitch
Mark Moverman
Beverly Sayed
Jesse Richards
Lisa Gottlieb-Clark
Gail Rector
B. B. King
Weird Al Yankovic [Alfred Matthew Yankovic]
Abbie Hoffman
Jerry Rubin
Anny Malla
Mark Anthony
Lou Jacobs
Brian Trim
Thomas Monaghan
Louis Belcher
Daniel Stein
Thomas Leabhart
Rebecca Surmont
Jango Edwards
Ted Shawn
Jean Dorcy
Angna Enters
Bari Rolfe
Dario Fo
Jack Anderson
Robert Shields
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