UMS Concert Program, July 7, 10 and 11, 1985: Ann Arbor Summer '85 Festival -- Marcel Marceau

Power Center For The Performing Arts, Ann Arbor, Michigan

lArbcn
nnnroor mmer ?
'stiM
THE UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
presents
Marcel Marceau
with JEAN LUC GALMICHE Two different programs:
Sunday, July 7, 1985, at 4:00 and 8:00 (Program I)
Wednesday and Thursday, July 10 and 11, 1985, at 8:00 (Program II)
Power Center for the Performing Arts, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Mr. Marceau will make his selections from the following: Style Pantomimes
Walking
Walking Against the Wind
The Staircase
The Tightrope Walker
The Public Garden
The Bill Poster
The Kite
The Sculptor
The Painter
The Cage
The Bureaucrats
The Hands
The Mirror
The Side Show
The Amusement Park
The Pickpocket's Nightmare
Remembrances
Contrasts
Memories of a Past Love
The Maskmaker
The Seven Deadly Sins
Cain and Abel
Youth, Maturity, Old Age and Death
The Tango Dancer
The Small Cafe
The Dice Players
The Four Seasons
The Dream
The Creation of the World
The Trial
The Angel
The Dress
The Tree
INTERMISSION Bip Pantomimes
Bip in the Subway
Bip Travels by Train
Bip Travels by Sea
Bip as a Skater
Bip Hunts Butterflies
Bip Plays David and Goliath
Bip Commits Suicide
Bip as a Soldier
Bip at a Society Party
Bip as a Street Musician
Bip as a China Salesman
Bip as a Fireman
Bip as a Bullfighter
Bip as a Baby Sitter
Bip as a Professor of Botany
Bip as a Lion Tamer
Bip Looks for a Job
Bip in the Modern and Future Life
Bip as an Illusionist
Bip as a Tailor in Love
Bip Dreams He Is Don Juan
Bip, Great Star of a Traveling Circus
Bip and the Dating Service
Bip as a Great Artist
Bip Remembers
Presentation of Cards by Jean Luc Galmiche
The Pantomimist Speaks . . .
The art of mime is the essenseof life in which humans, animals, and even objects are portrayed in their most secret and sacred yearning. The mime fixes his third eye on the heart of time, between light and shadow, between life and death; and with his silent outcry draws in that space a parable. The mime opens the eye of his blind brother to the ultimate light, deepening both our poetry and our imagination.
Since the beginnings of time, man has gone from redemption to malediction, from flight to fall, always in search of that sacred act or deed that would make him angel or god, devil or spirit, a lonely, ennobled traveler who dreamed of reaching the stars. Yet the further man went, the fur?ther that aim eluded him. Our destiny has escaped us, just as we thought it within reach.
Almost since the dawn of civilization, mime has helped illuminate this state of mind and these questions. Historically, the art of pantomime can be traced many centuries before Christ to the Hindu dancedrama bhdratanatya. In ancient China, complex conventions of gesture and movement were an integral part of theater, as they were in the dramatic narratives of Japan. Mime also flourished in both Greece and Rome, then wended its way through the traveling circuses of the Middle Ages, through the "dumb shows" of Elizabethan drama and into the 18thcentury commedia dell'arte, where the classic French Pierrot -a palefaced, moonstruck figure -was the partial source for my character Mr. Bip. The source of my inspiration was the great Etienne Decroux, who, along with Jean Louis Barrault, codified many gestures in the field of corporeal mime, pioneering this work during the 1930s.
It was after World War II that I became a disciple of Decroux's, eventually forming my own mime company. Because so little of mime is recorded in written scores, we had to create our own syntax and geometries -giving birth to a silent musicality in which the invisible became visible and the visible invisible. It was a world of metamorphosis. Miming the wind, I became the Tempest; miming fish, I threw myself into the Sea. I did not go toward the mountains; created, they came to me. Invisible walls became filled with concrete.
From the language of symbols I moved into satire to show that man struggled not only with a cosmic world but also with the inhibiting legacy of Victorian society. Using satire to illuminate human behavior, I created "trials," "bureaucracy," and "tyranny" to show man combating and conquering the hostile elements. In perhaps my most grandiose pantomime -"Youth, Maturity, Old Age, Death" -I attempted to show that life is a constant search for consciousness of self. Like so much of my work, it was an attempt to dramatize man's quest for the unreachable. Human?ity, through its endless wandering, has discovered that despite its vulnerability it remains a luminous point in space, a reflection in the immensity of time. This is the hope of man. This is the core of my theater.
And what of Mr. Bip -my alter ego who, like Chaplin's tramp, stands in constant combat with a tragiccomic world beset by violence and technology. Bip is a romantic figure, grandson of the great Pierrot, who himself inherited from the French Revolution a taste for freedom. Unlike the great comedians of American film and slapstick vaudeville, Bip lives in a silent world where theater has its own laws. There is a poetic austerity to mime, and Bip reflects this -a lonely figure surrounded by a thousand ghosts. His eyes are awake, but his heart is full of memories. I can still see Bip 33 years ago, standing beneath a gas lamp on a shabby street. I took him and placed him on a empty stage -then his adventures started. Sometimes he is pitiable and craves compassion. Other times, as a bullfighter at "the moment of truth," he is heroic in his defiance of violence. Betrayed by love, he attempts suicide or wanders through crazy cocktail parties. A fireman, he lights a cigar in the midst of a blazing inferno because, in his heart, Bip is beyond the realities of time and space. He is a poetic and vulnerable hero, propelled through life in search of a better world.
We must remember that mime reveals men in their deepest aspirations and shows them strug?gling in the turmoil of a deep, dark world. Our art is a vibrant outcry in that world. From the odyssey of theater, we learn that no art can flourish without passion. From mime, we learn that our quest is Wonder. Men, after all, have invented silent actions to cast a light into the mysteries of life.
Marcel Marceau
A glimpse of Marceau the artist -we invite you to view The Third Eye, a collection of ten lithographs with the artist's own accompanying texts, on display this evening in the Green Room (off the lobby) during intermission.