Mime

Preparing for his ride down the mountain, the skier adjusted his goggles, planted his poles and pushed off with a comical flair to start a descent marked by silent silliness. Slipping and sliding through his routine, the skier demonstrated the grace of a dancer and the timing of a veteran comic. The skier, complete with face paint, was mime Alan Schonberger, a former competitive skier known as "Marcel Marceau on Skis. " Schonberger was one of the main attractions for the 12,000 people who attended the fourth annual Ski and Travel Show, held Oct. 28-30 at the Valley Forge Convention Center.

Bill Carwile speaks volumes but says nothing. Thin and curly-haired, the mime artist paints his face chalk-white and his lips rosy red and bends, twists and gestures with a body as flexible as Spandex. Bill Carwile tells stories without words because he is deaf. And yesterday, the students at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, on School House Lane near Greene Street, Germantown, laughed and giggled and mimed right along with Carwile, a professional who has studied in France with the famed Marcel Marceau.

"Everything is mixed up; everything is mingling. Everything moves," says Jacques LeCoq - referring perhaps to the transatlantic flight that he'd just made from Paris to Philadelphia, but more likely to a rapidly proliferating form of theater based on the expressive powers of the human body. If there is a prime mover behind the new mime movement, it is probably the speaker himself. Through his teaching at his Ecole Jacques LeCoq, founded in Paris 30 years ago, this former physical education teacher, physical therapist, actor and director has influenced actors, writers, dancers - even an architect or two - by turning their minds back toward their own bodies.

If the mime festival under way in Philadelphia has proven anything definitive since it began two weeks ago, it's that mime - or "movement theater" as its practitioners like to call it - eludes categorization. Yesterday afternoon at the Harold Prince Theater at the Annenberg Center, Daniel Stein presented a metaphorical play. However, it had no text. On the same program Thomas Leabhart presented a piece that had tomes of narration. Yet his piece was similar to any number of post-Merce Cunningham dances one is likely to see in New York City's loft scene.

The International Mime and Clown Festival here last month presented 10 attractions in 38 public performances. This was not only a prodigious exercise in impresarioship, but a rare opportunity to become acquainted with developments in a different kind of theater. Public response was feeble. Attendance at the shows averaged only 45 percent, according to Michael Pedretti, director of the sponsoring Movement Theater International (MTI). Two performances (by the Israeli Tmu-Na troupe)

What has four wheels and flies . . . and juggles, and moves like a pine tree when not moving like an aspen, and wears baggy pants, and recites Shakespeare in pidgin Japanese, and asks the audience for a rubber band so that he can attach his red nose to his regular nose, and looks exactly as you and I would look if approaching a tightrope for the first time or leaving a beloved for the last time, and honks a horn, and nails his foot to the wall to...

We've been laboring under an illusion about mime, say proponents of the form. Because most Americans have been exposed only to the white-faced pantomime of the French master Marcel Marceau - and the many less-talented Marceau imitators who sprang up following his U.S tours of the '50s - we have a limited conception of mime. Most of us have thought of the mime only as that cute little fellow who engages us in a silent guessing game, in which we try to divine what action he's imitating.

Blowing a white kazoo, mime artist Laura Bertin jumped out onto the stage at Devon Elementary School and tried to "talk" to the students - but she kept tripping over an imaginary object on the stage. The children laughed as Bertin, dressed in a black and white shirt, black pants held up with red, yellow and blue suspenders and a red hat with a blue plastic horn, continued to fall over the object, eventually using illusion to move it. "Mimes imitate stories from real life. When you do mime, you can do funny things like walk and climb . . . you create an illusion.

In Poet in New York, the surrealist artist Salvador Dali tells Federico Garcia Lorca that an artist has to give people something they haven't seen before - which is just what the Pig Iron Theatre Company does with its show. The piece at the Mum Puppettheatre in Manayunk is a one-man presentation, but this imaginative, fascinating work is unlike any other solo show. By employing mime and movement and the risky gambit of having the single actor take both sides of a conversation, this piece transforms the hidebound solo form of an actor playing a character, talking to the audience about himself, into an exciting, absorbing hybrid of the one-person presentation and the multicharacter, multiscene traditional play.

If any of the five performers in the Beau Jest Moving Theater is over the age of, say, 28 1/2, it would be extremely hard to guess who. It's not just that the two men and three women look young. They also act that way. They are all energy and playfulness, and they plainly have an utterly unselfish desire to entertain us. The program they brought to the Painted Bride Art Center last night is the latest in the series of attractions of the Mime and Clown Festival, organized here for the first time this year by Movement Theater International, which is dedicated to the spread of this different form of theater.

CLEARLY, CIRQUE du Soleil's "Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour" is a major undertaking - a loud and lavish, multimedia celebration of the "King of Pop" boasting a budget in excess of $50 million, a cast and crew numbering 220. As an arena rock concert spectacle - how creators view it - the production dwarfs Madonna and Lady Gaga's wildest touring fantasies. Planned to circle the globe for more than three years, the thing's loaded to the gills with lavishly costumed dancers and daredevil acrobatic acts, a 12-piece band, high-tech video screens, fanciful props and in-your-face pyrotechnic explosions.

Students were leaping, lurching, swatting, and generally creating chaos on the stage of Cherry Hill East's cafeteria on a recent evening - all in the name of one of theater's oldest and most celebrated crafts: pantomime. East's pantomime group - the only one in the state - is celebrating its 30th anniversary. The company recently strutted its stuff at an ice cream social before an appreciative audience of family members, fellow students and fans. "It all began when two girls approached me 31 years ago in the spring and suggested a mime company be launched the following school year," said Tom Weaver, speech and theater teacher and the director/technical director for East's theater program.

As love songs to cities go, Paris, Je T'Aime is a little flat. A compendium of 18 shorts by 21 directors (a few working in tandem), with episodes set in different quarters of the City of Light, this innately rambling affair has its moments, and visitors who've wandered France's capital - and fantasized about living there - will find things to enjoy. But mimes, please! And vampires, give me a break! Yes, "Tour Eiffel," from The Triplets of Belleville's Sylvain Chomet, offers an unabashed - and unironic - piece of wordless Gallic gesticulation, about a monsieur and mademoiselle mime who meet cute - in jail.

He sat in the shadowy auditorium of Rancocas Valley Regional High School, a slight man with a lined face and dancer's build, a beaky nose, hair like black feathers, and dark clothes, watching intently. And then Yass Hakoshima, world-renowned mime, came alive, lurching forward in his seat, his voice echoing through the cavernous room. "You are MONSTERS!" he commanded in a fierce voice, transforming 20 teenagers into beasts, clawing at the air, roaring without sound, writhing on the stage.

Even though Tuesday dates from the early 1970s, the Amaryllis Theatre Company production at the Prince Music Theater is the first in Philadelphia, and it's a case of much better late than never. This is a marvelous piece of movement theater, and the production directed by Stephen Patrick Smith is superb. This strongly narrative, artfully choreographed, wordless piece by the highly regarded artist and teacher Jewel Walker is difficult to classify. I call it movement theater, but a dance critic might rightfully view it as dance, and a mime critic (if such an animal exists)

Uh-oh. There's a mime artist in this week's concerts by Piffaro, the Renaissance band, which expanded its ranks for an elaborate staging of "The Holly and the Ivy: A Midwinter Feast of Fools. " For those of us who suffer cuteness overload at the sight of mimes, apprehension was warranted Thursday at the Trinity Center for Urban Life. More perilous, the concert presented a pagan pageant that personifies holly, a symbol of wintertime fertility, and ivy, a healer of many ills. Such things can easily resemble a theme park show at a Renaissance fair.

Breann Mason, 14, curled up on the floor in a fetal position in the middle of the high school auditorium. She rolled her tiny blue-jean-and-T-shirt-clad body right, then left, while mouthing, "One, two, three, four, roll. One, two, three, four, roll. " "OK, two count: one-two, one-two," instructor Yass Hakoshima said, quickening the pace as he stood over Mason and 29 classmates struggling to keep time - a feat that had some of them knocking knees and elbows and breaking out in giggles.

"Eternity Ahead," reads the sticker stretched across street preacher Mime Clark's front door. And behind the door, inside her Hunting Park rowhouse, Clark apparently found that eternity, police said, after they discovered her body and the body of another woman badly decomposed yesterday. Clark, 62, a well-known street missionary to City Hall passers-by and subway riders, had been dead possibly since Christmas, authorities said. The other woman - a boarder who police didn't identify - had been dead for at least six weeks, authorities said.

From dawn to dusk, Mime Clark stood on the traffic island outside City Hall and called passersby to God. "We really called her the evangelist - Mime the evangelist," said the Rev. Joseph Stafford, her brother-in-law and the pastor of the Heavenly Hall Gospel Temple in West Philadelphia. "She was always helping folks," Mr. Stafford said. Clark, a fiery street preacher who wore a sandwich board and barked biblical messages for 18 years in East Penn Square, and a female boarder, Wonza Thomas, 50, were found dead yesterday in Clark's Hunting Park home.