Tony Montanaro-Mime Legend.

 

Tony Montanaro died in 2002
He was one of the most imminent mime practitioners of the 20th Century.
He performed globally, had been taught by both Marcel Marceau and Etienne Decroux and founded his own performance training institution, the Celebration Barn Theatre in Maine, a theater and school of mime, improvisation, storytelling and other performing skills that to this day is a beating heart for performance creatives from the US and beyond.
He had a vast and deep performance background. I'd heard that at one point he'd been employed to work with Marlene Dietrich on her movement skills.
I can only presume her representative studio [Paramount Studios] paid him to cure her of her natural gait which had been perhaps akin to a drunken Clydesdale who constantly broke furniture on set.
It might be even be said that her famously poised and general clarity of movement could well have been a bandaid of Tony Montanaro's design.

With mime you have to remember the art itself is very philosophical, perhaps even more philosophical than it is physical.
As such it often attracts more than its fair share of metaphysical charlatans who tend to be bitter and brittle and poor and arrogant and acerbic.
Much like myself.  

I met him in 2000 and he gave me the greatest compliment.

It was at a festival of performance workshops held in Philadelphia called Motionfest.

I had been given free all inclusive admission because I was a known overseas mime and Americans are a warm and hospitable and generous tribe no matter what anyone might say. 
Honestly I wouldn't have gone otherwise, I'm the sort of performer who really can't admit to need to learn much from anybody.
Unless I'm having issues with my modem.
I was in my 40's and pretty much stylistically calcified.
Still, this was a Tony Montanaro mime workshop.
It was like meeting the Pope if the Pope could make things out of nothing! [.....hold on a minute?]
And I'd already worked with the Pope at an outdoor mass I'd crashed back in NZ in 86.

We were a group of 12, mainly youthful with a smattering of intermediates and seniors, tracksuits, sweat pants, casual gym attire except for me.

Tony Montanaro walked in, we all dutifully formed a half circle and he introduced himself.
It was part introduction, part soliloquy, part lament, part naked statement of fact.
He stated that this class would be a basic introduction to movement and personal expression.
He asked forgiveness, he was old and had been teaching rooms of enthusiastic young idealists for decades.
The decades had shown him that very very few of them progressed much past an intermediate stage. 
He confessed that years of teaching had taken it's toll and his enthusiasm for teaching itself was increasingly harder to maintain as for him it was rare to see anything in anyone he hadn't seen already and that ideally teaching itself should be a voyage of discovery.

Then he looked straight at me  and we locked eyes and he tilted his head and said.

"You're Interesting."

Ta DA!

Ah yes, the old Brooks brothers suit and 'Do I look like a fucking People Person?' T Shirt trick.
This photo was taken 5 minutes ago with the same combo I wore back a quarter century  past.