Searching for Marceau finds a budding young Mime trying to make sense of his two fathers: the real one raising him and the far away Marcel Marceau. The imaginary and the real battle in this theatre/mime piece reinvents Marcel Marceau’s Mime tradition for the 21st Century.
This piece has toured to Ottawa's Undercurrent Festival, Kitchener's Registry Theatre, Toronto's Pia Bouman studio, the LIVELab at McMaster University, the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts, Red Deer Alberta's Prime Stock Theatre, the Royal Botanical Gardens, and the Toronto Fringe Festival where it received 5 Ns from NOW Magazine, 3/4 stars from the Toronto Star, and the 'Cutting Edge' Award.
Join us Saturday Nov 22nd and Sunday Nov 23rd for 7:30pm performances and a specialized workshop on Sunday at 2:30pm (only 20 spots available!).
Mime Piece/Text/Performance by Trevor Copp
Directed by: Richard Beaune* (with Robin Patterson, workshop director)
DIRECTOR’S NOTES
Searching for Marceau is the story of a young artist finding his own voice. The piece has undergone its own journey of discovery in order to find its own voice, too. In its earlier forms, Air (as it was then called) had no text and no narrative.
Trevor Copp, like the artist in our invented story, is not easily satisfied, and his constant reworking and questioning of his own work led to an unthinkable choice: the mime would speak! Under Robin’s direction, Trevor was able to reshape the work pretty significantly and the story began to cascade from Trevor’s creative imagination (and based on stories frim his own life; I’ll leave you to guess which are which) and he wrote a script. A script for a mime theatre piece will hopefully seem like an obvious choice once you see it, but it was a great surprise to me. When I rejoined the project it was in a shape very close to what you see today, but the history of its transformations remains a theme deep within the piece itself. We hope that it can inspire other voices and more transformations as it continues to reverberate through its growing audiences.
* “The participation of this Artist is (these Artists are) arranged by permission of Canadian Actors’ Equity Association under the provisions of the Dance Opera Theatre Policy (DOT).”