Last full day in Utah this vacation -- I'll be flying to Missoula, Montana for Elton John's concert tomorrow. (NOTE: Somehow I overwrote my entry for Wednesday with Thursday's musings. I will blog in real time after I return to Montana.)

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from -- Well, the same places they came from yesterday. Saint Peters, Missouri; Darlington, UK; Emeryville, California; Woodbridge, New Jersey; Brighton, UK; Si Dua Besar, Malaysia.


Speaking of yesterday, here's a snapshot of the Autumn foliage in North Ogden Canyon about 11 AM -- photo by Gary Gentry.

Remembering my friend George-O at: Theater X-Net

Starring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Ida's Places in Paris -- from my first jet-lagged day by the Seine.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley

Visit: Michael's Montana Web Archive
Theater, Art, Flash Gordon, Funky Music and MORE!
Spitfires of the Spaceways
Wilma Deering & Dale Arden to the rescue; Bodacious Princess Aura I; Hapless Aura II; The fiery Emperor Ming; The Orson Welles Rumor Debunked; and BOTH incarnations of Jean Rogers!





Thanks to Jim Keefe (Visit his Website) -- the LAST Flash Gordon illustrator of the 20th Century, and Flash's first illustrator of the 21st, for his recommendations -- HERE!

Charity Alert: Make a Resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day. Also check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site.

In The Community: Visit the Hockaday Museum of Art in Kalispell, Montana if you are up there.

Theater/Theatre: Another theatrical giant passed away this week -- Marcel Marceau combined Deburau's theatrical character of "Pierrot" with Chaplin's cinematic "Little Tramp" after WWII into a new creation he named "Bip." Marceau was a magnificently trained actor with a double-jointed body who could make an audience crack up for two hours without saying a word. Among the curiosities of his long career was a speaking part in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie, and a record album entitled The Best of Marcel Marceau, where each side is silent for about 15 minutes, followed by live clapping in a theater. The great sequential/comics artist Alejandro Jodorosky worked with him in the 60's.


L) A sketch by the late Al Hirschfeld. (R) Marceau himself onstage. (Images re-digitized from a YouTube Video.)
The best way of honoring Marceau and the craft of silent acting was to avoid imitating his moves and his scenarios, and revise your own stuff if you found similarities, no matter how logical or inadvertent they might have been. Unfortunately, he became unfairly identified with the plethora of less-talented imitators who followed his success. His teacher Étienne Decroux was famous as well, but the latter's stringent ideals of Corporeal Mime were ignored by hundreds of would-be Marceau clones who made the word Mime a laughingstock, or a synonym for obnoxious, under-trained street performers, hiding behind whiteface.
My theater company met some nice people playing that imitation game who were disciplined and charismatic, but the public eventually turned away from them too. There are great original silent actors and mimetic dancers in the US and Europe -- just follow some of my links in the margin. Some of Decroux's concepts are carried on by the Dell'Arte School and disciples of Jacques Le Coq -- you'll find them embedded in the works of successful contemporary organizations like Blue Man and Cirque De Soleil.