Gregg Goldston
In 1975, Mr. Goldston saw a performance by Marcel Marceau and immediately set upon a lifelong pursuit of the art of mime. He started training with Richmond Shepard, Moni Yakim, Stefan Neidzialkowki, and extensively with his idol, Mr. Marceau became a mentor, a close friend, and served as Artistic Advisor to the Goldston Mime Foundation. Mr. Goldston performed as Marceau’s assistant on his 2000-2002 U.S. tours, and took on lead roles with Mr. Marceau’s Nouvelle Compagnie De Mimodrame during its 5-week run at the American Repertoire Theatre of Harvard. For over 35 years, Mr. Goldston has toured his solo performance, uniquely imbued with ballet and modern dance, across the U.S., Asia, and Europe. He has also created a touring 7-member company, “The Invisible People,”and a Manhattan-based trio, “The Funny Bones.”He has presented his work off-Broadway, in various New York venues, including The Lincoln Center Institute, Lincoln Center’s “Meet the Artist”program, New York Theatre Workshop, and The Urban Stages program. Mr. Goldston has appeared on “The Daily Show,” “Law & Order,” “PBS online,” “The Early Show,” and created projects for General Motors, Van Cleef & Arpels and F.A.O. Schwarz at their flagship store where Mr. Goldston created the memorable character, The Mechanical Man. In 1980, he established The Goldston School for Mimes, hosting five seminars in collaboration with Mr. Marceau, and continues as The School for Mime Theatre, in Ohio. Creator and co-artistic director of The School of Modern Mime, an annual summer intensive in Warsaw, Poland. He developed BalletMime, a new vocabulary of ballet mime acting, which premiered on BalletMet’s “Romeo & Juliet.” He taught an American Ballet Theatre Summer Intensive 2006, and as a mime coach, worked with Anne Hathaway in “Ella Enchanted,” and Julie Harris. Mr. Goldston coaches privately, and teaches mime classes for actors, comedians, dancers and mimes. He also creates pen-and-ink drawings, and bronze and steel sculptures. Mr. Goldston is a recipient of two N.E.A. choreography fellowships. www.goldmime.com
What led you into the world of mime?
I grew up in Los Angeles, where my father was a carpenter. In high school, I was an A-student in industrial arts, which led me from drafting and metal shop into sculpture. I fell into a sketch improv group that my friend created and when he heard that Marceau was coming to town, he said, “You’ve got to see him.” When I went to the show, I could see the invisible appear in front of me as if I could touch it. I was eighteen and this was the first time I had ever been in a real theatre. I was not raised in an artistic environment; in fact, the most creative thing I remember in our house was the Elvis Christmas album.
How were you drawn to become a mime artist?
Like so many others in this art, it was Marceau. After seeing him, I took my first mime classes with Richmond Shepard. He was the first mime in America, who taught people like Sheilds & Yarnell and Lily Tomlin. After a few months with Richmond, I moved to Salt Lake City because a friend there encouraged me to come. Salt Lake was very supportive of mime at that time, because the city loved dance. It was really a city of dance – the very best modern dancers were teaching there and there was a mime group in town. A choreographer named Joan Woodbury had a big influence on me, and mentored me during my early career. Within a few years, I had created a two-hour solo mime-show and began touring the western states.
Is that when you met Marceau?
I first saw him perform in the fall of ’75 in Los Angeles – the show I saw when I was 18. Marceau was my first introduction to mime; he was doing 300 shows a year. It took me ten years before I ever met him, though I tried to meet him every year he came to the USA. Once, I actually had a birthday cake made for him designed like his Bip Hat...to no avail. When I finally met him in ’85, I was in Berkeley where he was performing. I went backstage, and when we saw each other, we locked eyes immediately. After a short talk, he invited me to come and meet him in Ann Arbor where he was holding a summer workshop. We bonded quickly in that one week. The following summer, I invited him to teach a two-week seminar, which I hosted as a part of my School for Mimes. We shared a very close relationship for twenty-one years, until he passed away. Marceau would often say he was like my older brother.
Mime has been around a very long time.
It can be traced back to the Greek and Roman amphitheaters. What we know of as mime today, was created in the 1940’s. Even Marceau perpetuated the “oldest art” rumor, but there is truth to it. If we say that there were mimes in ancient Greek and Roman times, it makes you think that they were “doing the wall.”
Modern mime began with a French man named Etienne Decroux. He created it with Jean Louis Barrault, and was later joined by Marcel Marceau. Once Gordon Craig discovered Decroux, everyone said that this had never existed before – the rearrangement of attitude, gesture and movement. Decroux really created what we now call modern mime.
Chaplin used a lot of mimetic elements in his work, but Chaplin was not a pure mime – we call him a mime of film. At first glance, one would think the biggest invention of modern mime was the invisible world (like the wall or the rope) but what modern mime truly gave us is the grammar to show the non-verbal thought process.
What made Marcel Marceau a great mime artist?
The logical answer is that I think he had a mind in the genius realm, like an Einstein. The amount of information he could absorb was stunning to all of us – about painting, art, history, politics. Insanely gifted, he could speak five or six languages. He loved telling jokes, to invent stories after dinner. He also loved to play chess; he prided himself on the fact that he once played with Bobbie Fischer. His interest in the world, in different cultures, in humanity and humor all made him a great artist.
What drove him to create as an artist?
During World War II, Marcel Marceau was sixteen, and living in France when the Germans invaded. Marceau’s family was Jewish and his older brother, Alain, was very important in the French underground. The Germans captured Marceau’s father and tortured him to death, trying to get him to reveal the location of Alain. Alain was actually hiding with Marceau in a basement, along with other Jewish children. His brother believed Marceau had great talent. “Someday,” he would say to Marceau, “You will be an important man in the theatre.” This obviously had a big impact on Marceau – on his commitment and devotion.
You have a very special relationship with Poland, having appeared annually at the Warsaw Mime Festival.
In 2000, I was invited to perform at the first year of the International Mime Art Festival in Warsaw; that was my first real visit. It was as if I was adopted by them. They brought me back for a solo show in 2001, 2003 and then in 2005. In 2005 I began teaching mini-workshops during the Festival. These became so popular that I created a Summer Intensive there in 2008. It is fashioned after the School for Mimes I created in Ohio. In Poland, I teach with Bartlomiej Ostapczuk, the Artistic Director of the Mime Art Festival as well as Founder of the Mimo Theatre at “Teatr Na Woli.”
Like France, Poland has been one of the most influential countries in the development of modern mime, like Henryk Tomaszewski. He was one of the most famous ballet dancers in Poland. But as with a lot of dancers, he wanted to do more and had a vision to start something new that was physically-based. In Wroclaw, Breslau, a cultural city (actually the same town where Grotowski came from), Tomaszewski began to invent very large mime works.
What is your preparation as a mime artist?
If you took ballet and you listed all the techniques you need, and you put mime next to it, they would be very close. And then you would add acting technique as part of mime as well.
What interests me about mime is the insane amount of choreography needed to make it successful. There is a lot of mechanical reasoning involved. For example, if you turn at a certain speed, the audience will feel one thing; if you turn at a different speed, they will feel something else. Mime is about emotion and thought, about the experience. We often say, the difference between dance and mime is this: Dance is about “Watch this.” Mime is about “Feel this.”
A mime is an illusionist, but not of an illusionary world. We are illusionists of time, of what happens now. We exploit time for two ultimate reasons: because we want the audience to see and feel every thought – and we want to create a work of art that is out of real time. Mime is “off the clock.”
What gives you the greatest satisfaction creating mime?
When I’m involved in creating or performing, it’s mesmerizing. I fall in love with both the universality of the concepts we communicate through our plays and the microscopic universe we present. Mime has the power to transcend culture, age, and boundaries of all kinds. It allows us to touch the human heart in ways that words cannot. As a performer, I strive to create the moment when the audience is laughing and crying at the same time. And, as I often say about those moments, when the audience is transfixed, mime is the loudest silence you will ever hear.
