A MORCEAU MORE OF MARCEAU.

In Broadway's My Fair Lady, that master lyricist Alan Jay Lerner posed the highly pertinent Shavian question: "Why don't the English teach their children how to speak?" Now perhaps I might ask a rather similar and, I think, equally pertinent question: "Why doesn't the dance world teach its children how to act?" After all, most actors learn something--occasionally quite a lot--about dancing, but acting or, more specifically, mime is in the curricula of extraordinarily few dance schools. And it shows.

Recently I saw a talented, internationally renowned young dancer making his debut in one of the standard ballet classics. He possesses all the qualifies, and, immaculately coached, he was making all the right moves. All except one. His acting was deplorable, wooden, unconvincing--inept. It simply dragged down the performance from a portrayal to a display. Now, by chance, the same week as this performance I went along to the Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse in New York to see Marcel Marceau perform his mime act, with the same impeccable style and precision that has been his for more than half a century. The seventy-six-year-old Marceau was communicating to the heart in a fashion that the young, brilliant, but inexpressive premier danseur, with all his qualities, simply was not.

Mime--classic mime of the Marceau variety--and dance are allied arts. Can dance learn from the art of mime? Need it? Should it? It is not an open-and-shut case. Marceau's mime has been influenced not simply by the classic mime of Jean-Gaspard Deburau, as realized by his teacher, Etienne Decroux, and Decroux's improvisatory collaborator, actor Jean-Louis Barrault, but also by the great silent cinema pantomimists such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon. Their art, in mm, owed something to that peculiarly English version of the commedia dell'arte tradition, itself a clownish development of that same medieval dumb-show immortalized in Hamlet and characterized by the first great English-born clown from the early nineteenth century, Joey Grimaldi.

But Marceau, in our time, remains the supremely eloquent voice of silence and poet of gesture. He has been before the public for more than fifty years now. I first saw him in London in 1952. Has he changed? Less than you might have imagined. Perhaps he has mellowed a little, yet his technique seems undiminished, his spirit unquenched, and his fantastic, sometimes grotesque, imagination unscathed. The art of mime--which he, more than anyone else, has brought out of the cold storage of history into the living tradition of twentieth-century theater--is partly the art of the impossible.

It is illusion without props, it is imaginary morphing, and special effects so special that they take place in the mind of the onlooker, making the invisible visible, creating an intangible world in which a silently expressive man bares his soul, makes us laugh, and makes us cry. Marceau's sketches are often little plays within themselves--almost like pictures where he drops small dots of drama, leaving the audience to assist by joining those dots in its own imagination and seeing the playlet itself emerge.

Much of Marceau's recent New York presentation was new to us, but probably the deepest impression was still left by two classics that, if I remember correctly, have been present since I first saw him. Here once more was his brief poem of man's life journey: Youth, Maturity, Old Age, and Death, a tiny gem of an acting arc, seamless and perfect, set to a fragment of Pachelbel's now-hackneyed canon, the elegiac ordinariness of which adds to its sense of Everyman, his hollow triumph and empty fate.

And finally there was Marceau's great image--his sad tribute to all clowns from Grock and Chaplin to Danny Kaye and Red Skelton--The Maskmaker. Here a man plays with the masks he makes, alternating in grimaces between comedy and tragedy. Brilliant, you think--but suddenly our clown cannot remove the comic mask. His face is contorted in the rictus of a ghastly grin--he straggles, he strives, he cries. But nothing, it seems, will remove this now-travesty of dead humor--until at last he manages to peel it off, showing the frightened clown beneath. This is genius. This is Marceau. But can such brilliantly mannered stylization be absorbed into the very different movement texture of dance?

There is an enormous difference between the impressionistic imagery of Marceau and the sign-language mime of nineteenth-century ballet or the more naturalistic dance-acting required in the Fokine and post-Fokine ballet of the twentieth century. But a study of Marceau or the technique of his teacher Decroux, or perhaps the more experimental methodology of the younger Jacques Lecoq, could surely prove of enormous value to the student dancer. In part, it is the acquisition of belief--the sheer confidence that acting without the finite parameters suggested by verbal communication can, even in the telling power of its necessary ambiguity, be a potent stage expression.

Ballet acting has enormous possibilities--yes, even that sign language developed by the nineteenth century, which can seem so mechanical, artificial, and often impenetrably unintelligible. Some of that mime is not unlike the signing used by the deaf with such accuracy and charm--the gesture for "I love you" is not precisely difficult to comprehend. Admittedly, we are in rather more treacherous terrain for communication when we get to Odette telling Siegfried, "You--see--the lake. The lake was formed from my mother's tears."

Yet, I well recall--not long before I encountered Marceau--watching the great Maryinsky ballerina Tamara Karsavina, who was sixty-five years old at the time, give a fantastic lecture-demonstration on ballet mime. This included a long mime excerpt from Le Corsaire, now, of course, irretrievably lost, that was startling in both the sheer beauty of its execution (it was absolutely lovely in itself) and the vividly articulate nature of its narrative. Yes, she told us the story first--something I suppose one could read in a program note--but after that initial hint, everything was crystal clear.

Mime in dance, whether it is formal sign-language stuff, simple, naturalistic gesture, or even--as in the Danish classics--an adroit merging of the two, can be not only totally meaningful but also extraordinarily beautiful in every sense. It is simply the skill with which it is executed, and the conviction with which it is done. So why, why, oh why, doesn't the dance world teach its children how to act?

Senior editor Clive Barnes, covers dance and theater for the New York Post, has contributed to Dance Magazine since 1958.