Marcel Marceau speaks (Yes!).

To some people, mime and poetry lie in the outer boroughs of art along with such obscure practices as throat singing. Some folks also think that, in reaction to a technologically oriented art world, mime may acquire new respect in the twenty-first century. Marcel Marceau, the French mime who completed his final U.S. tour as a solo performer in April, would love nothing better |hair to see his art form finally get its due. While Marceau's solo career as fire gentle, often hapless clown may be coming to an end, the master of wordless theater is turning his efforts to Iris Paris school to ensure that mine flourishes in the new century.

Best known for his character Bip, a diminutive figure in whiteface, a French sailor shirt, flared pants, and a tattered top hat adorned with a spindly flower, Marceau pioneered a new variant of mime that broke away from the French "classical," or abstract, mime style of Etienne Decroux. Marceau's style of mime, shaped by the artist's love of silent films and vaudeville characters, is frequently described by its advocate as "mimodrama," dramas of the invisible made visible.

"Bip is like a Don Quixote who struggles with the windmills of our time," said Marceau in a phone conversation. Formally, his style of movement revels in wisps of narrative structure that unveil everything from the poetic cycles of life to precise characterizations of human types, "whether it be the oaf, the fighter, the lover, or the unlucky dreamer."

At 80, Marceau is still able to molt from joyful to tragic to droll in the blink of an eye, and he insists that it is only his relentless life of solo concertizing that is over. In fact, be says, he will never stop performing. "How could it be otherwise?" he asked.

Offstage, Marceau is an elfin figure with curling sandy hair, a look of chiseled sweetness, and a formidable air of control, which in earring years he will apply toward his troupe, Compagnie de Mime Marcel Marceau, and school, L'Ecole internationale de mimedrame de Paris. Launched in 1978 at the insistence of then-Paris mayor and later French President Jacques Chirac, the school currently has forty students who enroll for a two-year period. Some, like Italian born Sara Mangano, a former dancer, and Frenchman Pierre-Yves Massip, an erstwhile circus clown, become part of the company. Both accompanied Marceau on this tour.

At the school, students undertake Marceau mime, or theatrical mime, as well as the classical mime technique of Decroux described by Marceau as the "art of mobile statuary." They also take acting, ballet, acrobatics, fencing, and modern dance. The mission of the school, says Marceau, is not only to preserve Marceau mime but to shape a new silent drama for the coming era from a synthesis of wideranging kinetic and dramatic forms.

According to Mangano and Massip, those forms include Cirque Nouveau and contact improvisation. "We have to all create ourselves," Mangano explained after the performance, referring not only to each individual's mime persona but the material used in the process. "The root is the Marcel Marceau style, but we put in the Decroux style, and then the dance."

Born Marcel Mangel in 1923, Marceau and his brother took the name of famed French Revolutionary General Marceau and dropped their Jewish surname after France fell to the Germans. His physical genius was early put to skillful use when he rescued young Jews by leading a large group of children into the Swiss Alps, pretending to be a Boy Scout leader on a mountain excursion.

Marceau's greatest hope for his legacy, however, is not that he be recalled for the heroism of his youth, but that Ire leave behind a grammar of mime for future generations. "When yon don't leave a grammar," he said, "then the art dies."