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So brace yourself for this revelation from Rob Mermin, who studied mime with the 20th-century master of the art almost 50 years ago on the way to founding Circus Smirkus.
“Once you got him speaking,” Mermin recalled last week, “it was hard to get him to stop, offstage.”
This weekend on the stage of the Eclipse Grange Theatre on Thetford Hill, Mermin will extol the virtues of performing in silence, drawing on his years as a mime and a circus clown, his encyclopedic knowledge of silent film — and, at some length, his voice.
“He’s really a great raconteur,” longtime Parish Players member Dean Whitlock, of Thetford, said this week. “He tells wonderful stories, and knows how to play an audience.”
With his presentation, “Silents Are Golden,” Mermin on Friday night will show clips from some 100 silent films to trace the evolution of the art form from its roots in mime and vaudeville to the big screen, comparing the styles and methods that stars of the silent era employed to convey emotions and tell stories.
And on Saturday night, he’ll present “Adventures in Mime & Space: The Legacy of Marcel Marceau.”
He started sharing his knowledge of the two art forms with theater groups, schools and adult-education programs in 2007, after retiring from Circus Smirkus. Not long after he relocated from the Northeast Kingdom to Montpelier that year, organizers of the Green Mountain Film Festival asked him to host a program on silent film.
“They were thinking Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the comedians, and I said, ‘I’ll do the program if you let me dig a bit deeper,’” Mermin recalled. “I had never seen much of the dramatic work of Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolf Valentino, but luckily they were just starting to come out on DVDs that you could rent.”
For four winter months leading up to the festival, Mermin sequestered himself from current television and modern film.
“I just watched one silent film a night,” he said. “It was a remarkable experience. It brought me into a new respect for the genre. They really shed new light for me on how the acting style of the era developed from histrionic gestures to sophisticated physical expression.”
Mermin knew how to let his body do the talking even before he studied mime at Marceau’s school in France, between his junior and senior years at Lake Forest College in Illinois.
“I met Rob in what was basically the Acting 101 class for freshmen,” Whitlock recalled. “We did a joint project in which I did a speech by El Gallo from The Fantasticks and he played the part of The Mute. A very expressive mute.”
Mermin’s year with Marceau inspired him to create his own major, culminating in a senior thesis that featured a mime routine on “how to walk through a wall,” Whitlock said.
Mermin turned the skills he’d learned, both from Marceau and from performing as a silent clown with circuses in Europe, into a career that culminated — or so he thought — in his founding of Circus Smirkus in 1987. At several venues in the Northeast Kingdom, he spent the next two decades building a program that every summer trains dozens of teenagers — usually including several from the Upper Valley — in the circus arts and then sends them on tour around New England.
In 2007, the same year, Mermin retired from Smirkus, Marceau died — a convergence of circumstances that led Mermin back to his roots.
“Marceau’s name had become so associated with the art form that he was worried that when he was gone, the art of mime would pass along with him,” Mermin said. “And to some extent, that’s what happened. When I finished with Smirkus, people were always asking me questions about my past, my time with Marcel Marceau. They’d say, ‘Do people really do that any more?’ I realized that the best way to talk about my career, and to share his legacy, was to tell stories.”
Marceau’s story includes growing up Jewish in pre-World War II France. After the Nazi occupation, he changed his name to Marceau, forged documents to help Jewish children avoid deportation to the death camps and posed as the leader of a Boy Scout troop to spirit refugees into Switzerland. The miming emerged as a means to deal with a past that including Marceau’s father dying at Auschwitz.
“He didn’t talk about it very much in the beginning, only after he got older,” Mermin said. “Using the art of silence, he connected with the audience without words, with the rhetoric of gesture.
“He used to say ‘the art of mime is the silent language of the soul.’ ”
Circus Smirkus founder Rob Mermin performs his multi-media shows featuring silent film and mime on Friday and Saturday nights, respectively, at 7:30, at the Eclipse Grange Theater on Thetford Hill. To reserve tickets and learn more, visit parishplayers.org or call 802-785-4344.
Best Bets
Veteran folksinger and songwriter Bill Staines brings his repertoire of stories and ballads, including the classics Roseville Fair and Crossing the Water, to the Sunapee Community CoffeeHouse on Friday night at 7. Admission is $15.
■The Jubilate Singers of the Upper Valley perform traditional music of the Baltic nation of Estonia on Sunday afternoon at 5:30, at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation church in Norwich. Admission is free.
■ Troubadour (and former Upper Valley resident) Tom Rush plays three shows in our neck of the woods over the weekend, mixing his compositions with his takes on Joni Mitchell’s work and other folk classics.
His visits start Saturday night at 7:30 with a show at the Flying Monkey Performance Center in Plymouth, N.H. To reserve tickets ($29 to $44), visit flyingmonkeynh.com or call 603-536-2551.
And in sets at 3 and 7 p.m. on Sunday, Rush appears at the Flying Goose Brewpub and Grille in New London. Admission is $55; reservations are required, by calling 603-526-6899.
■On the theme of “Indigenous Rising,” the Hopkins Center hosts three performances by emerging Native-American artists on Wednesday night at 7, at the Warner Bentley Theater in Hanover. The “evening of NextGen Native Artists” features the Lakota blues-rock quintet Spirits Cry, Pueblo/Cherokee playwright-singer-storyteller Ronee Penoi with her satire The Indian School Project, and Ute/Shoshone poet Tanaya Winder. General admission tickets cost $17 to $25. To learn more, visit hop.dartmouth.edu or call 603-646-2422.
■Northern Stage unveils Hanover playwright Marisa Smith’s Venus Rising with preview performances at 7:30 on Wednesday night and next Thursday and Friday nights at the Barrette Center for the Arts in White River Junction. Opening night for the midlife-crisis comedy is set for Feb. 2, and it runs through Feb. 17. For tickets and more information, visit northernstage.org or call 802-296-7000.
Looking Ahead
Carlos Ocasio will lead his Frydaddy ensemble into the Tunbridge Town Hall on Feb. 2 at 7:30, to set the soul-infused rockin’ rhythm for the monthly Shindig dance. Admission is $10.
Theater/Performance Art
The Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph is inviting aspiring actors, singers, dancers and performance artists to auditions in early February for the center’s annual Mud Season Variety Show and its Mini Mud Youth Variety Show.
For the Mud Season show, scheduled for March 22, auditions will take place in the Chandler Music Hall on Feb. 2 and 9. To reserve time slots, email Janine Reeves at mainesjj@comcast.net or call 802-234-5514.
Tryouts for the youth show, set for March 6, will be held on Feb. 8. To reserve audition times, email Ramsey Papp at ramsey.papp@gmail.com or call 802-728-3038.
Music
Patrice Williamson’s Boston-based jazz quartet joins forces with Dartmouth College’s Coast Jazz Combo for a free concert at the Top of the Hop in Hanover tonight at 9.
■ Barika plays a West African-flavored blend of funk music at The Skinny Pancake in Hanover on Friday night at 9. Admission is $10.
■Colorado-based musicians Adam Agee and Jon Sousa perform Celtic music from Europe and North America on Saturday night at 7, at the Seven Stars Arts Center in Sharon. Admission is $15 at the door. To learn more, visit adamandjon.com.
■The Cantabile Women’s Chorus sings two concerts of classical, traditional and folk compositions of Matthew Harris, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gwyneth Walker this weekend, starting Saturday afternoon at 3 at the First Congregational Church of Lebanon. The ensemble, directed by Kathy Sherlock-Green and accompanied by pianist Jeanne Chambers, also performs on Sunday afternoon at 3 at the Norwich Congregational Church. To reserve tickets ($5 to $15) and learn more, visit cantabilewomen.org.
■Jazz singer Giacomo Gates performs at the Center at Eastman in Grantham on Sunday afternoon at 4. To reserve tickets ($18 to $20) and to learn more about the Jazz on a Sunday Afternoon series of concerts, visit josajazz.com or call 603-763-8732.
Dance
Fairlee Community Arts hosts a disco-style dance in the new auditorium at Fairlee Town Hall on Saturday night from 7 to 10. All ages are welcome. To learn more, visit fairleearts.org.
■Turning Stile provides the musical inspiration and David Millstone calls the steps for Muskeg Music’s contra dance on Saturday night at 8, at Tracy Hall in Norwich. Admission is $8 to $12. To learn about subsequent Upper Valley contra dances, visit uvdm.org.
Bar and Club Circuit
Acoustic rocker Joel Cage performs at Peyton Place restaurant in Orford, tonight from 6 to 9. The Americana trio The Road Home performs next Thursday night at 6.
■The Rutland-based Miss Guided Angels pull into Windsor Station tonight at 7, to perform what they describe at their “Ver-mericana” blend of folk, blues, bluegrass, country rock and pop. Mister Burns & The Hounds range among funk, soul and hip-hop on Friday night at 9:30, the roots ensemble Adwela & The Uprising appears on Saturday night at 9:30, and singer-songwriter Mowgli Giannitti plays Tuesday night at 6.
■Enfield-native singer-songwriter Brooks Hubbard performs at Salt hill Pub in downtown Lebanon tonight at 8 and at the Hanover pub on Friday night at 9.
■The weekend lineup at Lebanon’s Salt hill features the Adam McMahon Trio with a set of blues on Friday night at 9, and Bob & Shane with an acoustic session of rock on Saturday night at 9.
■Turner Round rocks Salt hill Pub in West Lebanon on Friday night at 9, and singer-songwriter Amanda McCarthy performs the Happy Hour set starting at 4 on Saturday.
■The rock quintet Unbalanced performs at Salt hill Pub in Newport on Friday night at 9, and Turner Round frontman Chad Gibbs plays a solo set of acoustic rock on Saturday night at 9.
■Singer-songwriter Chris Powers plays Salt hill Pub in Hanover on Saturday night at 9.
■Gideon Yard performs reggae at Skunk Hollow Tavern in Hartland Four Corners on Friday night at 8.
■Sonny Saul plays jazz at the On the River Inn in Woodstock on Saturday and Wednesday nights from 6:30 to 9.
■Royalton singer-songwriter Alison “AliT” Turner performs at the SILO Distillery in Windsor on Sunday afternoon from 1 to 3.
Open Mics
String players of all ages and abilities are welcome at the weekly acoustic jam session at South Royalton’s BALE Commons on Friday night from 6:30 to 10.
■Joe Stallsmith leads his weekly hootenanny of Americana, folk and bluegrass on Monday night at 6 at Salt hill Pub in Hanover.
■Fiddler Jakob Breitbach leads an acoustic jam session of bluegrass, Americana and old-timey music on Tuesday nights at 7 at The Filling Station Bar and Grill in White River Junction.
■Tom Masterson hosts an open mic at Colatina Exit in Bradford on Tuesday nights at 8.
■Woodstock musician Jim Yeager hosts an open mic on Wednesday night at 8 at Skunk Hollow Tavern in Hartland Four Corners.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304. Entertainment news also can be sent to highlights@vnews.com.