Word: mime
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Movies. Records. Mime. Broadway stage. Video. Painting. Bowie has done them all, spinning off in so many directions that he looks like a loose compass searching for magnetic north. The striking thing is how often he finds it, and how, when the needle settles, so many diverse directions have been blended into one. His rock videos are state of the art, partly because Bowie has always been a witty accomplice in his artifice. "David's a real living Renaissance figure," says Nicolas Roeg, who directed Bowie in the formidable 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. "That's what...
...been on the fringes of the music business for five years, changing his name from Jones to Bowie to avoid confusion with a member of the Monkees. He also flirted with imitating everyone from Anthony Newley to Bob Dylan, and spent three years on and off studying with the mime troupe of Lindsay Kemp, who has been described by Rock Historian Nicholas Schaffner as "Scotland's ultra-camp answer to Marcel Marceau." "Lindsay taught me more about what one can do with a stage than anyone," Bowie remarks now. "Just one small movement...
Before Space Oddity became a hit, Bowie could be seen at various venues throughout Britain, performing a mime inspired by the Chinese invasion of Tibet. (Please, do not rush to the exits. Proceed in an orderly fashion.) After two more years and yet another record company (his sixth), Bowie produced his first important album. Hunky Dory was a hothouse of lush rock that contained such Bowie perennials as Changes, Oh! You Pretty Things and the enigmatic The Bewlay Brothers. That song may have been an oblique allegory of David and Terry Jones, who has spent much of his adult life...
...resurrection was only slightly less serendipitous. IBM's advertising agency, the Madison Avenue firm Lord, Geller, Federico, Einstein, was looking for someone, or something, that would attack the problem of computer fright head on. The agency was talking about using the Muppets or Marcel Marceau, the mime, when, according to Creative Director Thomas Mabley, the idea for the Tramp "sort of walked in and sat down...
West by Steven Berkoff. A Berkoff play (Greek, Metamorphosis, Hamlet) is simultaneously avant-garde and deja vu. Actors in whiteface mime extravagant gestures, confronting the audience with stylized, scatological invective. It is like being back in the rumble seat of '60s performance art, but with a raw poetic urgency. Other English play wrights may update Shaw; Berkoff wants to be an East End blend of Sam Shepard and Jean Genet. West, the first of his plays to infiltrate the West End, can be seen as a new West Side Story. Mike (Rory Edwards), leader of a quintet of Hackney...