Mime artist eyes Los Angeles

BY ILSE DUSART

A Wellington mime artist who has won the national championship for performing arts will join the New Zealand team in Los Angeles for the world championships in July.

Miklos Gerely, originally from Hungary, is part of a performing arts team that will compete for world titles in Los Angeles, the world capital of magic and dreams.

Gerely described the Aim to Fame contest as an event in which dancers, singers, actors, models, comedians, musicians and other performing artists compete on the world stage.

"It's like the Olympic Games of the performing arts," he said.

"There were more than 75,000 applicants this year from all around the world."

Gerely said he fell in love with mime 27 years ago after watching a mime group just after finishing his final high school exams.

"After seeing their performance I found the leader of the group and I asked him where I could learn about magic. Then I started to go to his school and, after three years, he asked me to join his group," Gerely said.

His teacher was a student of Marcel Marceau, the French doyen of mime.

"What I am doing is absolutely classical mime," he said. "My experience is that people mix it with pantomime.

"They are very similar, but pantomime is some clown jokes, nice-looking costumes."

In Hungary Gerely made a living as a mime artist, taking part in a television series in which he and others explained words and expressions in mime for children.

"They had to guess what we were doing, or what the expression could be."

In Greece his act was not always as successful.

"Sometimes I performed mime for them in the nightclub, but sometimes they were too drunk to understand."

With mime, he said, if he knows exactly what he is going to present and he does not need many mime movements. When he has an idea, it takes him about 10 hours to choreograph.

When Gerely entered the Aim To Fame competition, where he won four gold medals, he had one minute to perform each of his acts.

"In that minute you have to convince the judge of your talents. You have to influence the audience, you have to catch the attention and the feelings."

One of his acts was a Charlie Chaplin piece.

"It was typical burlesque music. I performed it with funny movements ... [it was] the story at the bus stop."

"Almost all my stories have some more meaning ... you can understand them in different levels."

Funny movements could also convey a sense of the romantic and the poetic.

"[That's] because mime works with movements and the movements are also symbols," he said. "And if someone can understand the symbols, it gives them a deeper meaning."

- The Wellingtonian