I have designed my style pantomimes as white ink drawings on black backgrounds, so that man's destiny appears as a thread lost in an endless labyrinth. I have tried to shed some gleams of light on the shadow of man startled by his anguish.
Silence in the turmoil of the theater world made me survive 50 years without speaking on a stage, only to say 'No' in Mel Brooks' film, 'Silent Movie.'
Bip is the romantic and burlesque hero for our time. Bip is a modern-day Don Quixote.
I started under my master, Etienne Decroux, who taught me a new grammar for mime he called statuary mime. This grammar brings style creations. Without it, no art survives.
With time, art developed Bip, my alter ego. He was not only a lion tamer or a street musician but a soldier revealing the tragedy of ephemeral life.
I was brought up in a Jewish home, but I was brought up to be human - not fanatical, which is something that I don't appreciate at all. I learned to become a humanist and not to dwell on the differences between Jews and Christians.
What sculptors do is represent the essence of gesture. What is important in mime is attitude.
Today, my heart and soul lives peacefully for the hope that the 21st century will have to face a great challenge, a peaceful struggle for the enlightenment of humanity.
The great problem of humanity is life and death. Every person dreams of becoming invisible one day.
Never get a mime talking. He won't stop.
Mime is an art beyond words. It is the art of the essential. And you cannot lie. You have to show the truth.
When you're in a play, 50 percent is the genius of the actor, 50 percent is the genius of the author. When a mime is not perfect, you see nothing.
Dance is in the air, pirouettes, very difficult. Mime is on the floor, like Spanish dancing perhaps, and very often in slow motion.
Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power.
I am a company in myself. My repertoire has become a bible for all mimes in the world.
It's good to shut up sometimes.
In a clown, we see what we do that makes us laugh and cry. I kept the white face, the tradition of the Pierrot. My clown became a romantic and stylized figure. I wanted to be an abstract and concrete figure, a symbol of humanity.
I wouldn't imagine I would become famous in America for my talk shows.
