Marceau Hopes His Legacy Is More Than Simple Gestures : Theater: The 70-year-old, who has done thousands of performances, says he’s just beginning and wants mime to take its place as part of the world heritage of performing arts.

Marcel Marceau, at 70, flings his teen-ager’s body to impossible positions, flexes his fabled face muscles and delivers a stirring monologue on never getting old.

“No, I’m not slowing down,” the French master of mime told an interviewer, speaking for a change, after 10,000 performances before college kids and kings. “I’m just starting.”

In the beginning, when Marceau created Bip, his white-faced waif in a sailor suit sniffed flowers and followed butterflies in flight. Now, ageless as Peter Pan, Bip also ponders war and peace.

And Bip is only the warm-up for Marceau’s latest venture, a pantomime of “The Overcoat” by Nikolai Gogol, an allegory about a humble Russian clerk who earns a coveted fur at a terrible price.

The production opened Nov. 12 for a five-week run in Paris. For Marceau, it reflects an enduring dream: After defining modern mime and teaching disciples at his own academy, he wants to shape a legacy.

“Mime belongs with spoken drama, dance and music as part of the world heritage of performing arts,” he said. “It is timeless and universal. Our silences breathe new life into the theater.”

Mime amuses and unsettles people at the same time, Marceau said, confronting them with their own reality by forcing them to fill in their own words.

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Through Bip, Marceau mocks human folly the way his hero, Charlie Chaplin, used to do, blending humor with pathos to brighten a world that worries him more by the day.

“We see so much violence and evil that we must have ways to counteract it,” he said. “What can children think when they see such things every day? We must give them a different experience.”

Lacking words, mime needs no translation. Demanding imagination, it says whatever the audience hears.

“Bip Remembers” comes from Marceau’s horror upon returning to his ransacked childhood home in Strasbourg during World War II. His father, a Jew, was deported. His brother had gone underground.

“When I did ‘Bip Remembers’ in Argentina, the entire audience rose to their feet and started to sing,” he said. Having just emerged from their own war, Argentines saw it their own way.

People often stand up for Marceau. On his first U.S. tour, in 1955, he was held over for months. He has returned almost every year since, to Broadway and backwater campuses. This year, he packed 60 houses.

Marceau travels ceaselessly, performing up to 300 times a year. In 1985, a perforated ulcer nearly killed him in Russia. Six months after emergency surgery, he was on stage again.

“I have a strong heart from my mother, and the mime I do is a sort of yoga,” he said, running his fingers through gray curls. “My face isn’t young, but my body is like it was when I was 30.”

Offstage and at rest, Marceau seems incongruous, a short, wrinkled senior citizen in a blue velvet suit with pointed lapels and an open shirt.

When he switches on, however, he crackles with energy. His eyes blaze under rippling brows. Shoulder movements turbocharge his verbs, and flashing fingers punctuate his sentences.

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A poet, a painter and a performer, he plays his words. Impassioned by the human condition, he veers from Harpo Marx to Karl Marx without a pause. On mime, he is at his most eloquent.

“My soul goes into every gesture, every expression,” he said. “If I am walking up stairs, I concentrate on what is behind each stair. Mime is the invisible visible.”

Usually a one-man show, Marceau is performing “The Overcoat” with 11 students of his International School of Mime-Drama, started in 1978 with a French government grant.

When funds dwindled in 1990, Marceau went to an old fan, Francois Mitterrand. The Gulf War was erupting and the U.S. secretary of state was in town. In between crisis sessions, the school got its money.

“The president understands what we are trying to accomplish,” said Marceau, “Mime is not simply entertainment. It has come to us from the earliest times, and it should be with us forever.”