He’s a Mastermime Tony Montanaro reflects on life as a visual aide

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He stretches out the balloon, just so, and brings it to his lips. Puffing out his cheeks, he blows mightily.

Slowly, the latex expands before getting the best of him – air whooshing back into his mouth, taking the balloon with it.

He manages not to swallow it and finally forces air into the balloon. Bigger and bigger it grows, and he leans back to give it room.

Finished, he removes the balloon from his mouth and holds it aloft in his right hand, the glee of accomplishment plain on his face. Up goes his arm, and it’s obvious that the huge balloon is lifting him off the ground.

There is no balloon, of course, but don’t tell that to the crowd filling the seats last December at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts. Every one of the patrons at Phyzgig, the annual physical festival put on by Acorn Productions, “saw” the balloon grow in the capable hands and mind of Tony Montanaro.

“Marceau said do something with a balloon, but don’t let it burst,” Montanaro explained offhandedly to the audience. “So I did this for him, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”

That was 1957, when a young mime from New Jersey went all the way to Paris to study with legends Marcel Marceau and Etienne Decroux.

More than four decades later, Tony Montanaro performs around the world, and is equally well known as a teacher and founder of Celebration Barn, the South Paris school for mime, storytelling and improvisation he ran from 1972 until he sold it in 1988.

Montanaro continues to teach at Celebration Barn, but now there’s a new project. He and wife Karen Hurll-Montanaro, a dancer and teacher, are building studios on a 16-acre plot they have purchased in Casco.

What used to be a karate studio at one end of the large log home is ready for the dance classes Hurll-Montanaro teaches.

Mime will be taught this spring in a portion of the barn the couple is redoing, while a workshop will give Montanaro space to paint and do carpentry. He’s been active in the renovations, from sheetrocking to framing doors and pounding lots of nails.

Upstairs, when funding permits, a dorm sleeping seven students will be located. Montanaro is hoping to find grants to move construction along.

The career that brought Montanaro, now 73, to this new start began more than a half-century ago during college studies that earned him a degree in drama. You might say it all started with a doughnut.

Cast as Mr. Webb, the father, in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” Montanaro found himself eating an imaginary doughnut. What if a piece of the treat fell into a cup of coffee? It did.

“And a hundred people burst out laughing,” he recalled.

Montanaro first saw Etienne DeCroux in a movie, “Les Enfants de Paradise.” A few years later, Marcel Marceau performed in New York, and Montanaro was there. Afterward, he met Marceau, who refused the young actor’s request to study with him.But Montanaro didn’t give up. He followed Marceau to the next city, wangled an audition and earned an invitation to study in Paris. While there, he worked with Decroux as well.

“They were not speaking to each other,” Montanaro said of the pair, referring to oft-seen rifts between mimes of different styles or philosophies.

He doesn’t buy into that, and loves to see mimes performing in the same shows. His Phyzgig show featured Reifer and Saccone, well-known to Mainers back to their days with the Celebration Theater Ensemble; and Antonio Rocha, who is originally from Brazil.

“I love the competition on stage,” Montanaro said. “I want them to shine.”

During Phyzgig, Rocha performed one tongue-in-cheek sketch as a monkey, jumping off the stage and into the audience, where he noisily inspected the scalps of several attendees.

Montanaro later did his own monkey sketch anyway, part of a series in which he transforms himself gradually from an animal-like person into the animal itself.

His portrayal was more of a “serious monkey,” he suggested. He also did a rooster, “my favorite,” and, for the first time ever in public, a tiger – paws crossing over one another as he paced.

After France came a visit to his family’s homeland, Italy, a country where Montanaro was a hit, doing more than 25 television ads for toothpaste.

“Each was a little playlet, one and a half minutes,” he explained. “I played a silly little character who had trouble,” an alchemist who has something explode in his face, or a tightrope walker who is bopped on the head with a bouquet of flowers.

“You couldn’t mention the product until the end,” he said. Then a young lady would appear with a beautiful smile and say, “Colgate con Gardol.”

Back in the United States, Montanaro appeared on “Captain Kangaroo” and hosted “Pretendo,” a children’s show for a Philadelphia TV station in the 1960s.

Had he stayed on the path of acting in the traditional sense, Montanaro thinks he would have done “comedy roles – sidekicks, somebody’s uncle. I would like to have worked off somebody like the Ritz Brothers did.”

But he was a mime, performing his evolving “A Mime’s Eye View” one-man show for more than 30 years, he explained while draped over a chair in his roomy living room. Early on, he created “The Wall,” a staple of many mime shows.

Montanaro does the skit simply. Without looking at his hands, he raises them and places his palms flatly against an invisible plane – a little lesson. He is frequently the performer, and always the teacher.

“With mime, you compose,” he pointed out, moving his arms apart to illustrate a point. “The stage is really a frame. Do you look up your nose, do you go to the corner, do you move fast or slow? Technique is easy to teach.

“What’s more and more important, as time goes on, is a personal style, tapping your own resources,” he said. He wants his students to become more fully themselves, not junior Tony Montanaros.

“They’ve worked with me because they’re original, not because they look like me,” he said.

He was teaching in Woodstock, N.Y., before moving to Maine with his previous wife and children in 1970. Two years later, he founded Celebration Barn.

“If you build it, they will come,” he pointed out.

And so they did. Over the years, he has taught more than 1,000 people, not just mimes and storytellers, singers and musicians, but people who just wanted to learn improvisation and the art of self-expression. The barn also produced several performing troupes.

Montanaro is big on improvisation, putting students on stage to see what comes out.

“Something should occur to you,” he’s fond of saying.

Just as in painting – another of his talents – Montanaro believes it’s important to have something to start with.

“If you have a white canvas, nothing will occur to you,” he said. “Painting is not a reproduction of a tree. It’s the painter’s journey toward a tree.”

So it is with performing. For Montanaro, mime is all about premise – believing and becoming whatever you’re showing the audience.

One minute on stage, he voraciously eats an invisible peach with big, lusty bites. The next, he fussily nibbles grapes one at a time before wrapping his mouth around the remainder of the bunch, his teeth tick-ticking as he scrapes the grapes into his mouth. His cheeks puff out as he spits out the seeds.

Karen Hurll-Montanaro is a believer. Married to Tony for 12 years, she met him during a “Nutcracker” performance where he was Drosselmeyer and she the Sugar Plum Fairy.

She called his work with premise “a revelation for me, coming from a very physical background, where you do everything with muscles and willpower. He talked about believing, letting your body be used by believing.

“People want to study ballet. I think ballet dancers should know mime,” Hurll-Montanaro said.

For years, she was prone to aches and pains from dancing. Once she changed her philosophy of dancing from strictly a technical art to one that comes from the heart and soul, she hasn’t been injury-prone.

Hurll-Montanaro still dances and teaches, but now she’s a mime, as well.

On stage at Phyzgig, Montanaro’s tug of war sketch takes on new dimensions with someone on the other end of the invisible rope.

His wife remembers the day the sketch gelled on her end.

“I really felt Tony pulling me,” she said.

Indeed. On stage at Phyzgig, the muscles in her arms flexed, and though she was leaning backward, her feet skidded across the floor as though the tug of war were real.

In another sketch, Hurll-Montanaro was a robotic doll, moving rhythmically onto the stage to irritate and bump into her partner.

Moving to the wings periodically, where the audience could not see her, Hurll-Montanaro nonetheless held the premise, her facial expression showing that she was in character every second.

The pair has performed around the world, and has toured Germany several times. A popular skit there – and at Phyzgig – simulated a strobe effect as the audience shut their eyes briefly each time the mimes quickly changed positions while enacting a soccer game.

Recent shows were given in Tennessee, Connecticut and New York City, and other performances are planned for Arizona, California and possibly Taiwan.

They also will perform at 7:30 p.m. March 17 in Nordica Auditorium at the University of Maine at Farmington. In Machias, Montanaro will give a keynote speech and workshops for students participating in the Down East Young Authors Conference in April.

In addition, Hurll-Montanaro will debut her one-woman show at 8 p.m. April 14 at Casco Bay Movers Dance Studio in Portland.

Montanaro’s students range from singers and musicians to ventriloquists and clowns.

“I work with a lot of clowns, including the Big Apple Circus clown-care unit,” he explained of the clowns who work in hospitals.

Teaching has its own benefits, he said. “I don’t like travel that much. Teaching, you get to know people better.”

He will continue this summer with the beginning mime workshop July 9-20, and the advanced workshop July 23-Aug. 10, at Celebration Barn. Once his own studio is open, he’ll do the advanced workshops only in Casco.

Over the years, ensemble members have included mimes such as Jackie Reifer and John Saccone, who perform as Reifer and Saccone and were on the Phyzgig bill with Montanaro.

“I think I took my first workshop with him in 1979,” Reifer said recently from her home in Pownal. “That night was the final performance of the first ensemble. It was just an amazing way to start.

“Tony has been my teacher, my director and my friend. He’s the master,” Reifer said, praising not only his gifts as a mime, but his generosity with other mimes as a teacher and performer.

“He wants to take you so you can better express what you want to say. He’s very deep and metaphysical. You find that when you study with him for an extensive period of time,” she said.

According to Reifer, Montanaro is not a “safe” performer, but one who is “always learning, always growing. He actually does what he teaches. He takes risks. He has a wonderful eye and a big heart.”

Montanaro’s teaching isn’t limited to those who can take his workshops. He and Hurll-Montanaro also wrote a 1995 book, “Mime Spoken Here: The Performer’s Portable Workshop,” still in print; and have issued a two-part video on the same topic.

He also is going to be doing videos based on little stories, and one of Montanaro’s eight children has designed a Web site.

Reifer said that studying with Montanaro tends to make a mime want more time with this gifted teacher:

“His spotlight is just so big, his glow, that when you’re in it, it’s an amazing experience.”

For information on performances, workshops, classes or the book and videos, write Montanaro-Hurll Theatre of Mime and Dance, 5 Riggs Road, Casco, ME 04015; call 655-2350; check www.mimetheatre.com, or e-mail tmontan1@maine.rr.com. For information on the workshops at Celebration Barn, call 743-8452 or check www.celebrationbarn.com.