Performer blends mime, ballet Expression, feeling drive solo act

PRESQUE ISLE – When you watch Karen Montanaro on stage, you can’t help but notice how much feeling and expression she puts into each move.

In one moment she’s a stage mother, cheerfully dragging her invisible daughter to a performance, and the next, she’s the little girl – pouting with arms tightly crossed – refusing to dance for her audience.

Montanaro doesn’t utter a single word while she does this. She doesn’t have to, her physical expressions speak volumes.

Karen Hurll Montanaro, 43, is a ballerina turned mime who mixes both art forms with contemporary dance in her one-woman show, “Tanzspiel,” German for “dance play.” Montanaro, the widow of famed mime Tony Montanaro, does 10 sketches ranging from a lively baseball game – with Montanaro playing both teams – to a gunslinging cowboy remembering his glory days.

Montanaro presented her show at the Caribou Performing Arts Center over the weekend and took time out on Sunday to talk about why she mimes and what the art form gives to both performer and audience.

The art of mime uses body movements, alone, to tell a story or present a character or situation. Montanaro was a 27-year-old ballerina when she had her first encounter with mime, or, more accurately, one of the world’s best-known mime artists. She was the Sugar Plum Fairy in a production of “The Nutcracker,” and Tony Montanaro was Uncle Drosselmayer.

Tony Montanaro, who established in 1972 the Celebration Barn Theatre in South Paris, studied with famed mime Marcel Marceau and Marceau’s teacher Etienne Decroux.

“When I met Tony, he was the first person to tell me that I should express myself when I move,” Montanaro remembered.

The idea, she said, was a novel concept to her because, in her world, technical perfection was the driving force.

With mime, she said, the focus was on self-expression, being aware of how you feel and being moved by what you’re doing.

“I had a sense of a miracle through my work in dance, but I was getting injured, and that miracle wasn’t happening,” Montanaro said. “I saw Tony on stage and said, ‘That’s the miracle waiting to happen.'”

Montanaro recalled how the second time she and Tony met in a room together, he proposed. Despite a 34-year age difference, the two married in 1989, performing at their own wedding.

It took Montanaro five years to get over her fear of improvising on stage and focusing on self-expression, but she said that it was embracing that fear of failure that allowed her to pick up a new dance form and find her own way to express herself.

In 2001, she premiered “Tanzspiel,” which featured choreography by her, Tony and renowned dancer and choreographer Clay Taliaferro.

It was an amazing high, she said, followed all too quickly by the deepest low of her life.

Two weeks after the premiere, the couple found out Tony had stomach cancer. He died a year and a half later.

Since then, Montanaro has performed the show throughout Maine. You might think that doing the show would bring back too many painful memories, but Montanaro said it’s just the opposite. It’s a chance for her to feel Tony’s presence and to offer her audience the gift he gave her.

“In a successful mime performance, people don’t see you, they see themselves,” Montanaro explained. “They dream off of what they’re seeing.”

Rachel Rice can be reached at 768-5681 and rrice@downeast.net.