MICHAEL LANE TRAUTMAN, above, and Jackie Reifer and John Saccone, below, are scheduled to perform Saturday during the Phyzgig shows at Bates College.
Advance tickets to the afternoon show cost $10 for adults or $8 for children. Advance tickets to the evening performance cost $15 for adults or $10 for seniors and students. Call 782-7228 or go online to www.laarts.org.
MIME ARTIST and dancer Karen Montanaro will be among the scheduled acts Saturday during Phyzgig at Bates College.
Paper shimmers with movement as butterflies dance and multiply; paper birds transform into real ones; rice, water and fruit spill out of nowhere; and shadows take on a life of their own in an amazing exploration of light.
Faulkner provides creative, mesmerizing presentations that encourage imaginative dreams. With a vision dedicated to the necessity of makebelieve and the ability of theater to be a universal art, Faulkner’s World of Wonder enables audiences to walk away with visions of their own.
Faulkner was born in Afghanistan to Native American parents. He spent seven years on the coast of Tanzania, East Africa, and credits his international experience with stimulating his love for theater.
Faulkner is a trained actor, director, choreographer, licensed pyrotechnician, filmmaker, and a creator of effects for theater and television. Beginning with mime and evolving through new vaudeville and performance art, Faulkner trained in the old world tradition of master and apprentice.
Most recently, he earned a bachelor of arts degree in film-making from the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif.
— Michael Lane Trautman started out in life as a fairly normal kind of person.
After growing up in Springfield, Ill., he attended William
Jewell College in Liberty, Mo., where he studied political science with the intention of becoming a lawyer. After four years of college, he decided that the legal profession was not going to be much fun, so he left school and started looking for something to do that would be.
In 1976 he took his first mime class. In 1977, he was invited to become a founding member of Mimewock, a Kansas City-based school and performing company. Since then, he has performed throughout the world.
Variously identified as a visual comic, performance artist, new vaudevillian, mime, physical comedian, storyteller, magician and fool, he claims only be a clown — and not a very traditional clown at that.
He has appeared in such prestigious venues as the New York International Festival of Clown Theater, Festival D’Ete in Quebec, the General Jackson Showboat at Opryland, USA, the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal and The Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.
— Yo-Yo People are a husband and wife team, John and Rebecca Higby.
John first started performing as a teenager while living and attending school in Colorado. His first big break was at the Denver Busker Festival. Soon he was performing for U.S troops abroad.
Rebecca earned a degree in elementary education and human development from Connecticut College. She met John in 2001 and was easily incorporated into his show.
— Karen Montanaro is a professional ballet dancer and mime artist. She danced with the Ohio Ballet and with the Marmstadt Opera Ballet in Germany.
From 1987 to 2002 she performed and taught with master mime, Tony Montanaro. For the past 20 years she has taught mime, dance and movement to children of all ages and grade levels throughout the United States.
She is a recent winner of an Artist Fellowship grant from the Maine Arts Commission.
— Jackie Reifer and John Saccone met at Tony Montanaro’s Celebration Barn in 1980. They toured and performed with his Celebration Theater Ensemble for five years.
In 1987, they created Reifer & Saccone and have been offering performances and workshops ever since.
The duo brings a wealth of physical theater and comedy to the stage. Their sketches weave together movement, mime and monologue to create comic and often poignant observations of life.
When not touring with her husband in Reifer & Saccone, Reifer does a solo show, Reifer Madness. She collaborates with other artists in various venues and performs in commercials.
A licensed and certified speech and language pathologist, she applies theater and improvisation techniques to her ongoing language groups for adults with developmental disabilities and students diagnosed on the autism spectrum.
In addition to his work in Reifer & Saccone, Saccone is the movement education teacher for grades 1-12 at Merriconeag Waldorf School in Freeport. He is a guest artist with the Portland Ballet Company and a teacher at Casco Bay Movers Dance Studio and the Rudolf Steiner Institute.
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