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Book Cover for: Great Salt Lake Mime Saga and Amsterdam's Festival of Fools, Michael R. Evans

Great Salt Lake Mime Saga and Amsterdam's Festival of Fools

Michael R. Evans

This attractive collection of images and words shows an unfolding story of artists and musicians meeting at the University of Utahs now-famous Dance Department then taking their original ideas into some of the best theaters in Salt Lake City then even further on to Colorado, Wisconsin, and the first International Mime Festival held in the United States during 1974, just about a year after we launched our Dance Company. The group called themselves Salt Lake Mime Troupe, partly as a "gimmick" that separated them from the other luminous talents on the Dance Scene, but it also allowed them to explore acting and visual comedy. They had their own band and performed original music from the very beginning too, so they knew how to entertain! The rigor of their Ballet and Modern Dance backgrounds made them standouts at the International Mime Festival in 1974, and they were invited to perform in Europe at the first Festival of Fools in 1975, but were faced with the challenge of keeping bodies, souls, and an unconventional company together until they could make it to Europe. The book follows them to California and all the way to New York City where they hopped the Atlantic Ocean and met up with a globe-encircling network of performers who are still active throughout the world - forty plus years after Amsterdam's Festival of Fools began its long run over two different decades.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Media Man Productions
  • Publish Date: May 30th, 2016
  • Pages: 126
  • Language: English
  • Edition: Clothbound with - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.21in - 6.14in - 0.50in - 0.89lb
  • EAN: 9780692729359
  • Categories: Entertainment & Performing ArtsDance - PopularPopular Culture

Praise for this book

Johnny Melville is a film director/ actor/ writer/ songwriter/ clown / lightworker / transformation facilitator & performance poet. He has performed in theatres, festivals, movies and TV in over 40 countries for the last 40 years, and wrote a review of my book in his blog Diary of a Fool: ... the Troupe were to play at the first Festival of Fools in Amsterdam. Many of the American hippy performers that attended that first festival were connected to the American clown Jango Edwards whose rough and dynamic form of modern Vaudeville was turning the smokers of the tulip town upside down. Jango was instrumental in guiding some of the club owners of the city to begin the Festival of Fools. So we come to the year 2014 when a former member of the group Salt Lake Mime Troupe, Michael Evans finally had his book about the both the group and the festival published in Holland. The book carries a tender charm as he waxes lyrical about the time and his friends. Michael had been for years the online curator of the whereabouts and projects of his friends in the group for quite some years. His dream was to publish for the world their story and that mad time in Amsterdam. What Michael Evans has done in this book is not just celebrate his time with the group but spotlights a whole cross-cultural movement of extreme richness which served as a breeding point for a huge change of cultural expression across the continent and even further afield. CFK in Michigan USA writes: Our Mike Evans has published a Memoir, "The Great Salt Lake Mime Saga and Amsterdam's Festival of Fools: Memoir and Memorabilia." When I read a memoir, I also pause to think about my own life. What was I doing in the same years? How did my vision of life overlap with the authors'? Good memories, hard memories, regrets, sympathy ... all are part of my reading as the author shares his life. In this book, I see memories of people who did the hard work of becoming entertainers, who reached out to the world and shared their vision and skills. It takes courage and joy to produce a show. The challenge of setting up in varied venues from the street to small stages, to high schools is a great one. Finding enough money to live on while honing the material and getting known is very tough. This memoir is an intimate look from the inside that touches the heart the more you read about how the young artists began and worked together to create their shows. The author saw it all from the beginning in Salt Lake City to the shows in Amsterdam. He did lots of jobs to keep the show going strong such as doing art work, stage lighting, juggling, running off programs, and keeping the bus driver awake at night on bad roads. I visited Amsterdam for a few days in 1972 so I know a little bit about the bustle of that city; the trams, the bicycles, the flower market and the buildings. It is a lively city and the Mime Troupe made it livelier. Thanks to Mike Evans' gift of this book, I enjoyed a time travel trip back into the 70's when dancers, mimes, clowns, and musicians were burgeoning with creative enterprise and daring the odds to show their stuff. Mini-Review by author Claudio Tapia: How valuable it always is to preserve the past! And in such intimate detail, too. Mike Evans takes us back only a couple of decades, though, to a time long gone in so many ways. A delightful journey to a time when young people still invented the world around them - without writing a business plan first; when the word 'revolution' was still a matter of the soul.