Fiction - General & Miscellaneous, Circus

Bip in a Book

Name: Bip in a Book
Author: Marcel Marceau, Bruce Goldstone, Steven Rothfeld
ISBN: 9781584791300

by Marcel Marceau, Bruce Goldstone, Steven Rothfeld

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Overview

Marcel Marceau's genius for the art of silence has astonished and delighted audiences of all ages for more than 50 years. Now, Bip in a Book captures the celebrated mime's boundless talent in a playful and charming adventure-and we really mean captures.

Bip is Marceau's beloved alter ego, a hapless clown with unlimited curiosity and compassion. Since his debut in 1947, Bip has bravely explored every imaginable location, from a skating rink to a lion cage. But he has never been trapped inside the pages of a book... until now.

Bip's struggle against invisible walls is the subject of "The Cage," perhaps the best-known mime drama of all time. In Bip in a Book, this richly evocative drama is reinterpreted for a new generation.

Once again Marceau's famous innocent is trapped, but this time he is confined not by an imaginary cage, but by a page.

Anyone who loves the theater will cherish these playful photographs of a modern master at work, but even readers who have never seen Bip will be drawn to the creativity and suspense of this one-of-a-kind story.

Author Biography: Marcel Marceau is universally acclaimed as the world's greatest mime. He was trained in Paris in the mid-1940s by legendary teacher Etienne Decroux, who recognized that Marceau was a "born mime."

In 1949 he formed the only pantomime company in the world, and in 1955 he made his U.S. debut. Since then the artist has performed in every major U.S. city and around the world, and has gained an even larger international following through his many television and movie appearances. Among his many honors are an Emmy Award and France's coveted Legion of Honor.

Bruce Goldstone is the author of The Beastly Feast (Holt), and Ten Friends (Holt). He lives happily trapped inside an invisible cage known as New York City.

Steven Rothfeld is the photographer of Entrez (Artisan), French Dreams (Workman), Irish Dreams (Chronicle), and Italian Dreams (Collins).

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

This ingenious square volume makes brilliant use of both the great mime's talents and the idea of the book as a physical object. Fans of Marceau will recognize one of his most famous pieces, "The Cage," taken to a new level here. The opening spreads feature a seemingly fathomless glossy black background on the left as, opposite, the inventive mime plays out his drama, photographed against a crisp white background. As Marceau approaches readers, he comes up against an invisible wall, which he indicates with hands outspread; in the next photos, he moves toward the right-hand edge of the page, eventually coming to a dead-end there as well. But here's where he expands on his work in "The Cage": he next begins to "climb" the edge of the page until he hits the "ceiling," or top edge of the page. Rothfeld's photos brilliantly create a cinematic effect: Marceau first loses his hat to gravity, then loses his own tenuous hold, falling (over several spreads) to the bottom of the page. This whole sequence leads to a cleverly imagined interplay with the mysterious blackness that has hitherto remained confined to the left of each spread. Marceau begins to get sucked into the darkness, saves himself, but loses his hat into the black vastness. Much playfulness prevails as Marceau finds a way to retrieve his chapeau. For the uninitiated, this thoughtfully conceived volume is an ideal introduction to the art of mime at its finest; for Marceau's followers, it is a must. All ages. (Nov.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.