The Sound of Movement
Multi‑mime Nick Johnson speaks volumes in ‘Symphony of Silence’
by Chris Moore
Powerful and dynamic... I have seen the work he (Nicholas Johnson) has created develop the  boundaries of our art.
Marcel Marceau

CAVE CREEK – Talk is cheap, they say. Maybe that’s why C. Nicholas Johnson doesn’t use it–at least when he’s working. Then again, mimes usually don’t.

But Johnson is so much more than a mime. A dancer, a choreographer, a director, a teacher of children, a filmmaker, a theatrical innovator, and, sure, a mime–indeed one who studied and worked with the legendary master Marcel Marceau.

Johnson, who now lives in Wichita, Kansas, where he is director of dance at Wichita State University, is nevertheless devoted to the cultural development of the Desert Foothills and the artistic education of the children here. He dedicates assiduous energy to the advancement of “the art,” as he calls it, of not just mime, but “mime theater,” or even more broadly, “physical theater,” which he sees as a bridge between dance and theater where the language of the body can tell a story without having to say a word. 

He calls the Desert Foothills “home” and has been working with children here for more than 20 years, the last 10 of which have been through a more formal association with Desert Foothills Community Education’s Performing Arts Camp. The camp, an intensive two‑week summer program, provides an unforgettable artistic experience for about 50 students (grades pre‑K through 12), culminating in a sophisticated, inventive, public performance enabling them to share their experience with the community. Next up is “Symphony of Silence,” which the camp will be staging June 17 at Cactus Shadows Fine Arts Center (CSFAC) in Cave Creek.

Johnson’s last two Performing Arts Camp performances, “Alice” in 2004 and “Once Upon a Planet” in 2005, were staged multi‑media events, combining videotape, live choreographed movement and music. Johnson, his creative team, and the students develop the theatrical movement, mime, music, film footage, costumes, sets–and everything else, really–to build stunning, visual spectacles for the CSFAC stage.

And this summer will be no different. Since June 4, when he arrived in town from Wichita, Johnson has been working with his students creating “Symphony of Silence,” a series of vignettes illuminating the human experience through exploring conformity, compatibility, the life cycle, death, evolution and other weighty subjects not usually associated with children’s theater.

Johnson doesn’t take the easy road–he challenges his students. In his program, that’s the way to learn, and the way to perform. Two years ago, Johnson staged “Alice,” an inspired interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass,” reset in the desert, which took its audience down the jackrabbit hole to address the issue of how to live life with imagination, identity, development, and fulfillment. According to Johnson, “Transforming the story to desert themes personalizes the production not only for those students and community members involved, but also for the audience and all of Cave Creek and Carefree, the desert dwellers.”

Last year, “Once Upon a Planet,” which he calls “a warning,” enacts the evolution of consciousness through race, faith and politics using geometric shapes and colors at first to separate and then to merge individuals and groups in an awakening of universal being. “These are very contemporary issues,” Johnson says of “Planet’s” thematic threads. “Today, that’s what’s ripping the world apart.”

It’s that challenge that rips the mind open, that makes the mind move. “It’s important to say something valuable to young people,” Johnson explains. “In what we’re doing–mime for the stage–we speak with the body. There is no language barrier.” It’s this simplicity of silence, this music of movement, that allows Johnson’s young performers to not only grasp the issues, but convey them.

And judging by the intensity of the preparations going on this summer at Performing Arts Camp (the rigorous rehearsal schedule is 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays), there’s every indication that this year’s performance of “Symphony of Silence” will be as innovative and invigorating as the past shows of Alithea Creations, the company Johnson developed and named after the Greek word for “truth”  in 1990 to produce multi‑discipline mime theater performances.

In addition to Alithea Creations, Johnson is artistic director of his Wichita‑based Alithea Mime Theatre, in conjunction with his wife Sabrina Vasquez, a choreographer, who is the associate artistic director of the touring repertory company that performs Johnson’s choreography. She, like Johnson, is on the faculty of  Wichita State University where she teaches a variety of dance forms. Prior to that she was a dancer with the Tucson Metropolitan Ballet, Arizona Dance Theatre, and a performer for The Invisible People Mime Theatre, which was formed in 1986 by Johnson and Gregg Goldston, a fellow mime innovator, and helped propel Johnson’s career when it was noticed by Marceau.

The Alithea Mime Theatre tours as part of the Kansas Arts Commission and has traveled to Warsaw, Poland, Puerto Rico, and other international locations, performing such signature pieces as “Angels Rising,” “Asylum,” “Seg way,” “The Nickracker” and in 2000, “Alice,” which he restaged four years later with his Performing Arts Camp students.

With that illustrious background, but no words to speak of, Johnson graces the Foothills each summer to shepherd students through the creation of one of his ambitious, avant‑garde, multi‑media productions with the help of his creative team which includes, but is not limited to: choreographer Vasquez; Vincent Pascoe, a cinematographer who graduated from Cactus Shadows High School 10 years ago; film editor Dustin Payne; Kevin Glenn of Desert Foothills Theater, who writes the music; vocal coach Martha Lindsey Glenn; costume designers Renee Swan and Liz Lincoln of Desert Foothills Dance Studio; and set and lighting designer Dan Williams, also a member of Alithea.