This man will do a lot — let a suitcase overpower him, dance with an empty dress — just to entice kids to a library.
Mikael Rudolph, also known as Mikael the Mime, describes himself as the “silent partner in a one-man business,” but don’t expect all to be quiet when he comes from his Minneapolis home to give free performances Friday in Sequim and Port Angeles.
With his luggage that seems to levitate, a rebellious cat puppet and a plain rock that sends him sliding across the floor not unlike a moonwalking Michael Jackson, Rudolph is the next entertainer to appear in the free Summer Reading Program series presented by the North Olympic Library System.
Sequim show
He’ll leap onto the Sequim Middle School cafeteria stage at 10:30 a.m. Friday and then slip into the Raymond Carver Room at the Port Angeles Library for a second 55-minute program at 1 p.m.
A Whitman and Seattle Community College-educated mime, magician, actor and ballroom dance teacher, Rudolph puts on a 45-minute show and then opens it up for questions from his audience.
This trip to the North Olympic Peninsula is a kind of return to childhood, Rudolph said.
Son of architect
He grew up on Bainbridge Island, and his father, the late architect John Rudolph, would pull him out of school and take him out to job sites across Western Washington.
“I’ve been to Port Townsend, LaPush, all over the Peninsula,” he said. And this summer, he wanted to come back — and meet some fellow “library kids.”
Rudolph was an early and ravenous reader at the Bainbridge Island Library, which his father designed; books blew the world wide open for him. And today’s young readers, he said, are the ones to be reckoned with.
“The kids who are reading now and asking questions,” he added, “will be writing legislation and legal briefs and books and screenplays tomorrow.”
Along those lines, the mime himself urges the youngsters in his audiences to ask him about his life and art. And since he does a bit of magic and illusion in his show, many ask, “How did you do that?”
He’ll teach them a little magic but doesn’t give it all away. With his onstage frolic, Rudolph wants most of all to inspire a sense of wonder.
“I love hearing the laughter of children,” he added, but also delicious are “the few moments of total silence, when they’re completely rapt . . . I love seeing their attention, holding their attention. Silence in a group of kids is always a miracle.”
Rudolph began his one-man-show business career when he was a teenager and sharpened his moves as a street performer in the early 1980s at Seattle’s Bumbershoot and Northwest Folklife festivals.
Dancing circuit
He later competed on the ballroom-dance circuit, specializing in a dance called American Smooth, and has since taught just about everything from Viennese waltz to salsa at the Four Seasons Dance Studio in Minneapolis.
Web video
In a video on his Web site, www.MikaeltheMime.com, Rudolph demonstrates his skill by dancing tenderly with only a dress as his partner.
Performances like those he’ll give this Friday, he said, are a kind of finale for all of the other work he must do as a self-employed movement artist.
“I spend a lot of time marketing, traveling and setting up,” Rudolph said. “The hour that I’m performing is dessert.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladaily news.com.
