He’s Not Sure What He Does, but He Knows It’s Not Mime

Leonard Pitt isn’t quite sure what to call his art.

It has elements of traditional drama, but it’s avant-garde enough to be called “performance art.” Lately, it’s been called “new vaudeville.” He calls himself “a movement artist.”

There is one thing Pitt doesn’t want his act called. Mime.

The inaccuracy of that label will become evident to anyone who sees, and hears, Pitt’s performance of “Not for Real,” tonight through Sunday at Sushi Performance Gallery. The San Francisco-based performer lets loose a variety of voices in the solo show, which received the 1987 Bay Area Critics Circle Award and the 1988 Actor of the Year award from Chicago’s Academy of Theatre Artists.

The “mime” label is an understandable link to Pitt’s past. In the early 1960s, he moved from his native Detroit to Paris to study with Etienne Decroux, who was Marcel Marceau’s teacher. The physical lessons of mime remain an influence on Pitt’s performance style, but staging and text play equally vital roles.

“We try to create very strong visual images,” Pitt said. “I do these things that are a little strange, but the content of the images is left open to a degree so you can invest your imagination. It’s like good radio theater, which doesn’t tell you (precisely) what’s going on. It isn’t explicit; it leaves tons of room for people to see what they want to see.”

“Not for Real” was a collaboration with Rinde Eckert, another Bay Area performer who met Pitt when both were members of George Coates Performance Works. The piece had its premiere in 1987 at Life on the Water, the San Francisco alternative performance space where Pitt is co-artistic director.

“I wanted to do a one-man show, so we went to the studio and just started with a few simple ideas,” Pitt said, adding that the approach is standard procedure “in this kind of theater.”

Still, he avoided labeling “this kind of theater.”

“I don’t like the term new vaudeville ,” he said. “Artists like to think we’re bigger than any descriptive term. I’m not that interested in ‘performance art’ either. I’m interested in performance that somehow expresses the full spectrum of emotion--work that’s funny and tragic.”

Pitt found a conduit for that spectrum in the production’s central character: an elderly man who goes on a journey to uncover his past.

“Rinde and I both have a good visual sense, and we were looking for moments that were theatrically compelling,” Pitt said. “The old man was the launching pad. He’s a very erudite gentleman, dressed in a funky suit, who loves history and all its minutiae. We came upon the idea of sitting him at a desk with a wall of maps behind him. It emerged into a scenario of a man looking for his past, wanting to reconnect with family and culture.”

The old man’s voyage is relayed through a mix of stunning visual effects and Pitt’s versatile characterizations, which range from a prim, gray-haired woman who has a new and improved speed-reading technique, to the Sun King, Louis XIV, who is portrayed as a rapping, dancing fool.

“There are several sub-texts,” Pitt said. “It sounds real straightforward, but looking at it is quite different. It’s really non-linear.”