DIMITRI - Man, father, artist. A life on the stage

This year’s financial statement – covering the 2021 financial year – contains a substantial monograph on Dimitri Jakob Müller, known professionally as “Dimitri”, who was born in Ascona on 18 September 1935 and died in Borgnone in Centovalli on 19 July 2016. He was a famous Swiss circus performer, mime and theatre actor.

His meeting with Jean Andreff at Circus Knie at the age of seven was a eureka moment for the future clown. He realised that his vocation was to become a circus performer and that he would do anything to achieve his goal.

After leaving school, he attended a ceramics course while also taking lessons in acting, music, dance and acrobatics. While still a young man, he began performing in a few student shows, where he created his first numbers as a clown and mime.

In 1954, he moved to Aix-en-Provence in France, and then to Paris the following year, where he followed an intensive course of study in mime performance, acrobatics and tightrope walking. Just one of the things he did at the time was become a student of the famous actor Marcel Marceau, who recruited him for a couple of mime shows. In the French capital, he also performed in the prestigious Circus Medrano.

In 1959, he gave his first solo performance in his native Ascona, to great success and admiration. The boy became a man and, as fate would have it, he joined Circus Knie – the very institution that had fascinated him all those years before. A succession of performances on countless tours in Europe, America, China, Japan and Australia then followed.

Among Dimitri’s many accomplishments, there are a few particularly significant ones we have to mention: In 1971, he and his wife Gunda founded a theatre in Verscio (in the canton of Ticino) and, four years later, the Scuola Teatro Dimitri, together with Richard Weber. In 1978, he founded the Compagnia Teatro Dimitri and in 1981 the Dimitri Foundation.