The 11th International Festival of Nonverbal Theatre celebrates the legacy of Jean-Gaspard Deburau, the inventor of modern pantomime, who died 160 years ago after bringing the world the first of the white-faced speechless tragicomics. Deburau was born Jan Kašpar Dvořák in 1796 in the festival's home of Kolín, 40 minutes by train from Prague, to a family of acrobats. He moved to Paris in his teens, changed his name and then changed the performing arts.

This year's festival features artists and troupes from France, Italy, the Netherlands and Finland, along with Czech productions such as Deburau, by the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. The quasi-biographical performance tells Kolín's silent son's story by surrounding his character with a speaking cast to whom he responds in gesture.

The festival kicks off Sept. 7 with France's Cahin-Caha, a troupe featuring the American-born actor Daniel Gulko in a solo performance, Moby in Prison. Gulko acts out the saga of a Moby Dick–obsessed inmate who pleads his case while staging the white whale's story from his cell. The piece debuted at Prague's Letní Letná festival and will continue to be fine-tuned in Kolín, with the official premiere of the finished work slated for next spring.

Gulko calls himself a "terrible mime," and describes what he does in broad terms. "You could say I do clown," says the 44-year-old San Diego, California, native who trained in Montreal. "I did a lot of experimental theater and dance and circus for a while. I mainly call it theater — people come to a show and have an experience in a dark place."

Versatility is important to Gulko, who began Cahin-Caha's cirque batard, or bastard circus, act in 1998 but has tackled all manner of "theater" in 29 years of performing in outlets ranging from amateur stage productions to Montreal street theater. At the first Kolín festival, he performed in three different pieces: a solo street show, a solo stage show and a group performance.

Moby in Prison is his first solo performance in a decade, though he's quick to point out that it's not really a one-man show: Cahin-Caha's Bob Lipman provides a guitar and electronic-music soundtrack, and other members handle stage design and direction. With the piece still a work in progress, it's likely that even more hands will eventually become involved.

Any yet-to-be-completed portions of sound and stage action will be filled in this time around with improv by Lipman and Gulko. "We wanted to be sure that the experience is interesting for me — and especially for the audience," says Gulko, whose preparation involves as much physical training as rehearsal to deal with the demands of motion-intensive theater. "It means there's the possibility for the present moment to influence what's going on," he says. "What's happening [in one performance] will never happen again."

Gulko can be a compelling performer. When he was doing street theater, he once got an audience of 500 people to follow him a kilometer (0.6 miles) before he finished his act. Now that he's got an internationally renowned troupe and an established name as a performer, he finds that he has more freedom to take audiences places they wouldn't expect — even if they never leave their seats.

"When I stopped doing street theater, it was because I got sick of doing what people expected of me," Gulko says. "I wanted to do things people wouldn't think were theater."