LIMF Modes II

Wow. The weird and wonderful world of the London International Mime Festival continued.

First up this week were BlackSkyWhite from Russia with a production called Astronomy for Insects, one of the most peculiar, disturbing and downright sinister things I have ever had the (great) pleasure to see. Impossible to describe except by reference to the Other; imagine vintage doctor Who choreographed by Punchdrunk, or Kafka’s Metamorphosis performed by the Teletubbies/In the Night Garden people, or Quartermass animated by the Brothers Quay and you might get somewhere close. We may have been on a space ship peopled by our ancestors or descendants; or witnessing life from the consciousness of a still born puppet/human/Pierrot hybrid. Or maybe not.

Next up was Dead Wedding, a collaboration between puppeteers Faulty Optic and the very wonderful abstract electronica /contemporary classical composer and performer Mira Calix (see previous posts, especially http://robingrebsonsguidefortheperplexed.blogspot.com/2007/03/mira-calix-man-of-mode.html). Mira must be one of my favourite musicians of the last few years. This was a haunting, uncanny, troubling and often moving re-creation of the Orpheus myth, imagining his desperate attempts to be reunited with Eurydice where the Greek legend ends, after his previous rescue attempt has resulted in failure and death.

I guess what this show, and LIMF as a whole, proves, is that the theatrical space is and should be a magical one; that you can create magic from two padded envelopes with minimal faces drawn on. In Dead Wedding the envelopes came to represent the hopes, dreams and agonies of the central characters. Excellent all round from the live score performed by Mira and her three person mini chamber group, brilliant puppetry using all sorts of different puppetry techniques, and some excellent animation thrown in as well.

Saturday’s double bill was a last minute booking from me because on the travels I had heard much talk about the companies, and was having such a great festival I thought why not? In the afternoon I caught a pared down version of Woyzeck by the wonderfully named Sadari Movement Laboratory from South Korea. Performed on a bare stage, the cast in black vests and tights, the only props were chairs, which were used as evolving metaphors for Woyzeck’s plight, from cages of the mind to physical imprisonment to twirling flashing symbols of mental breakdown. The soundtrack all Astor Piazzolla which gave the work a fresh, vibrant feel.

Similarly minimal, and again using chairs as a main prop, were the Collectif Petit Travers with their show Le Parti Pris Des Choses. I was initially a little worried that I was at last going to have to watch some real mime, and even some juggling, but I was quickly grabbed by this eccentric trio. Their main thing was try to make what was virtually a contemporary dance piece out of juggling and physical movement and some spectacular and scary trapeze work. I’ve never scene a Cirque du Soleil show but I have rather gotten the impression that their shows are empty, soulless, spectacles, carnivals of nothingness. Certainly in the intimacy of the Purcell Room, the trapeze work here seemed genuinely dangerous and thrilling. The narrative seemed to be a love triangle; the moral: never come between a man and his balls. The said (juggling) balls) were used in the climax in vast quantities to produce a spectacle of cosmic proportion. This was a show with a menacing undercurrent of violence and perversion, which of course how we used to think about the circus before cirque and their ilk sanitised them. It was also wonderfully, nostalgically French (you could all but imagine Gerard Dipidoo or Daniel Hotel walking on stage). And great chamber music before and during too.

On the closing day of the festival I caught Silent Tide, a collaboration between various instrument makers/musicians and puppeteers/performers. There was something odd about the scale of this performance – the giant industrial instruments and the tiny puppets, so tiny we were issued with opera glasses, and this was in the tiny theatre in the ICA. The puppetry was exquisite, but hard to watch in these conditions. Overall this was production somehow didn’t quite add up to more than its parts. The hand-out spoke of a show contrasting mankind’s need for movement with the immobility of urban life, but the scenes themselves – people marching to a city in the dessert (foot festival or invaders or nomads?), the dessert sky becoming filled with the cranes of the oil industry, the Manhattan skyscrapers full of restless unhappy people drinking / shopping / arguing themselves into extinction, somehow they were too familiar, too politically pre-loaded to work in such an abstract setting. The music was ominous and drone like but not that transporting. The finale however was brilliant, in which a female puppet figure starts to ape the movements of an angel that we saw crawling out of the dessert sand at the start (perhaps discovering the angel within her); she then climbs up the side of her apartment building, then up a kind of Oval type industrial building, before launching into flight, exploding into flames as she does so. It was an image of transcendence and enlightenment, and a magical way to end the festival for me this year.