London International Mime Festival
Encyclopedia
The London International Mime Festival (LIMF) is an annual theatre
event in London
. Its directors are Joseph Seelig and Helen Lannaghan, winners of the International Theatre Institute Award for Excellence.
LIMF features live art
, new circus, clown
, object and physical theatre
at various central London venues. It was established in 1977 by Joseph Seelig and Nola Rae
and it is the longest running event of its kind in the world.
London International Mime Festival
Wednesday 11 - Sunday 29 January 2012
‘This epic festival showcases some of the most gaspworthy theatre you will see all year.’ The Guardian
“The consistently innovative London International Mime Festival knows no boundaries.”
Bruce Dessau, Evening Standard
London International Mime Festival is Europe’s leading showcase for ground-breaking visual theatre, starting each year off with a dynamic programme of award-winning new circus, performance art, physical and object theatre - a host of more or less wordless shows that defy categorization.
“LIMF now functions as a very high-level international festival of dance, circus and puppet theatre. The shows have been carefully selected and curated, so whatever you see is likely to be, at the very least, inventive and interesting.”
Andrew Haydon, The Guardian
Staged across six prestigious London venues, highlights of the 2012 festival include a rare visit to London by Wales’ internationally acclaimed NoFit State Circus in a co-production with France’s Tattoo Theatre; the UK premières of Camille Boitel’s astonishing visual cacophony, L’Immédiat, at the Barbican Theatre, Belgium’s acrobat-illusionist, Claudio Stellato at Southbank Centre, and Japanese butoh/street-dance icon, Hiroaki Umeda, at the Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House.
The season opens at the Soho Theatre with Blind Summit’s The Table, the 2011 Edinburgh ‘Fringe First’ award-winning show from the innovators who created memorable puppetry for Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly and Simon McBurney’s A Dog’s Heart at ENO.
SOUTHBANK CENTRE
From Switzerland, Baccala Clowns (Camilla Pessi and Simone Fassari) bring a consummate mix of classic and modern clowning to the Purcell Room. Pss Pss was created last year with circus-theatre expert Louis Spagna and brings together numbers that have won awards at major circus festivals in China, France and Russia.
Created in 1997 by two former members of the Marcel Marceau Company, Sara Mangano and Pierre-Yves Massip, French troupe Autour Du Mime make their LIMF début at the Purcell Room. Based on a poem by Jacques Prévert (writer of the celebrated film, Les Enfants du Paradis), Tell Me The Truth is the headline in a mixed-bill programme, the story of lovers in a tomented relationship.
Toron Blues' Tendre Suie is also inspired by a great literary work, Jean Paul Satre's Huis Clos. It's an enigmatic and gripping piece about two women whose purpose and identity remains suspended metaphorically - and indeed literally, performed by young French rope and aerial specialists, Clementine Lamouret and Elsa Caillat.
Milan-born and Belgium-based Claudio Stellato offers a mix of theatrical illusion and magic. L'Autre is the acrobat’s take on the alter-ego within, impulsive and oblivious to rules and reason.
From Spain, Kulunka Teatro bring a heart-warming mask-theatre production to LIMF about an elderly couple with Alzheimer's, the eponymous André and Dorine, who need to remember who they were so as not to forget who they are. André and Dorine has toured extensively in Spain and South America, and comes to London following performances in New York. It was an award winner at the Birmingham European Theatre Festival in 2011.
Leading the renaissance of contemporary circus in the UK, Wales' NoFit State Circus features at this year's festival with Mundo Paralelo, a show directed by Mladen Materic of French group Tattoo Theatre, whose productions have been invited to many of Europe’s most important festivals. As superb, acrobatic performers move from dollhouse streets to life-size rooftop platforms, interwoven stories unfold with swooping aerial moves and gravity defying skills. Mundo Paralelo brings circus and theatre together in a Picasso-blue-hued world of dreams where weird, wonderful and impossible feats are the norm.
BARBICAN
French new circus artist Camille Boitel brings L'Immediat to the Barbican Theatre, a tumultuous visual metaphor for chaotic modern times. Amidst a stage crammed with machinery, objects and bric-a-brac of every kind, seven acrobat-adventurers, defy a tsunami of unstable forces with optimism, dark humour and breathtaking physical skills.
Based in London Theatre Ad Infinitum is an award-winning international ensemble that is developing new and original theatre for a multi-cultural audience. Translunar Paradise, a moving story about love, loss and remembrance, is their latest work, told entirely through gesture and with a haunting, live accordion accompaniment.
Australian Fleur Elise Noble's highly-acclaimed and much travelled 2 Dimensional Life of Her arrives in London for the first time to play at the Barbican Pit. Set in an artist’s studio, this multi-media mix of drawing, animation, puppetry, projection and paper mesmerises and confounds as images reproduce themselves and go beyond the control of their creator.
LINBURY STUDIO THEATRE, ROYAL OPERA HOUSE
Tokyo-based multidisciplinary artist Hiroaki Umeda. Umeda is a performer, sound artist and lighting designer; his work is both sublime and violent. Combining street dance and butoh, Holistic Strata thrills with its hurricane of digital imagery, while in Haptic an exquisite visual and sonic experience is created as bright hues shift and morph with Umeda's fluid movements.
Britain’s celebrated Gandini Juggling troupe presents the full-length première of Smashed, a sensational mix of skill and theatricality inspired by the work of German dance-theatre legend, Pina Bausch. Nine brilliant jugglers, eighty apples and flying crockery combine in a series of nostalgic filmic scenes hinting at tense relationships, lost love and the quaintness of afternoon tea.
ROUNDHOUSE
Théâtre Tête De Pioche is a young Anglo-French company founded in 2009 by former director of the Mirepoix Puppetry Festival, Christine Saint-André. Fragments de Vie is a beautiful, miniature performance/installation for 40 people, a cabinet of curiosities conjuring sights and sounds of a vanished rural world.
Invisible Thread is Faulty Optic co-founder/artistic director Liz Walker’s new venture. Plucked inhabits the same Faulty Optic world of weird mechanical sets and strange animated figures, and uses live video-feed painting, object theatre, puppetry and animation to tell a scary fairy tale for adults. It’s haunting, funny and tragic.
SOHO THEATRE
The Table is the new show from 2011 Edinburgh Fringe First award winners, Blind Summit, creators of puppetry for Anthony Minghella's Madam Butterfly and Simon McBurney’s A Dog’s Heart at English National Opera, and their own sell-out shows, Low Life and 1984. The Table is a glorious tongue in cheek triptych featuring a ballet of disembodied heads, a story told entirely by pictures emerging from a briefcase, and a tiny Moses with a cardboard head full of lonely wisdom and pictures. Dark humour meets flat pack technology.
JACKSONS LANE
A brand new show from Geneva Foster-Gluck’s Sugar Beast Circus features at Jacksons Lane, recognized as a power-house for innovative, contemporary circus and a new venue for LIMF in 2012. Event Dimension is promenade and interactive circus, taking on aspects of a scientific lecture and a TV game show, with a hint of sci-fi B movie, all combining to question our notion of time.
Full programme online at www.mimelondon.com and free festival brochure available from 5th December at 020 7637 5661.
The 2012 London International Mime Festival gratefully acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
event in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. Its directors are Joseph Seelig and Helen Lannaghan, winners of the International Theatre Institute Award for Excellence.
LIMF features live art
Live Art
Live Art is the fifth album released by Béla Fleck and the Flecktones and their first non-studio album. It was recorded live at various concerts between 1992 and 1996 and features ten guest musicians....
, new circus, clown
Clown
Clowns are comic performers stereotypically characterized by the grotesque image of the circus clown's colored wigs, stylistic makeup, outlandish costumes, unusually large footwear, and red nose, which evolved to project their actions to large audiences. Other less grotesque styles have also...
, object and physical theatre
Physical theatre
Physical theatre is used to describe any mode of performance that pursues storytelling or drama through primarily and secondarily physical and mental means. There are several quite distinct but indistinct traditions of performance which all describe themselves using the term "physical theatre",...
at various central London venues. It was established in 1977 by Joseph Seelig and Nola Rae
Nola Rae
Nola Rae MBE is an internationally renowned mime artist.-Early life and education:Rae was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1949 and migrated to London with her family in 1963....
and it is the longest running event of its kind in the world.
External links
- http://www.mimelondon.com, official website
London International Mime Festival
Wednesday 11 - Sunday 29 January 2012
‘This epic festival showcases some of the most gaspworthy theatre you will see all year.’ The Guardian
“The consistently innovative London International Mime Festival knows no boundaries.”
Bruce Dessau, Evening Standard
London International Mime Festival is Europe’s leading showcase for ground-breaking visual theatre, starting each year off with a dynamic programme of award-winning new circus, performance art, physical and object theatre - a host of more or less wordless shows that defy categorization.
“LIMF now functions as a very high-level international festival of dance, circus and puppet theatre. The shows have been carefully selected and curated, so whatever you see is likely to be, at the very least, inventive and interesting.”
Andrew Haydon, The Guardian
Staged across six prestigious London venues, highlights of the 2012 festival include a rare visit to London by Wales’ internationally acclaimed NoFit State Circus in a co-production with France’s Tattoo Theatre; the UK premières of Camille Boitel’s astonishing visual cacophony, L’Immédiat, at the Barbican Theatre, Belgium’s acrobat-illusionist, Claudio Stellato at Southbank Centre, and Japanese butoh/street-dance icon, Hiroaki Umeda, at the Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House.
The season opens at the Soho Theatre with Blind Summit’s The Table, the 2011 Edinburgh ‘Fringe First’ award-winning show from the innovators who created memorable puppetry for Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly and Simon McBurney’s A Dog’s Heart at ENO.
SOUTHBANK CENTRE
From Switzerland, Baccala Clowns (Camilla Pessi and Simone Fassari) bring a consummate mix of classic and modern clowning to the Purcell Room. Pss Pss was created last year with circus-theatre expert Louis Spagna and brings together numbers that have won awards at major circus festivals in China, France and Russia.
Created in 1997 by two former members of the Marcel Marceau Company, Sara Mangano and Pierre-Yves Massip, French troupe Autour Du Mime make their LIMF début at the Purcell Room. Based on a poem by Jacques Prévert (writer of the celebrated film, Les Enfants du Paradis), Tell Me The Truth is the headline in a mixed-bill programme, the story of lovers in a tomented relationship.
Toron Blues' Tendre Suie is also inspired by a great literary work, Jean Paul Satre's Huis Clos. It's an enigmatic and gripping piece about two women whose purpose and identity remains suspended metaphorically - and indeed literally, performed by young French rope and aerial specialists, Clementine Lamouret and Elsa Caillat.
Milan-born and Belgium-based Claudio Stellato offers a mix of theatrical illusion and magic. L'Autre is the acrobat’s take on the alter-ego within, impulsive and oblivious to rules and reason.
From Spain, Kulunka Teatro bring a heart-warming mask-theatre production to LIMF about an elderly couple with Alzheimer's, the eponymous André and Dorine, who need to remember who they were so as not to forget who they are. André and Dorine has toured extensively in Spain and South America, and comes to London following performances in New York. It was an award winner at the Birmingham European Theatre Festival in 2011.
Leading the renaissance of contemporary circus in the UK, Wales' NoFit State Circus features at this year's festival with Mundo Paralelo, a show directed by Mladen Materic of French group Tattoo Theatre, whose productions have been invited to many of Europe’s most important festivals. As superb, acrobatic performers move from dollhouse streets to life-size rooftop platforms, interwoven stories unfold with swooping aerial moves and gravity defying skills. Mundo Paralelo brings circus and theatre together in a Picasso-blue-hued world of dreams where weird, wonderful and impossible feats are the norm.
BARBICAN
French new circus artist Camille Boitel brings L'Immediat to the Barbican Theatre, a tumultuous visual metaphor for chaotic modern times. Amidst a stage crammed with machinery, objects and bric-a-brac of every kind, seven acrobat-adventurers, defy a tsunami of unstable forces with optimism, dark humour and breathtaking physical skills.
Based in London Theatre Ad Infinitum is an award-winning international ensemble that is developing new and original theatre for a multi-cultural audience. Translunar Paradise, a moving story about love, loss and remembrance, is their latest work, told entirely through gesture and with a haunting, live accordion accompaniment.
Australian Fleur Elise Noble's highly-acclaimed and much travelled 2 Dimensional Life of Her arrives in London for the first time to play at the Barbican Pit. Set in an artist’s studio, this multi-media mix of drawing, animation, puppetry, projection and paper mesmerises and confounds as images reproduce themselves and go beyond the control of their creator.
LINBURY STUDIO THEATRE, ROYAL OPERA HOUSE
Tokyo-based multidisciplinary artist Hiroaki Umeda. Umeda is a performer, sound artist and lighting designer; his work is both sublime and violent. Combining street dance and butoh, Holistic Strata thrills with its hurricane of digital imagery, while in Haptic an exquisite visual and sonic experience is created as bright hues shift and morph with Umeda's fluid movements.
Britain’s celebrated Gandini Juggling troupe presents the full-length première of Smashed, a sensational mix of skill and theatricality inspired by the work of German dance-theatre legend, Pina Bausch. Nine brilliant jugglers, eighty apples and flying crockery combine in a series of nostalgic filmic scenes hinting at tense relationships, lost love and the quaintness of afternoon tea.
ROUNDHOUSE
Théâtre Tête De Pioche is a young Anglo-French company founded in 2009 by former director of the Mirepoix Puppetry Festival, Christine Saint-André. Fragments de Vie is a beautiful, miniature performance/installation for 40 people, a cabinet of curiosities conjuring sights and sounds of a vanished rural world.
Invisible Thread is Faulty Optic co-founder/artistic director Liz Walker’s new venture. Plucked inhabits the same Faulty Optic world of weird mechanical sets and strange animated figures, and uses live video-feed painting, object theatre, puppetry and animation to tell a scary fairy tale for adults. It’s haunting, funny and tragic.
SOHO THEATRE
The Table is the new show from 2011 Edinburgh Fringe First award winners, Blind Summit, creators of puppetry for Anthony Minghella's Madam Butterfly and Simon McBurney’s A Dog’s Heart at English National Opera, and their own sell-out shows, Low Life and 1984. The Table is a glorious tongue in cheek triptych featuring a ballet of disembodied heads, a story told entirely by pictures emerging from a briefcase, and a tiny Moses with a cardboard head full of lonely wisdom and pictures. Dark humour meets flat pack technology.
JACKSONS LANE
A brand new show from Geneva Foster-Gluck’s Sugar Beast Circus features at Jacksons Lane, recognized as a power-house for innovative, contemporary circus and a new venue for LIMF in 2012. Event Dimension is promenade and interactive circus, taking on aspects of a scientific lecture and a TV game show, with a hint of sci-fi B movie, all combining to question our notion of time.
Full programme online at www.mimelondon.com and free festival brochure available from 5th December at 020 7637 5661.
The 2012 London International Mime Festival gratefully acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.