Dance

There’s no sense in beating a dead mime. I’m referring to the late Marcel Marceau, whose passing last year has robbed me of a handy whipping boy. Invariably it was the silent, white-faced clown he so famously embodied that I was compelled to drag out every January to herald the latest London International Mime Festival. Why? To contrast the Frenchman’s often twee inventions with the staggering and sophisticated range of live, visually based theatre and performance that the LIMF has been showcasing for the past three decades.

Thirty years is no mean benchmark. During that time, the artistic field that festival directors Helen Lannaghan and Joseph Seelig have ploughed has expanded immeasurably, whether it be in the form of circus, puppetry or object animation and physical movement. Yet, despite all the advances made under the mime banner, neither of them has a bad word to say about Marceau. ‘He’s a major reference point,’ offers Seelig. ‘He created such a strong brand,’ adds Lannaghan. ‘He really had a great physical ability to tell simple stories that people liked.’ (For the record, the LIMF presented Marceau’s company only once, in 1995.)
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With Marceau gone, it’s time to move on to new definitions of what mime is and can do. ‘Just as dance embraces a million different forms of movement,’ Seelig says, ‘so does mime.’ But, he admits, ‘in many ways it’s been a problem word for us because it’s got such a negative connotation. Maybe we misappropriated it. We’ve never been about that sort of work.’

Because it predates language, mime is acknowledged as one of the earliest mediums of human self-expression. ‘Mime means to mimic life,’ explains Lannaghan. Starting as a primitive communications tool, it developed into a key Greco-Roman art form that, over centuries, has further evolved into such enduring incarnations as commedia dell’arte, pantomime, vaudeville, music-hall slapstick and silent cinema.

The instigation for the LIMF came from Nola Rae, an accomplished clown recently awarded an MBE for services to drama and mime. (Her latest show ‘Mozart Preposteroso!’ is part of the 2008 festival.) In 1977 Rae, approached Seelig, who was then running The Cockpit, with an idea for spotlighting the alternative, mainly wordless kind of theatre that she and others were practising. The ‘build-it-and-they-will-come’ approach worked a treat, as public, press and, eventually, funding bodies sat up and took notice. As they continue to do.

‘Every year, the festival has new adherents,’ says Seelig, ‘because every year there are new discoveries. We’re still here offering things you can’t see on television or in the commercial theatre.’ Although he takes no credit for it, it’s possible that, without the LIMF to pave the way, such key organisations, events and genres as BAC, LIFT and new circus might have struggled to materialise on the UK’s theatrical scene. Seelig and Lannaghan also take pride in the fact that their festival has championed a host of sterling companies and artists (Theatre de Complicite, The Right Size, Improbable’s Phelim McDermott, David Glass) in their earliest creative phases.

These days, the LIMF is committed to presenting work from all over the globe. What, then, are among the hot tickets in the 2008 festival? Lannaghan, who joined Seelig in 1987, mentions in quick succession Japanese dance-circus practitioner Hiroaki Umeda (‘He’s mesmerising, and not just because he’s got a great body’), the Franco-English duo BP Zoom (‘There’s something wonderful about watching mature performers doing stupid things’) and the erotic Spanish puppet troupe Teatro Corsario (‘They reach parts that other puppet companies can’t’).
I can heartily recommend several other productions, from Gecko’s comic and potentially controversial ‘The Arab and The Jew’ to the pioneering Korean director Do-Wan Im’s razor-sharp take on Georg Büchner’s ‘Woyzeck’ for Sadari Movement Laboratory. Set to a soundtrack of Piazzolla tangos, this bitterly funny and unexpectedly moving drama features immaculate ensemble work. It also makes brilliant use of small wooden chairs to define space and identify locations from prison to cemetery.

But the most unique show in this year’s LIMF is undoubtedly ‘Paso Doble’, a two-hander like nothing you’ve ever seen. The collaborators are Hungarian-born (but Orleans-based) choreographer Josef Nadj and Catalan visual artist Miquel Barceló. Initially their performing area looks peculiarly edible, like a giant slab of chocolate. It’s actually a huge wall and floor of moist red clay imported from France. Using shovels and pickaxes, sculpting tools and their bare hands, the two men dig, gouge, scrape, slice, poke, punch and insert themselves into the material as if in some intensely messy act of mutual transubstantiation. Events take increasingly surreal turns as the two begin to shape and wear the clay as grotesque masks, monstrous appendages or stiflingly sloppy armour. Think Jackson Pollock and then let your imagination push far beyond him.

‘Paso Doble’ effectively contrasts the offstage personalities of its creators: Nadj sober, pale and exhausted in the eastern European manner, and Barceló sporting a naturally sunnier Latin temperament. ‘I’m very shy,’ the latter says, but it’s hard to believe it of this round and jolly fellow. ‘I hate people looking when I paint. To me that’s very violent. Because to make paintings you need to be alone and concentrated. It’s sacred work.’ So how does he explain his expansive presence in this show? ‘In the end the public gives me a big energy. Here they’re the point.’
Barceló pegs his creative partnership with Nadj as ‘very intuitive. It’s like a ceremony or a ritual initiation, not a representation. If we feel something is very theatrical or dramatic, we remove it.’ The show, he continues, ‘is a way for us to go much closer and live in proximity with my work. I like a lot the sensuality of bodies and clay. Josef’s body becomes part of the matter. It’s not a metaphor.’

The London International Mime Festival is at various venues Jan 12-Feb 23. www.mimefest.co.uk