Vamos Theatre’s Finding Joy, a heart-warming, heroic and comic full-mask adventure.
When: 8th January – 1st February 2014
Where: At various London venues including Barbican, Jacksons Lane, Southbank Centre and Royal Opera House
£: Ticket prices vary depending on the event
What is it?
The London International Mime Festival began in 1977 and is now one of the world’s most influential visual theatre festivals.
This year will be the 38th London International Mime Festival (LIMF) and will feature the return of visual theatre maestro Philippe Genty and Company, with a new version of his classic fantasy dreamscape Forget Me Not at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Also at the festival will be Compagnie 111 and Aurélien Bory’s What’s Become of You? a flamenco-themed show with a difference at the Barbican Theatre. At Jacksons Lane, Vamos Theatre will be performing Finding Joy, a heart-warming, heroic and comic full-mask adventure.
This year’s festival opens at The Platform Theatre in King’s Cross, with two productions in its own custom-built circular arena. L’Après Midi d’un Foehn is an exquisite dance for airborne plastic bag ‘ballerinas’ to music by Debussy, and Vortex its much darker companion piece, explores identity and pulls us directly into the eye of the hurricane.
Man Drake bring an extraordinary piece of physical storytelling about a tense ménage a trois based on actual events with Anatomia Publica and Città Di Ebla’s The Dead uses movement and real-time photography in a show inspired by James Joyce’s 1914 novella of the same name.
In the very heart of the West End at the Leicester Square Theatre, ‘gentleman juggler’ and all-round variety showman, Mat Ricardo will be performing. Ricardo is famed for his fast hands, smart mouth and flash suits.
At the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room there’s silent movie-inspired magic from Holland in Jakop Ahlbom and cult indie-band Alamo Race Track’s Lebensraum. There will also be uproarious physical comedy from France’s Patrice Thibaud and Philippe Leygnac in Cocorico and a male/female relationship played out through daring hand-to-hand acrobatics in Compagnie Fet a Mà’s Cru. Concluding the Purcell Room season, Spitfire Company from the Czech Republic presents a powerful vision of triumph and loss, physical combat and exhaustion in One Step Before the Fall, inspired by Muhammad Ali’s most challenging fight; his battle with Parkinson’s disease.
The festival line-up will be complimented by a full programme of workshops and artists’ talks.
More info: www.mimelondon.com