LIMF

Toron Blues

{Event(Dimension):}

« Still unchallenged

as the UK's first and finest importer of polyphonic ensemble lamentation, bleak coruscating puppetry, weepy mask dramas, awful clowns (~1 p/a), and intelligent circus, the London International Mime Festival makes it to its 34^th edition this year.

All kinds of good circus going on. Sideshow has already taken every opportunity in the last year to recommend Gandini Juggling's Smashed, exhibited first at Watch This Space as a spruce twenty-minute Pina Bausch tribute and extended for LIMF to a full-length stage piece – so get in there. Also on offer, there's modern world chaos from Compagnie L'Immédiat / Camille Boitel (L'Immédiat), some magie that might just be magie nouvelle from acrobat Claudio Stellato (L'Autre) and an uncharacterisic pros arch theatre piece from NoFit State Circus (Mundo Paralelo).

Advanced beings who've accepted the superiority of corde lisse over other circus disciplines will be delighted also by the presence of new French company Toron Blues with Tendre Suie. It's an aerial duet based on Sartre's play Huis Clos, which must rank somewhere in the same league as Woyzeck as one of the most adapted texts for physical theatre, and which depicts an afterlife where three people are locked in a room together to play out an eternal sick downward spiral of blame, dependency, prejudicial misapprehension, jealousy, sin and hate. Existentialism! Whee!

Finally, in the sad absence this year of anything to quite match the excitingly posthuman industrial robot arm of 2011, the Sideshow SF Circus Pick 2012 goes to Sugar Beast Circus' {Event(Dimension):}, a piece that formally reflects on the differences between classical and quantum physics (but through the kitsch visual language of gameshows). There's a detailed interview with director Geneva Foster Gluck in this, but boiling it down: it sounds challenging and ambitious and thoughtful. You should go. »