• London International Mime Festival

    MPTA/Mathurin Bolze, Du Goudron Et Des Plumes | photo Christophe Raynaud de Lage

    The most resolutely outward-looking of the UK's visual theatre festivals (it imports the large majority of its programme) and perhaps now the oldest, LIMF has been running over 30 years and a look back at the programme archive proves their eye for for picking the greats before they've made it. In London, and, more widely, the country, it's unchallenged in size and reach. Certainly there's nothing else going in January.

    It's not a hub festival, strung as it is over two weeks and half a dozen central London venues, and the workshops it offers annually are half-hearted – in the main it's the same people running them each year, and the incoming artists and companies, who in some cases have come many hundred of miles, are seldom drawn upon.

    Over the years the festival has built up strong relationships with particular companies and artists (Aurelien Bory and Collectif Petit Travers have been favourites in recent years), and there are other recognisable trends to the programming – you can for instance be sure that there will be a Kids and Granny show, something gentle and soft and suitable for the whole family – but you can be sure too that there will be something unlike anything that's gone before.

    And there will always, always be at least one show that reflects the festival's taste for – relish for – the weird and the inscrutable. There are plenty of programmes out there that encompass strange or outlying work, but LIMF's unique victory has been to establish itself as the festival where mainstream audiences seek and pay for exactly this quality of esoterism – even if they do it only once a year. Hence and therefore: Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes.

  • Events Archive

    Compagnia 2+1, La Porta
    20/01/2011 to 23/01/2011
    Purcell Room
    London
    Compagnie 111 / Aurélien Bory, Plan B | Photo: Aglaé Bory
    18/01/2013 to 20/01/2013
    Queen Elizabeth Hall
    London
    Compagnie 111 / Aurelien Bory, Sans Objet | Photo: Aglaé Bory
    21/01/2011 to 23/01/2011
    Queen Elizabeth Hall
    London
    Gandini Juggling, Smashed
    24/01/2013 to 26/01/2013
    Linbury Studio Theatre
    London
    Toron Blues, Tendre Suie
    19/01/2012 to 22/01/2012
    Purcell Room
    London
    Compagnie Non Nova, Vortex | Photo: J. L. Beaujault
    08/01/2014 to 11/01/2014
    Platform Theatre
    London
    Gandini Juggling, Smashed
    18/01/2012 to 21/01/2012
    Linbury Studio Theatre
    London
    Simone Riccio, Nothing Moves If I Don't Push It | Photo: Ben Hopper
    18/01/2013 to 20/01/2013
    Jacksons Lane
    London
    Upswing, Fallen | Photo: Hilary Shedel
    24/01/2011 to 26/01/2011
    Purcell Room
    London
    Zimmermann & de Perrot, Hans Was Heiri | Photo: Mario Del Curto
    23/01/2013 to 26/01/2013
    The Barbican
    London

    Pages

  • Magazine

    By John Ellingsworth on 21 January 2010 in Reviews

    Sometimes it seems there's scarcely a juggler who's not deeply interested in mathematics and the sizeable body of music that closely abuts it.

    By John Ellingsworth on 20 January 2010 in Reviews

    Okidok got all kinds of laughs over the course of Slips Inside, but seemed particularly to generate isolated giggleloops that they would always stop to chastise, absolutely worsening the situation for whichever audience member was at that moment trying to control herself.

    By John Ellingsworth on 19 January 2010 in Reviews

    The Mill: a giant, suspended wheel, human-powered, wrapped in rope that runs out over a network of high pulleys to several smaller cogs. Four people tend it: one on the big wheel, one inside; two to perch upon the littler reels and walk them forward.

    By John Ellingsworth on 13 January 2010 in Reviews

    Played out on a raised square stage that tilts in all directions (slowly) as performers move their weight across it, Öper Öpis is the latest collaboration between clown Martin Zimmermann and DJ Dimitri de Perrot, featuring also a small assembled cast of European circus talents.

    By John Ellingsworth on 22 October 2009 in Features

    ‘Attention spans will be even shorter than now, perhaps too short for words. Stitched together from the strongest limbs of circus, puppetry, movement and dance, visual theatre is an unconquerable monster destined to overcome all other modes of discourse.’ - Joseph Seelig, co-director, London International Mime Festival.

    Sideshow searches for the strongest monsters in the 2010 line-up, including work from six countries and nine companies.

    Pages