For me LIMF always opens January, opens the year really.
Among a generally excellent programme, I think Gandini Juggling's 4 x 4 is particularly exciting – from a sector POV because partnering with ballet opens up a different level, and different kind, of press/attention; and from a sitting in the audience POV because I saw a work-in-progress last year and liked it a lot – it was only a collection of some scenes/sequences but even then it felt like a little dance between two rhythms that were similar but discrete. Also got the sense, as I do with some of the minimalist compositions that the Gandinis follow, that it was alternately hiding and revealing itself – dividing attention between the beauty of the image of the present moment and awareness of its constituent parts. So: good stuff, worth watching.
I also saw Iona Kewney and Joseph Quimby (Knights of the Invisible) give a twenty-minute performance some years ago and it was intense, feral, covered in dirt – it reminded me of Alasdair Gray a bit; same sort of relationship to history/myth as broken signs half-buried in a peat bog. (Maybe it's a Scottish thing.) The Bromance boys have come and gone, but Jacksons Lane continues the British invasion with Noodles and Stateless. And then the last thing I want to point to: Cie 111's Plexus, which is following on from Questcequetudeviens? as another portrait piece working with a solo dancer. That stage aesthetic is crisp, plus it's got nice copy: 'Entrapped by five thousand cords, a forest of brilliantly lit strings, a warrior-woman conquers her environment so that she floats, like a black angel, in a sumptuous cage that she can only leave by vanishing completely.'
Over in the States, CN ICE concludes its historic first edition tonight in New York, while, not far up the road, APAP rolls on, hundreds of stray promoters jumping and pawing the mesh of their enclosures to attract the attention of buyers. In Belgium, CircusCentrum are running a tight little festival called Smells Like Circus. Whichever way you cut it, this is a nice programme – full shows from Chloé Moglia, Cie Nuua, Rode Boom and others, plus works-in-progress from the likes of Cie Ea Eo and Alexander Vantournhout.
Back in France, two big festivals. First, in Marseilles, the Biennale Internationale des arts du Cirque. The programme has heft; one could test it in the palm of the hand and be pleased with its weight and authority. Among the 60 companies presenting work (a good number of whom the festival managed to cram into their trailer), I'm most intrigued by the prospect of Martin Zimmermann going solo (I like the images for the show too – they get better as you go down), and by Nouveau Cirque National de Chine's Alice in China (probably it should be approached with some caution, but I like the idea of Alice in Wonderland transplanted to a contemporary urban China which has itself been transplanted to a world of acrobatics and bitching human pyramids).
Second, there's Cirque de Demain in Paris. The whole thing is a big pageant, but fun in its own glitzy way. I'll try to go this year in the expectation of seeing Jacob Sharpe – a man who sold his soul, taste, and sense of shame to the devil at the crossroads – shatter all competition. When he wins two gold medals and six special prizes I'll drop my trousers to reveal a pair of tiny pink shorts; a heart-warming moment, like in Cool Runnings.
Couple-three smaller things to close out: there's only one day left, but Christophe Raynaud de Lage, the recording angel of French circus (and crocodiles), has an exhibition in Antony; Circo Aereo, who produce and premiere one new work approximately every six days, are showing another new piece at Cirko; and Sisters run and run at Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, the whole of the month.