Upswing's Fallen, receiving its London premiere during LIMF 2011
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Mime is a word much abused, the butt of jokes, a thing easily dismissed - but mime is not, nor has it ever been, limited to white-faced man-in-a-box antics. It’s an embracive term, incorporating dance, circus, puppetry and clowning, wordless story-telling of all kinds; it can even include - as in the case of Sans Objet by Aurélien Bory’s Compagnie 111 - robots.
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The London International Mime Festival is a celebration of physical theatre in all its forms. London's longest established international theatre season, it began life in the 1970s; the 2011 festival starts on 15 January and takes place at a range of venues across London including the Southbank Centre, the ICA, the Roundhouse, the Linbury Studio and the Barbican.
The line-up features companies from all across Europe and the US and highlights of this year’s festival include La Maldicion de Poe, a gothic thriller based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe from Spanish puppet theatre company Teatro Corsario (Purcell Room 15-19 January), the fantastical Hilum (ICA, 22-26 January) by France’s Les Antliaclastes and the world premiere of Faulty Optic’s Flogging a Dead Horse with its ‘surreal adult puppetry’ at the Roundhouse (27-30 January).
There’s also room for Finnish one-man circus via Circo Aereo at the Roundhouse (20-22 January) and the Barbican stages the energetic and inventive Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl (19-29 January) following a well-received run at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
In addition to this there’s some rather more traditional clowning from the Swiss Compagnia 2+1 (Purcell Room, 20-23 January) and, more contemplative in tone though not without humour, The Art of Dying by Danish duo Paolo Nani and Kristjan Ingimarsson (Purcell Room, 27-30 January).
Aerial artists Upswing present the London premiere of their new piece Fallen at the Southbank (Purcell Room, 24-26 January) and there’s a circus-theatre reworking of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in the French piece Du Goudron et des Plumes (Barbican, 26-29 January).
For further details of the 2011 London International Mime Festival visit:MimeFest.co.uk
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