Brace yourself, the 30th annual London International Mime Festival has begun. As always the choices are rich. You can go to the show where a gross muscular immense puppet wolf performs oral sex on a naked puppet woman; or the one where renowned Chinese Pole specialist João Paulo Dos Santos dances and tumbles to the trumpeting of roller-skating musician Guillaume Dutrieux; or the piece where a wordless history of human migration is communicated by images set to the ominous viscera-level music of Bob Rutman and the Steel Cello Ensemble.
Mimefest's programme has more or less every genre mashup you can think of. Solo streetdance? Solo multimedia streetdance? Solo multimedia butoh streetdance? Hiroaki Umeda’s Duo/Montevideoaki is all these things (and more!). There is a mime account of the life of Mozart; and a Korean Sadari Movement Laboratory version of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck which builds its set and props entirely from wooden chairs; and also a guy called Pep Bou who wears a suit with no tie and has toupee-ish hair and does something probably quite tame with giant bubbles (this is the one you take your grandma to).
But you’ll have to be quick: tickets are going fast. Festival favourites Faulty Optic have already sold out but that is OK because unless it has improved since its debut last year, the new show, Dead Wedding, is not their best. blackSKYwhite are another returning company, and maybe again the new piece, Astronomy for Insects, is not the best ground on which to meet them. Six or seven years ago bSw did a show called Bertrand's Toys which people still talk about it in a tone of what I guess might be described as reverential horror. And it's like if you weren't there you don't know. Astronomy has flashes of the same evil that in Toys was reportedly so powerful and overwhelming, and again features a woman who can dislocate parts of herself you would not think a person could dislocate, but I saw the show in Edinburgh last August and I hope in the time since it has been changed and strengthened. It felt like it was halfway there, almost a nightmare, and by all accounts they can do better.
It’s hard to know what to recommend. I think Collectif Petit Travers, a French ensemble circus outfit, will be sweet and human and uplifiting. I think Woyzeck will be slick and impressive and probably a good introduction to physical theatre if you've never seen a production which self-identifies as such. I think your grandma will love Pep Bou. And the absolute safest bet: Teatro Corsario, the one with the randy wolf, will be erotic and scarring and ultra-perverse. The last show they did was full of necrophilia and graphic puppet sex and at the end a colossal spider—as big as the stage's proscenium arch—descended from the ceiling and began to unfold and outreach its limbs into and among the terrified audience...
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Frieze Art Fair to launch new section for young galleries in 2012
Frieze have today announced details for the 2012 edition, their tenth art fair in London. Taking place...