London International Mime Festival 2021 Adjusted For Covid Constraints

Adjusted for Covid constraints, next year's festival will concentrate on live and online workshops led by top industry professionals, a series of specially commissioned short films to be shown online, a collection of rarely shown physical comedy and slapstick movies at Barbican Cinema 1, plus Zoom talks by various distinguished mime festival participants from recent years.

From festival directors Helen Lannaghan and Joseph Seelig:

"We're delighted to acknowledge the magnificent support of all the festival's featured artists, staff and venue partners in mounting this wide-ranging season in unprecedented conditions. We look forward to returning to our customary major programme of international live performance in January 2022 to include LIMF co-commissioned new productions from UK artists including Nikki Rummer, Opposable Thumb, Theatre Re, The PappyShow, Thick & Tight and Vamos Theatre."

Led by top physical and visual theatre professionals the workshops cater for all levels of experience and run throughout the month. The line-up includes Nola Rae's Upgrade Your Clown; Les Bubb's Playing with the Invisible; Blind Summit's How to do Puppetry Home Alone; Angela de Castro's clowning workshops How To Be A Stupid & How To Be Even More Stupid; Told by an Idiot's Building The Chaos, and three courses run in partnership with Shoreditch Town Hall; The PappyShow's How We Play and Move, Theatre Re's corporeal mime-based Falling Man, and David Glass Ensemble Learning's Devised and Physical Object Theatre which runs in both London and Manchester. American vaudeville performer, clown, mime, juggler and sleight of hand magician Avner Eisenberg ('astonishing and funny, a clown for the thinking man' New York Magazine) will present his Introduction to Eccentric Performing, approaching performing and creating comic material from a fresh perspective.

Six specially commissioned short films by British artists will launch on Monday 18 January, opening a 14-day season of free-to-view videos which also includes outstanding shows previously performed at LIMF. Shorts by renowned movement director Andrew Dawson, acrobatic circus company Barely Methodical Troupe, British Sign Language interpreter Jacqui Beckford, animator Gavin Glover, multimedia artists Davy and Kristin McGuire and movement director, actor and War Horse choreographer Toby Sedgwick will be followed by a retrospective selection of work from Russia's Akhe Engineering Theatre, Collectif Petit Travers, Compagnie 111, Les Antliaclastes and Olivier de Sagazan from France, Italy's Paolo Nani, Belgium's Compagnie Mossoux Bonté, Franco-Spanish duo Josef Nadj and Miguel Barcelo, Britain's Gandini Juggling, Gecko, Ockham's Razor and Thick & Tight, and the UK/Belgium collaboration of Andrew Dawson and Jos Houben.

Also from Belgium, Peeping Tom's 32 rue Vandenbranden (2015 Olivier Award Winner) and their later shows Mother and Father, all staged in partnership with the Barbican as part of earlier editions of the festival will be available for three nights over the weekends 22-24 January and 29-31 January.

Talks with artists will accompany the video series, beginning with LIMF founders Joseph Seelig and Nola Rae on how the festival began in 1977, followed by mask theatre companies Familie Flöz and Vamos Theatre, world-renowned juggler Sean Gandini, British Sign Language interpreter Jacqui Beckford, physical theatre directors Jos Houben and Hamish McColl, Told by An Idiot's Artistic Director Paul Hunter, Gecko's Amit Lahav, Theatre Re's Guillaume Pigé, and award-winning dance duo, Eleanor Perry and Daniel Hay-Gordon of Thick & Tight.

A special screening of slapstick shorts, Abel & Gordon and Friends, curated with the Barbican Cinema, will take place at Barbican Cinema 1 at 2pm on Sunday 31 January. Abel & Gordon have recorded a special introduction and a ScreenTalk with Festival directors Helen Lannaghan and Joseph Seelig for this screening. Long-term friends of the London International Mime Festival, the Brussels-based comedy duo Fiona Gordon and Dominique Abel will present three of their early shorts. In Rosita (1997) the pair are a fortune teller and her assistant, working out of a dilapidated caravan; in Merci Cupidon (1994) attraction sparks between their two oddball singletons in a strange, out-of-the-way nightspot; and in Walking on the Wild Side (2004), an awkward misunderstanding occurs between a man and a cleaning-lady. Fiona Gordon first appeared at LIMF in 1984 as part of Complicité's first show, Put It On Your Head, returning in 1989 with Dominique Abel in their two-hander, Danse des Poules.

Phenomenal physical performers, the duo are steeped in the grand French physical-comedy tradition of Jacques Tati and Pierre Etaix, who are also represented in the programme. In The School for Postmen (1947), Tati is a bumbling rural postman on a bike; meanwhile, in Rupture (1961), Etaix is a thwarted lover who finds inanimate objects conspire against him as he attempts to reply to a break-up letter.

Workshop bookings will go live at 10am on Monday 23 November - full details of all events can be found on the festival's Facebook page and at mimelondon.com

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