London International Mime Festival 2010 Announces Full Details Including Lineup

London's celebrated annual showcase for contemporary visual theatre presents 19 days of boundary-breaking performances featuring 15 companies from 10 countries. Productions come from Belgium, Italy, Russia, Israel, France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Switzerland and Britain, and include no fewer than 13 UK premieres.

Zimmermann & de Perrot (Switzerland) - Öper Öpis (UK premiere)

Barbican Theatre - part of barbicanbite10

Wednesday 13 - Saturday 16 January, 7.45pm; £10 - £26

Runs 70 minutes, no interval

Co-produced by London International Mime Festival (LIMF) and opening the season, Öper Öpis is a rich mix of visual arts, circus, music and dance. Choreographed and led by rubber-limbEd Martin Zimmermann, the company features some of Europe's top young circus artists.

On a precariously tilting, unstable floor a daredevil game of shifting relationships, balance and control unfolds. Driven by composer/DJ Dimitri de Perrot's fabulous live scratched soundscore, every move is a risk, every step a challenge and everyone's perspective distorted.

www.zimmermanndeperrot.com

Etgar Theatre (Israel) - Eshet (UK premiere)

Southbank Centre's Purcell Room

Saturday 16 - Tuesday 19 January, 8pm (Sun 6pm); £14

Runs 55 minutes, no interval

Eshet is the Old Testament story of Tamar, a young widow forced by convention to marry of her dead husband's brothers. Five life-sized puppets and their human doubles play out this powerful drama with its tragic consequences, denouncing male oppression and the harshness of laws concerning women. Recommended for ages 14 and over.

BlackSkyWhite (Russia) - USSR Was Here (London premiere)

ICA Theatre

Saturday 16 - Wednesday 20 January, 8pm; £14 (concessions £12)

Runs 60 minutes, no interval

Moscow's BlackSkyWhite presents USSR Was Here, a vision of disintegration. Through movement, shadows, sound and light, terrifying characters and grotesque costume, this is an overwhelming, impressionistic response to the sudden collapse of a great edifice, a vast empire.

www.bsw.ru

Ockham's Razor (UK) - The Mill (World premiere)

Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House

Tuesday 19 - Thursday 21 January, 7.45pm; £6.50 - £16

Runs 60 minutes, no interval

Britain's award-winning Ockham's Razor create daring physical theatre on aerial equipment specially created for each new show. In this latest production, directed by Toby Sedgwick (Olivier Award winner for Best Theatre Choreographer for War Horse) with dramaturgy by Rufus Norris, their world revolves quite literally inside and around a giant wheel of wood and steel suspended seven metres in the air. By turns treadmill and pleasure wheel it's the vehicle for a roller-coaster ride through every emotion and its effects are unpredictable and dramatic.

www.ockhamsrazor.co.uk

Compagnie Mossoux-Bonté (Belgium) - Kefar Nahum (UK premiere)

The Pit - part of barbicanbite10

Tuesday 19 - Saturday 23 January, 7.45pm; £12

Runs 50 minutes, no interval

Nicole Mossoux and Patrick Bonté have been creating performances at the crossroads of theatre and dance since 1985, exploring inexpressible human feelings through a language of movement that grips the spectator's imagination. In Kefar Nahum, sorceress-puppeteer Nicole Mossoux creates theatre of startling, unforgettable images, at once droll and frightening. She endows random objects with human desires and animal impulses and reincarnates them as actors. They represent the supreme shambles that is humanity, where everything is possible, and suggestion opens the door to the darkest, deepest dreams.

www.mossoux-bonte.be/spectacles/kefar_nahum.html

Okidok (Belgium) - Slips Inside (UK premiere)

Southbank Centre's Purcell Room

Wednesday 20 - Saturday 23 January (Wed-Fri 8pm, Sat 6pm); £14

Runs 60 minutes, no interval

The brand new show from Belgium's acclaimed theatre-clown duo, Xavier Bouvier and Benoit Devos, draws on some of their classic street-theatre repertoire, developed over many years. One of today's most accomplished double acts, effortlessly and sublimely funny.

www.okidok.be

Collectif Petit Travers (France) - Pan-Pot (UK premiere)

Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall

Thursday 21 & Friday 22 January, 7.30pm; £12 - £16

Runs 55 minutes, no interval

Based in Toulouse, Collectif Petit Travers brings together stage performers, designers, directors, writers and musicians to create new theatre using circus arts. Pan-Pot is a firework display of brilliant juggling, building to a spectacular climax and performed to

live piano music by Liszt, Ligeti, Mozart, Beethoven and others.

www.collectifpetittravers.org/pan-rencontre.html

Kitt Johnson X-act (Denmark) - Rankefod

ICA Theatre

Thursday 21 - Saturday 23 January, 8pm; £14 (concessions £12)

Runs 50 minutes, no interval

The story of our evolution analysed with one fascinating body and its unconscious memory,

set to a soundscape of computer-manipulated sounds from the natural world. Kitt Johnson moves like a magical creature from a bygone age. Reptilian, insect-like, animalistic, human - her body changes before our eyes.

www.kittjohnson.dk

O Ultimo Momento/Joao Paulo dos Santos (Portugal/France) - Contigo

Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House

Friday 22 & Saturday 23 January (Friday 7.45pm, Saturday 4pm); £6.50 - £16

Runs 40 minutes, no interval

Portuguese choreographer Rui Horta and circus artist Joao Paulo dos Santos present Contigo, a compelling hour of artistry, strength and physical risk-taking. Using one of the more unusual pieces of circus equipment, the Chinese pole, they tell a heart-stopping story about anger and loneliness.

www.scenesdecirque.org/compagnies/o-u-m.html

Circus Klezmer (Spain)

Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall

Saturday 23 & Sunday 24 January 7.30pm (Sun mat 2.30pm); £12 - £18

Runs 75 minutes, no interval

They're back! After their hit marriage ceremony at last year's festival, bride, groom, guests and band re-assemble to do it all over again. A nice Jewish village wedding, somewhere in Eastern Europe - but it's all going wrong as the rings are mislaid and the arguments start. Performed to live klezmer music, this is riotous, atmospheric and acclaimed circus-theatre entertainment.

Okidok (Belgium) - HaHaHa

Southbank Centre's Purcell Room

Sunday 24 January, 3pm & 6.30pm; £14

Runs 75 minutes, no interval

First seen in London in an earlier version at LIMF03, HaHaHa is a series of original, wordless sketches and impressive, physical comedy routines, polished and perfected in the course of this outstanding duo's touring with different circus troups in Europe, America and Canada. Classic clown theatre.

www.okidok.be

Pathosformel (Italy) - The Timidity of Bones

ICA Theatre

Sunday 24 - Tuesday 26 January, 7pm & 8.30pm; £10

Runs 25 minutes, no interval

Eerily impressed into the surface of a large, luminous white screen, the outline of bones and skeletal forms appear. Perhaps the debris of buried civilisations, fragments build to form a floating frieze, and finally a body that evokes an unimaginably distant and mysterious past.

www.pathosformel.org

Mimbre (UK) - Until Now (London premiere)

Southbank Centre's Purcell Room

Monday 25 - Wednesday 27 January, 8pm; £14

Runs 60 minutes, no interval

A beautifully improbable acrobatic adventure fashioned from joyful flips and harmonious balances, Until Now tells a story of journeys and goodbyes and astonishing feats of friendship. Graduates of London's The Circus Space ten years ago, Mimbre's Silvia, Lina and Emma have established a worldwide reputation. The director is well-known Spanish clown, Leandre Ribera.

www.mimbre.co.uk

Compagnie Bal/Jeanne Mordoj (France) - Eloge du Poil (In Praise of Hairiness) (UK premiere)

The Pit - part of barbicanbite10

Wednesday 27 - Saturday 30 January, 7.45pm; £12

Runs 65 minutes, no interval

In a fairground-carnival setting, sharing her freakshow stage with a badger, a mountain goat and other natural curiosities, Jeanne Mordoj juggles egg yolks and bamboo and forces us to consider taboos that rarely come to the surface. Ventriloquist, contortionist and multi-talented circus artist, the charismatic bearded lady reveals truths about identity, perception, sex, and finally death itself.

www.elogedupoil.com

Compagie Ieto (France) - Ieto (UK premiere)

Southbank Centre's Purcell Room

Thursday 28 - Sunday 31 January (Thur & Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm; Sun, 4pm); £14

Runs 70 minutes, no interval

Using little more than a few planks, some rope and a fine understanding of mechanics, performers Jonathan Guichard and Fnico Feldmann effortlessly draw us into this acrobatic battle of wits.

Winners of the prestigious Jeunes Talents Cirque competition in 2008.

(Warwick Arts Centre, Tue 26 Jan, 7.30pm; 024 7652 4524)

www.ieto.fr

Atelier de Spectacles (France) - A Distances

ICA Theatre

Thursday 28 - Sunday 31 January (Thur - Sat, 8pm; Sun, 6pm); £14 (concessions £12)

Runs 80 minutes, no interval

From France, extraordinary animation theatre in seven short episodes, mysterious, unconventional and entertainingly quirky. A Distances is a micro-epic for two performers, shadows, puppets, objects, sounds, imagination and wonderful, clanking, Heath-Robinson-style machinery.

www.ateliers-du-spectacle.org

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