Programme Announced For The 2019 London International Mime Festival

London International Mime Festival, directed by Helen Lannaghan and Joseph Seelig, is a unique event in the theatre calendar, a once a year chance to see the very best and newest contemporary visual theatre that embraces cutting edge circus-theatre, juggling, puppetry, live art, mime and physical theatre.

UK artists are at the forefront in 2019. Barely Methodical Troupe opens the festival with its latest acrobatic spectacular Shift at the Platform Theatre. Gandini Juggling with Alexander Whitley, make their debut at Sadler's Wells while Gecko makes its main stage debut at the Barbican; Thick & Tight delight at the Lilian Baylis Studio; Stan's Cafe makes a rare London appearance with The Capital, whilst Green Ginger explores the inner reaches of the human body in Intronauts, both at Jacksons Lane. Theatre Re premieres its latest creation, Birth, a LIMF co-commission, at Shoreditch Town Hall.

The festival's international dimension brings companies from Belgium, Finland, France, New Zealand, Norway and Spain. Debut participants include performance artist, Olivier de Sagazan, ice puppeteers Théâtre de l'Entrouvert, and 2018 Total Theatre Award winners Focus/Chaliwaté with Backup. Companies returning with new productions include Plexus Polaire, Thomas Monckton, Les Antliaclastes and Olivier Award winners Peeping Tom. Xavier Bobés brings Things Easily Forgotten back to the festival, his atmospheric salon performance for an audience of five.

A wide range of workshops, artists' talks and discussion complements the performance programme, which also features two classic silent films with live music at the Barbican Cinema: Buster Keaton's The General and Victor Sjöström's He Who Gets Slapped.

The Festival website will go live on Monday 15 October.

PLATFORM THEATRE, CENTRAL SAINT MARTINS, UAL

Britain's hottest young circus-theatre acrobatic group Barely Methodical Troupe opens LIMF 2019 with the London premiere of recent Edinburgh Fringe hit, Shift. Impressive Cyr wheel, hand-to-hand and B-boying all feature in the latest show from four outstanding performers who create ingenious, contemporary physical theatre with charm, strength and a unique perspective.

Online booking only - opens in late October at mimelondon.com

Barbican Theatre

The Barbican Theatre is the venue for the UK premiere of Father (Vader) from Belgium's Olivier Award winning dance-theatre visionaries, Peeping Tom. Thrilling choreography, live music and startling visual imagery are interwoven in an incisive and compassionate portrait of ageing. Father is the second part of the company's family trilogy - Mother was seen at the Barbican at LIMF 2018.

Amit Lahav's internationally acclaimed Gecko makes its Barbican main stage debut with trademark heightened movement and spectacular staging. The Wedding explores notions of community and isolation and questions the union between state and individual, amid a flurry of white dresses. A thrillingly tribal and rhythmic finale promises revolution and hope. London premiere.

BARBICAN, THE PIT

Patrick Sims' France-based puppetry company Les Antliaclastes has featured in several previous editions of LIMF. Waltz of the Hommelettes (UK premiere) is loosely based on three Grimm Brothers stories and staged in and around a Black Forest cuckoo clock with a mysterious thirteenth hour. Atmospheric and unusual, with gorgeous masks, costumes and an eerie soundtrack, the production remains faithful to the logic, humour and cruelty of traditional fairytales.

From French company, Théâtre de l'Entrouvert, Anywhere is the story of blind King Oedipus' long journey into exile, through water, fire, light and shadow. Guided by his daughter, Antigone, Oedipus in this atmospheric, highly charged production is a puppet made entirely of ice, created anew for each performance. Anywhere is loosely based on the book, Oedipus on the Road, by Belgian author Henry Bauchau. UK premiere.

Presented by LIMF in association with the Barbican

General booking opens Friday 26 October

BARBICAN CINEMA 1

The General (1926) Recently re-released, Buster Keaton's most famous film is a comic masterpiece and widely regarded as the first action movie. Based on a true story, Keaton is Johnnie Gray, a locomotive driver in the South during the American civil war. When his engine, The General, is stolen by Union army saboteurs, Johnnie single-handedly journeys behind enemy lines to retrieve it and rescue the woman he loves. Live music accompaniment by Jazz students from Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

He Who Gets Slapped (1924) Publicly humiliated when he discovers a trusted friend has stolen both his research and wife, a scientist joins a circus sideshow. He becomes famous for a routine in which he plays a clown who gets slapped by all the other clowns, reliving his humiliation over and over again. This gripping drama of romantic complications and devilish revenge unfolds in a wild and crazy circus setting and features three of the silent movie era's biggest stars, Norma Shearer, Lon Chaney and John Gilbert. A rarely screened gem, this print was sourced from a French private collection. Inter-titles in French. With live musical accompaniment from composer and pianist Taz Modi and guests.

Presented by LIMF in association with the Barbican

General booking opens Friday 26 October

JACKSONS LANE

Bristol based Green Ginger is one of Britain's leading puppetry/animation companies. Intronauts, its new show, is set in the not-too-distant future, where people can buy personal cleaners called Intronauts, miniaturised human workers injected into their bodies in order to carry out essential maintenance. This is a story of advancing technology, big syringes and a tiny submarine. London premiere.

Spain's Xavier Bobés returns to LIMF with Things Easily Forgotten, a brief history of Spain in the second half of the twentieth century, for five people. Around a small table, in an intimate salon setting, a powerful sequence of close-up sensory experiences invokes old memories and invents new ones. Through this miscellany of sights and sounds, objects and photos, a fascinating story unfolds, exploring memory and identity.

Plexus Polaire's Chambre Noire is a wild hallucination around the death-bed of Valerie Jean Solanas (1936-1988): writer, radical feminist, creator of the SCUM Manifesto and the woman convicted of shooting Andy Warhol. Inspired by Sara Stridsberg's novel The Faculty of Dreams, this performance is a duo for puppeteer Yngvild Aspeli and percussionist Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen. UK premiere.

Ingeniously staged on moving walkways, Birmingham-based Stan's Cafe's latest show The Capital explores financial and social inequality, in the highly charged stories of people we pass on our streets every day. If you ever feel you have to run in order to stand still, or see others gliding through life while you struggle to survive, or experience a relationship drifting apart, or a goal retreating as fast as you advance on it - then you will recognise life in The Capital. A co-production with Birmingham Rep. London premiere.

Presented by LIMF in association with Jacksons Lane

Booking opens Monday 15 October

Sadler's Wells/LILIAN BAYLIS STUDIO

In Transfiguration French painter, sculptor and performer, Olivier de Sagazan annihilates his own identity with clay and paint to become a living artwork. At once grotesque puppet and puppeteer he morphs from human to animal to astonishing hybrid creatures. De Sagazan has featured in videos with best-selling French singer Mylène Farmer, and recently in London in a collaboration with photographer Nick Knight and fashion designer Gareth Pugh on the fashion film presenting Pugh's S/S 18 collection. London premiere.

An award-winning duo like no other, choreographers, performers and lip-syncers Thick & Tight create bizarre and brazen pieces that embrace the breadth of human emotions. In A Night with Thick & Tight famous faces brought to life include Queen Victoria and Miss Havisham mourning their losses, while Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana are dogged by fame and beauty. Guest performer and newly appointed New Wave Associate Julie Cunningham (ex-Michael Clark and Merce Cunningham companies) becomes avant-garde artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, the pseudonyms of step-sisters Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe - best known for their riveting photographic "self-portraits", creating mysterious, androgynous personae that seem eerily ahead of their time.

Spring from Gandini Juggling, creators of Pina Bausch-inspired international hit Smashed, is the final part of a trilogy of dialogues between juggling and dance. For their Sadler's Wells debut Sean Gandini's juggling ensemble has joined forces with Sadler's Wells New Wave Associate choreographer, Alexander Whitley, top contemporary dancers and American star juggler, Wes Peden. Performed to an original acoustic / electronic score by London composer Gabriel Prokofiev, performed live. Prokofiev has been acclaimed by the Financial Times as being "in the vanguard of redefining classical music conventions".

Presented by LIMF in association with Sadler's Wells

Booking now open for Gandini Juggling/Alexander Whitley.

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