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29th Annual Festival Celebrates International Mime

The London International Mime Festival, Europe's longest-established annual season of contemporary visual theatre, launches its 29th annual event on 13 January 2007.

Running until 28 January 2007, the festival features visual theatre companies and productions from around the world performing at venues across the capital. Highlights of the 2007 festival include the first UK performance in 15 years by France’s Philippe Genty Company, the UK premieres of Mathurin Bolze's circus-skill based production of Tangentes and Swiss duo Zimmermann/de Perrot’s Gaff Aff, and American vaudeville comedy duo, Rainpan 43 with its acclaimed silent movie spoof All Wear Bowlers.

Other international highlights for 2007 are: French acrobat Jean-Baptiste André’d return after his LIMF 2005 show with his new production Comme En Plein Jour; Belgian Complicité actor Josef Houben with The Art Of Laughter, illustrating what makes audiences laugh; Finally at The Purcell Room American theatre clown and writer Wolfe Bowart with LaLaLuna, a story of how one man saves the moon’s light from going out; trampolinist Mathurin Bolze and his company of acrobats; Spain’s Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes with their opera about the inaudible and unmentionable, Vestibular Folds; and from Switzerland, Philipp Boë offers a surreal detective story, Memoire de la Nuit, inspired by the imagery of René Magritte, blurring the borders between theatre and magic.

British acts include: Inspector Sands and Stamping Ground Theatre with their Total Theatre Award winning show Hysteria; Company:Collisions’ seven-strong ensemble brings Nothing Left To Lose, celebrating the spirit of resistance through the ages; three pieces by aerialists Ockham’s Razor, beginning with the world premiere of its latest work Arc, followed by the award-winning Momento Mori and ending with Every Action; Faulty Optic’s humorous but hazardous visual journey Soiled; Steven Whinnery’s Lying With The Animals mask-theatre piece inspired by Gary Larson’s The Far Side cartoons; and Al Seed performs his award-winning show The Factory, billed as a blistering exploration of masculinity, violence and the military industrial complex.

Mime Festival productions will be staged at the South Bank Centre (Purcell Room and Queen Elizabeth Hall), The Barbican (Theatre and Pit), The Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera House and ICA. There will also be a lecture by poet, painter and co-founder/artistic director of the legendary arts company Welfare State International, John Fox. For further information, visit the festival website.

- by Caroline Ansdell

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