Do not be misled: MimeLondon is not London International Mime Festival in a new outfit, but rather an offshoot of its previous form. Until its closure in 2023, LIMF was the longest running, annual, international theatre festival in the UK; no small feat. Directors Helen Lannaghan and Joseph Seelig rely on partner venues for this offshoot and on no doubt loyal crowds, who for decades enjoyed a festival dedicated to visual theatre of a wackier kind. What MimeLondon brings to London as we plod through January is as strange as we knew it before, rife with illusions, deceptions, and delightful misdirections.
review
Moving on: MimeLondon 2025
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6 min
Brú Theatre, Not a Word. © Emilijah Jefremova
Three body-based MimeLondon shows mining the exile of memory, the visuals of metamorphosis, and the entertainments of deception
Brú Theatre, Not a Word
Brú Theatre’s works are rooted in and reflective of their home: Galway, Ireland. Bringing a humble air of remembrance to the Barbican Centre’s Pit Theatre, the solo performance Not a Word is a microcosm for an entire class of Irish emigrants – navvies, as they were called – who laboured on English engineering projects, only to be forgotten. Peter Woods’ translated poem Exile is Not A Word accompanies the piece; navvies were outcast to the edges of society. This, then, is where we are.
Our protagonist (Raymond Keane) is aged, coated in dust, depersonalised by a head made of mangled clay. Trepid, tired and almost without aim, he mostly carries out mundane tasks within an austere home. A musician (Ultan O’Brien) sits downstage right, whose playing injects mood, and convinces us to remain patient in its hesitant beginnings. Violin and viola narrate our navvy’s emotions, subconscious, and moral compass.
Dance exists in micro form, traces of lingering memory that an aged body cannot fully relive. Keane plays records that unlock the past, and is most alive when these movements – a waltz in the imaginary arms of another, for example – creep back into stiff joints and aching bones. When he grabs a razor to shave, the clay that falls away feels shocking and fragile. He sheds layers, yet we still don’t completely see what is beneath, so deep is his exile. There is something faintly ridiculous in this caricature, hobbling between walls with a clay head, and yet a mere chord change, a twitching gesture, renders him eternally, tragically lonely. Not A Word feels like all that goes on while others are doing the forgetting; Brú Theatre haven’t tried to glorify the reality of these narratives. To be forgotten over time is indeed a kind of exile, to be exiled a kind of death.
Dewey Dell, The Rite of Spring
At the Southbank Centre, The Rite of Spring is born again. Stravinsky’s primal, dissonant score has been reinterpreted by so many; Italian company Dewey Dell’s version is an exuberant display, in keeping with MimeLondon’s visual offering, and is inevitably compared to its predecessors. Spectacles of fabric and form are favoured over nuance, a flamboyance reminiscent of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes – striking for its time – and Dewey Dell goes great lengths to conjure similar awe in our own.
Cream, paper-thin walls build depth into the stage, a cave from which a silkworm of impossible size emerges. Many ambiguous rituals follow. Human intervention by a full cast in beekeeper suits sees the prizing of a phallic, gold stamen, that had earlier emerged from the head of a seven-foot, spidery creature. Costumes are worthy of the centre stage the performers often occupy, advancing towards us as if on a catwalk of nature at its most repulsive, and alluring.
The highest moments of Stravinsky’s score pummel the stage with a drama that is at once impressive, and vaguely comical. Two dancers clad in black combat-wear breakdance in windmills, slides and diving rolls. Movement urgently devours the space, but a balletic duet by delicate leaf insects with equally mighty intentions reveals that this refined technique cannot quite match such primitive instrumentation.
Visuals take centre stage – and the eye deceives itself. One body is in fact two, and later, a vast red cape conceals and creates imaginary forms in its billowing expanse. Fabric and light lend themselves to the metamorphic life cycles, the flux of processes both gorgeous and threatening in our natural world. Even without the high stakes of Stravinsky, Dewey Dell reminds us of our inferiority.
The ultimate MimeLondon deception, however, comes from Gandini Juggling’s Heka, at The Place Theatre. Renowned duo Sean Gandini and Kati Ylä-Hokkala remain as ponderous as ever, this time presenting a crash course in Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin’s philosophy of magic. A cast of seven – including Gandini as a pleasurably tacky circus master in rotating suits – use balls, hoops, detachable limbs, and bottomless pockets to prove to us that magic is utterly maddening. A table lends itself to slick choreography of unruly hands, and the white surface is clinically satisfying as six straight-backed performers create a comical maze of upper limbs and balls to a clicking metronome.
Gandini Juggling, Heka
Gandini then breaks the fourth wall with snippets of lecture on knowns unknowns, unknown unknowns and the very real intention to deceive us. Each lecture is followed by a demonstration of sorts, a solo that contorts through and around hoops, a giddy can-can and a sequence performed to multilingual chants, a physical and mental workout. The cast do not simply stand upright and juggle, they turn, crouch, and compromise their balance while juggling more balls than the eye can follow. Group unison combines the buoyancy of juggling with the deftness of magic which both captivates and infuriates; repetition of a trick leaves us none the wiser of its mechanics.
A dorky and yet impossibly fiendish crowd-pleaser affirms Gandini as a staple of mime culture in London. Heka unites a diverse cast by acknowledging their differences. The steely skill of these performers might hook our attention, but seven individual styles of humour maintain it. With a cacophony of tricks, the audience are wrapped around their finger, but Gandini Juggling are loved all the more for it, despite deceiving us over, and over again. •
MimeLondon, 14.01.25–02.02.25
