London Mime Festival 2003

Joanne · **Posted:** Sun Dec 29, 2002 3:45 am

Preview in The Sunday Times.

Quote:

Some involve cutting-edge concepts, others stick to time-honoured traditions, but none of the acts at the London Mime Festival can be pigeonholed, says Clifford Bishop

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Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Wed Jan 08, 2003 9:51 am

<img src="http://www.mimefest.co.uk/Jerome2.jpg" alt="" />

The four-letter word that nobody dares speak...
Mime gets a hard press at times. But these days, argues Jenny Gilbert for The Independent, it's a very different bag of tricks.

London International Mime Festival: a mouthful of a name to conjure with, and its founder Joseph Seelig knows it. He's lost count of the times he's toyed with changing the title, and not just because the PR company protests that the word mime is a major turn off. The main problem is that mime is not what this festival is about.

"When we started 25 years ago all the acts in the festival were mime," he reasons, "but that soon changed. For a long time now it's been a festival of visual theatre drawn from all over Europe and beyond – a collection of uncategorisable shows linked only by the fact that they have relatively little text. But visual theatre is two words and mime is one, and once we'd got going there seemed little point in changing.

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Joanne · **Posted:** Tue Jan 14, 2003 3:14 am

From The Times.

Quote:

OF THE two shows that opened the London International Mime Festival this past weekend, each featured a head temporarily caught in a cardboard box. Coincidence, or trend? It’s still early days.
The festival, now in its 25th year, runs until January 26. The 2003 roster is strong, pitching British companies against Belgium, France, Spain, Swizerland and the US, spread around nine venues

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Joanne · **Posted:** Thu Jan 16, 2003 6:51 am

From the FT.

Quote:

The London International Mime Festival has become an event as elastic as many of its performers, encompassing all manner of theatre that one might loosely call "visual". You would not describe Juggling Hands, one of the first of this year's Mime Festival shows (presented in association with Bite:03), as "mime" - but then you might hesitate to call it "juggling", too. Juggling alone seems too narrow a definition for this enchanting show, in which two performers, accompanied by an accordionist and armed with buckets full of balls, elevate their chosen skill to new levels.

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Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Sat Jan 18, 2003 9:29 am

Actually he enjoys it, but you wouldn't know from the first few paragraphs:

At last - a mime show to shout about
Charles Spencer for The Times reviews A Little Fantasy at Soho Theatre

There are few combinations of words that strike more dread into this reviewer's heart than the London International Mime Festival.

It is cunningly held each year in January, when there is usually little competition from more mainstream productions, meaning that, despite my best endeavours, I don't always manage to avoid all of it. And I can count several of the evenings I have spent at LIMF productions among the most footlingly pointless of my life.

I mean, would you fancy an evening watching an underwater puppet show performed to a recording of Berlioz? No, of course you wouldn't. You'd very sensibly prefer to stay at home and listen to Berlioz in peace.

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Joanne · **Posted:** Mon Jan 20, 2003 4:32 am

Review in The Times.

Quote:

THE 25TH EDITION of the London International Mime Festival is only just half over, but already it has shown us that modern mime, post-Marcel Marceau, is about as wide a theatrical umbrella as exists. This flexible, genre-bending art form encompasses dance, juggling, clowning, text, circus, puppetry, animation, sculpture — basically, anything that falls under the banner of physical and visual theatre.

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Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Thu Jan 23, 2003 11:50 am

Our intrepid reporter lootie bibby has been covering The 2003 Mime Festival for us and here are the links to her reports. I have the impression that it has been a successful Festival this year which has won over some doubters:

Fiat Lux - Nouvelles Folies

A2 - Do You Want This Once Again?

Juggling Hands Compagnie Jérôme Thomas

MZdP (Metzer/zimmerman/dePerrot)

and another:

Throat - Company F/Z

Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Fri Jan 24, 2003 3:13 pm

Clowning around and gabbling galore where once there was only silence
Ismene Brown for The Daily Telegraph reviews the London International Mime Festival at the South Bank Centre.

Mime is the art of telling a story or describing an emotion without recoursing to words, and how happily I usually troll along to LIMF every January to pick up the newest practitioners of a beautiful art almost lost now in dance. This year, though, there are words galore, and with the gabble comes an increasing reliance on more obvious skills of circus and clowning about.

Of the three companies I saw, only Fiat Lux was a real mime company - in terms of valuing silent body language. But then they are French, and France is still the major source of enthusiasm and cultivation of mime.

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