CriticalDance Forum

Louder than words
Forget Marcel Marceau; the London International Mime Festival offers moving and profound theatrical experiences - and with not a white glove in sight, says Claire Allfree [The Independent]

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Theatre: Actions speak louder
Stalingrad on a table, a bird doing time and a ghost-train trip in the street: Clifford Bishop picks 2004’s most intriguing physical theatre

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White Cabin
By Donald Hutera
Mime
Purcell Room

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Pandora 88, Purcell Room, London
Boxed in, claustrophobic... inspired!
By Jenny Gilbert for The Independent

On the scale of human phobias, the fear of being trapped in a small space ranks pretty high. Broom cupboards, lifts, even low-ceilinged toilet cubicles induce panic the minute the door won't open. As for being holed up indefinitely, it's hard to imagine. Which is partly why the story of Brian Keenan and John McCarthy's incarceration at the hands of Beirut terrorists in the late 1980s has taken so long to evolve as a film (Blind Flight is still awaiting a release date).

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The Overcoat, Barbican, London
By Paul Taylor for The Independent

People are rarely at their best when they are on their best behaviour. You're reminded of that by The Overcoat, a show brought by the Canadian Stage Company to the London International Festival of Mime. It's fluent, accomplished and involving.

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The Overcoat
By Donald Hutera for The Times


UNQUESTIONABLY the biggest attraction of the 2004 London International Mime Festival is this co-presentation for the Barbican’s BITE season.

The Toronto-based Canadian Stage Company’s adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s titular short story features a cast of 22, most essaying multiple roles, on a handsome set dominated by a vast wall of opaque, mullioned windows.

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An unfortunate outbreak of niceness
Ismene Brown for The Daily Telegraph reviews the mime performance of The Overcoat at the Barbican


A Canadian staging of Nikolai Gogol's 1835 story The Overcoat is the main attraction of this year's London International Mime Festival, a generously well-styled, 90-minute production with 22 people playing 65 characters, splendid designs and music by Shostakovich.

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A play without words - or rhythm
By Jann Parry for The Observer

The split-level stage fills with scurrying commuters, some bunched in a swaying line (a tram, not a tube), others striding or cycling to work. Their movements are synchronised to music: Shostakovich's Jazz Suite determines their pace and that of the scene-shifters, all members of the 22-strong Canadian Stage Company.

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Review of The Overcoat from The Independent.

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The Overcoat
Barbican, London
By Ian Shuttleworth for The Financial Times


London International Mime Festival directors Joseph Seelig and Helen Lannaghan have long maintained that the principal reason for retaining "Mime" in the title is brevity. As a descriptive term, it has broadened to the point where it almost encompasses any performance work with a significant physical and/or visual component. Thus, one of the flagship presentations of this year's festival, Toronto-based CanStage's production of The Overcoat, stands where the territories of theatre, traditional mime and dance meet. Directors Morris Panych and Wendy Gorling simply call it a "movement piece".

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I've consolidated two topics

Kings of Infinity
Preview by Donald Hutera for the South Bank Magazine

After more than a quartercentury’s exposure
to the London International Mime Festival, audiences
ought to have a pretty good idea of what mime isn’t.
First and foremost, as co-directors Helen Lannaghan and Joseph Seelig
annually point out, it is not just the white-faced, invisible-walled routines
of Marcel Marceau.

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