Programme Announced for London International Mime Festival 2012

The wraps are off the LIMF12 programme...

For circus there's a cheering amount of UK work: Gandini Juggling's Smashed!, a witty and impeccable piece of Bauschian tanzjonglage originally commissioned (in a shorter version) for Watch This Space; NoFit State's stage show Mundo Paralelo, directed by Mladen Materic of Theatre Tattoo and a departure from their usual style of work (you can see MP at Festival Circa in Auch in October, if you can't wait); and Sugar Beast Circus' {Event(Dimension):}, a promenade performance in the form of a TV game show / lecture that will touch on science fiction, mathematics and dimensionality, and which will hopefully be as weird and outré as previous work The Sugar Beast Circus Show and as intelligent and pared-down as its sister piece Milkwood Rodeo (the latter of which can be seen at Circomedia's St Paul's Church 24 September, along with an {Event(Dimension):} work-in-progress). Also watch out for Camille Boitel, a French performer who often earns the Chaplin comparison and who seems to fairly vibrate with compacted energy; he'll be performing L'Immédiat.

Two Edinburgh hits will be presented at the festival: Blind Summit's The Table, a narrative swirl of stories and ideas and masterful puppetry in the cabaretish style of their previous show Low Life; and Theatre Ad Infinitum's mask piece Translunar Paradise, which by all accounts will ravage you with the emotive tale of a bereaved widower looking back on his life. Also in the mask/puppetry category, Invisible Thread, headed by Liz Walker and one of the companies to emerge from the dissolution of long-time LIMF favourite Faulty Optic, bring the puppetry piece Plucked.

Hiroaki Umeda will show the new work Haptic + Holistic Strata. He last presented at LIMF in '08 with his triple-bill Duo / Montevideoaki / while going to a condition, a spare and sometimes aggressive combination of technically virtuosic but unshowy movement (sort of pop n lock) + jittery fast-paced projection + brutal, invasive strobing, the slippery identity of which has seen it programmed across visual theatre, live art and dance festivals.

Plus there are less familiar companies bringing work: Cie TêTe de Pioche (Fragments de vie); Fleur Elise Noble (2 Dimensional Life of Her); Kulunka Teatro (André & Dorine); Autour de Mime (Tell Me the Truth); Baccala Clowns (Pss Pss); Claudio Stellato (l'Autre); and Toron Blues (Tendre Suie).

Joining the usual venues – the Barbican, the ROH's Linbury Studio and the Southbank Centre – and the Roundhouse (which first presented LIMF work last year), Jacksons Lane and Soho Theatre will be part of this year's festival.