January is something of a palate-cleanser for the year, as the London International Mime Festival flies in plane-loads of companies bearing gnomic names in a kind of dance-world Desperanto that’s equally incomprehensible in every language. Like cars or tourist T-shirt slogans, titles like Plexus or Ephemeral Architectures label what’s now called ‘visual theatre’, with copious explanatory notes translated between four languages, gaining comic value at every stage. I don’t know why they don’t just write, ‘We’re playing. The sponsor paid.’ (Mark Morris is the only choreographer I know who says, ‘I make up dances and you watch ’em.’)
In LIMF you get acrobats, puppetry and circuses, but also some pretty fantastic international lighting artists, video artists and installationists. It’s the marvellously imagined set that made Plexus, Aurélien Bory’s production for the solo dancer Kaori Ito, memorable. An enormous construction that you’d imagine filling the atrium of the Wellcome Foundation, it’s a cuboid room of fine vertical wires, closely threaded in serried rows — in describing which an unfortunate image of Wayne Rooney’s hair transplant keeps coming to me. Or perhaps, think of raining stair-rods, or a thousand spiders spinning only up and down, with Ito, a short strong Japanese woman, totally closed inside this world of thinly pencilled verticals.
The concept seemed to be a conspiracy against gravity, Arno Veyrat’s spectacular lightshow making all kinds of underwater and aurora borealis effects to disembody Ito as she struggled against the threads, and then gradually made use of them. Being impeded, she was also being supported, so she could virtually swim in the wires, slip upwards, or sideways, or force the whole platform to swing, the wires twanging and rumbling, like the intestines of a gigantic piano.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in