Author Archives: Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com

Do I please you, or do I please myself?

The title of this blog is a quote – or misquote, or paraphrase perhaps – from Liz Aggiss’s new work-in-progress The English Channel, an excerpt of which was presented 9 April at the Brighton Dome’s new venture The Works. (And where do I know that name from? Ah yes it was the title of a soon-to-be-revived series of features in Total Theatre. But we won’t complain, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.)

Anyway, back to Liz. There she is in all her glittery green glory, standing before us with hips a twitchin’ and a goblin grin on her face. ‘Do I please you, or do I please myself?’ she asks. It’s a statement that is at the core of an artistic investigation into the nature of performance, and of being a performer – and in particular of being a female performer age 60, who has long past the stage in her life or her career when she has to bother too much about what others think. And yet of course you never stop being bothered – never stop trying to please, never stop giving them what they want. That’s what performing is all about, isn’t it? That’s what being a woman is all about, isn’t it? ‘I’m a one-woman variety show’ says Liz as she takes her seat for the after-show discussion.

But the question raised in Liz’s piece – who this is actually for, the artist or the audience, who is pleasing whom? – is a pertinent one for the whole evening.

The latest new night of new work to hit Brighton, The Works is an open evening, advertised publicly, ticketed but free, in which works-in-progress are presented by three artists or companies at various stages of their career. But why? Who is it for? What are the expectations of both artist and audience?

I’ll admit straight away that I’ve developed a mistrust, steadily growing over the past decade or so, of Scratch nights and work-in-progress showings. There is an irony here, as without blowing my own horn too loudly, I did play a part in establishing this now-commonplace theatrical activity, so perhaps have only myself to blame. In the late 1990s, as director of an artists’ forum called Bodily Functions (yes I know – I didn’t choose the name), I set up something called Platform at the Komedia Theatre – a twice-yearly space for artists working in physical, visual and devised theatre / live art performance to present the beginnings of their ideas to a (hopefully) receptive audience. One of our production assistants was one Louise Blackwell, who then left Brighton to work at BAC in London, and subsequently coin the term Scratch nights, using a similar format to the Platform at the Komedia: a number of 10–15 minute acts; feedback forms to pass comment on work seen; and the chance to chat to the artists informally in the bar afterwards.

What we found with Platform was that even educated audiences often found it hard to really understand how to receive the work. ‘Most of the things I saw were not really developed’ said our then Arts Council officer in response (and ACE hadn’t even funded this particular part of our work, to add insult to injury). Er yes, it is unfinished work so it is not yet developed – that’s the point… But actually, is it fair to present snatches of unfinished work to an audience and expect them to understand? Can it do the artist more harm than good to present their yet-to-incubate musings in public? Maybe it’s a personal thing, but I know that when I’m developing work I often hold it close to my heart for a very long time, not even letting close family and friends in on it. Yet theatre is an artform in which the artist’s relationship to the audience is at the heart of the matter, so they have to be let in at some point. There are some venues / organisations who have worked hard to improve the scratch format: the Nightingale Theatre, for example, structures their evenings very well, with the post-show feedback set up as small roundtable discussion groups, audience members free to flow round to whichever artists’ tables they would like to join. I’m still wary of scratch evenings, but theirs is better than most.

The Works was work-in-progress excerpts rather than scratching new ideas, I suppose I should make that clear – and the three pieces shown were at very different stages of development. Liz Aggiss, I suspect, wouldn’t go anywhere near an audience until she’d put in a lot of legwork and was reasonably sure of where she was going and what she was attempting to achieve. Her excerpt from The English Channel was the very necessary stepping out from the solitary space of the rehearsal studio into the engagement with audience that is necessary for something to become a real piece of performance work. It was very new, very fresh, finding its way – but it was clear about what it was and where it was heading, and was thus immensely entertaining and thought-provoking.

So I’m fine with the idea of seeing work that is in progress, once progress has been made – I think there is a value in presenting early versions of newly created shows, and for artists to then rework them as a result of trying out before an audience, but that’s different to this bitty ‘a taste of this and a slice of that and tell us what you think’ approach. I’ll confess that I didn’t read the publicity properly and I thought I was just going along to see an early version of Liz’s show, so when I found out I was in for a two-hour marathon – three excerpts from three very different works, plus this rather formal discussion process after each one – I got a bit sulky!

Also to say that another gripe against the pot-pourri approach is that I feel unsure how to respond to something when I’m only privy to part of the picture. To just get 15 or 20 minutes of what will be a full-length show, then to be asked what we’ve seen and understood, is inevitably encouraging discussion along the lines of ‘I didn’t understand this’ or ‘’you need to make that clearer’. It’s like being in a writers’ workshop and reading out chapter four of your novel-in-progress and someone saying,‘Well, you’ll need to make that clearer, I didn’t understand what that character was doing’. Well of course you didn’t – I’ve just read you chapter four and you haven’t read chapters one, two or three, have you? How can you possibly understand?

But the aspect of the evening I had most problems with was the feedback format. The pieces were presented to a large audience in a formal theatre setting, with the feedback session after each one set up like a regular post-show discussion – i.e. with the artist or company and facilitator (director/dramaturg Lou Cope) sat on chairs facing the audience, who are then led into the discussion with pre-decided questions about the work, followed by some open/general discussion. To give Lou her due, she did start the evening by reminding the audience that this ‘wasn’t about them’ and that questions or comments made should be precise and to the point and relate directly to the work seen – but of course that didn’t happen. Instead we had the usual post-show horrors: the awkward silences as people try to think up answers to the questions thrown out to them; the gushers who can’t stop telling the artist how wonderful she is (and that’s helpful to the making of the new work? I don’t think so); the ‘maybe you could do it this way instead’ problem-solvers; and the ‘I haven’t really got an opinion about any of it but I feel the need to say something, and say it at length’ ramblers. Perhaps some people find this useful, but it just felt strained and uncomfortable to me. Both artists and audience were placed in the spotlight (literally and metaphorically) and when on the spot didn’t necessarily talk much sense. I tend to feel that just presenting the work to an audience is enough for the artist, who can then form their own opinion of what worked and what didn’t. Do it in front of people and you can feel when something sinks sadly into the ground or when something is a genius moment of inspiration – you don’t need a post-show discussion to tell you.

In many ways, this new venture feels like an audience development initiative disguised as something else. ‘Do give us your email addresses so we can tell you when these shows are on’ being an obvious give-away. As a friend of mine said, if that is what it is, let’s be upfront about it, rather than pretending it’s there to help the artist make the work. I dislike the pretence that it is useful to get the audience engaged with the dramaturgical process of making a show. In my humble opinion, that’s the artist’s job.

Diederik Peeters: Red Herring

The show starts – or does it? A figure with a sheet of white paper for a face appears from the very back of the deep performance space, walking slowly, an animated Magritte painting. He’s here to open the show; he would sing, but… But no, that was a red herring; in a flash the man re-emerges (minus the sheet of white paper) from a half-open doorway, a rapid lighting change transforming the space into a film noir set. Unmasked, pushing his lank hair behind his ears, Belgian artist/performer Diederik Peeters tells us in a slightly agitated, conspiratorial tone that this is the real start of the show. And so we begin, and begin, and begin. And so it goes.

The theatrical conceit is that everything is a red herring – there is no start, and no ending either, and what happens in between (the start and end of the show; the start and end of life) is a wild and random assortment of stimuli that juggle for our attention constantly. Where does life, never mind art, begin and end when so much that happens exists in parallel time; when time itself is at the mercy of memory and imagination and the games they play with our perception; when so much random stuff bombards our senses night and day? In the onstage world he creates so ingeniously life is a roomful of projectors running numerous films simultaneously. He sets up a game of rewinds and replays, of fanciful experiments and artful ‘mistakes’ – and of course the truth is that whilst playing with the notion of chaos theory, playing with the various realities and fictions of performance, film, radio, and indeed life itself, what we witness is something breathtakingly beautiful in its structure, and in the interplay of its aural, visual and physical elements.

Some moments are worthy of Buster Keaton: standing behind a dislodged door, just his hands showing (that image itself another gorgeous sculptural moment), he suddenly clambers up the door, which crashes over, bringing him almost crashing into the front row. At other points, he turns into an onstage Foley artist, creating a sound drama loaded with suspense – shoes crunch on gravel, the wind howls, a door creaks (doors feature a lot in this show). Later the drama is replayed in physical action, in tandem with the soundtrack that we’ve seen and heard being created. At other points he teasingly invites us to close our eyes: ‘DON’T think of the beach!’ he cries as we hear a soundtrack of crashing waves. Throughout the piece, things seen and heard are re-viewed/re-experienced with a twist. Constantly we ask ourselves: what did we see, what did we hear, what did we think, what really happened? What exactly is ‘reality’?

Diederik Peeters’ influences are worn on his sleeve: silent comedy, horror and suspense film, and the early 20th century art traditions of surrealism and absurdism. His years of experience both as a visual artist and as a performer with Jan Fabre and with Alan Platel have paved the way for the creation of solo work of the highest order. I say solo work, but there is a strong team behind the main player: the work of sound artist and technician Lieven Dousselaere is fantastic. Set design, lighting, dramaturgy – all contributes to one harmonious whole.

Red Herring is that wonderful and rare achievement: a show that is both pure entertainment and pure art, the two co-existing in a structured chaos controlled by a masterful performer. Proof (if any more were needed) that Belgium is currently a hotbed of top quality contemporary performance. A perfect choice to open The Basement’s spring season – a season that sees a number of excellent European shows brought to the UK over the coming weeks.

Ockham’s Razor: the map is not the territory

‘At the beginning we didn’t have a map, or even a destination’ say Ockham’s Razor in the programme notes for their latest full-length show Not Until We Are Lost, which opened the London International Mime Festival 2013 at the brand spanking new Platform Theatre in King’s Cross (a cavernous building that is home to the newly enlarged Central Saint Martins art school).

‘It’s terrifying to be lost; to not know whether to keep moving forward, or try and find your way back, or whether you should stop’, they say. Yet in the getting lost, straying from the usual path into new territories, we discover things we might never have otherwise discovered – new ideas, new experiences, new aspects of ourselves. In life, as in theatre-making, ’tis better to have run the risk and really lived, rather than to have just taken the path you know best which offers the least challenges and risks. It is for all these reasons and more that Ockham’s Razor cite the Thoreau quote ‘not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves’ as the inspiration for their new show.

The company – Alex Harvey, Tina Koch, and Charlotte Mooney – have, for quite a while, wanted to make a show ‘with the audience on stage alongside us’. In March 2012, before the process of making this new show got properly underway, I met the trio at artsdepot in North London, where they were working with Oily Cart on Something in the Air, a show for young people with severe physical and/or learning disabilities. In this tender and lovely show evoking the turn of the year and the flavour of the seasons, the children are placed in swinging cradles while the Ockhams aerialists unfurl from brightly-coloured silk ‘nests’ to swing gently around with the children, bounce balls and flutter leaves above, between or under them, and perform gentle trapeze or corde lisse routines so close that the children could almost reach out and touch them. Alex and Tina tell me that they loved working in this way for the Oily Cart collaboration, and the company were keen to explore the possibilities of a similar intimate relationship with the audience in their own new show. At that time, they had just started working with composer Graham Fitkin, and were excited by the idea of exploring the concept of a mobile choir interweaving with the audience (an idea also explored recently by H2Dance whose show Something to Say, also a promenade work featuring a mobile choir, played at Summerhall at the Edinburgh Fringe – there must be something in the air, so to speak). In the Ockhams case, the desire to work so closely (literally) with singers came out of their experience working as performers on Improbable’s version of the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha for the ENO. Alex says he ‘loved the power of being that close to the singers – the physical effect’. For the early dates of Not Until We Are Lost the company have worked with local choirs in regions they’ve toured the show to, but the LIMF run features a choir specially put together for the show.

A residency at the Generating Company’s space in France, then a block of time back at artsdepot (where they were circus artists-in-residence 2011-2012) culminated in the first showing of the work there in September 2012. Something in the Air is also supported by Dance City in Newcastle, and by the Lancaster collective Live at LICA, who specifically supported the development of Graham Fitkin’s specially composed score. Also name-checked for their support are Circomedia, the Bristol school for circus and physical theatre where the Ockham’s Razor trio trained and met. Circomedia co-founder Bim Mason is on board for the show, credited with ‘additional direction’, as is Matilda Leyser, the renowned aerialist who taught the company and whom Alex cites (with Bim) as one of his main influences.

Talking of influences and early training: it is interesting to note that the company members have backgrounds in visual art, scenography and literature that prefigure their circus training – so hardly surprising to note that their productions have an intelligent and multi-textured sensibility offering a view of ‘circus’ as a place for metaphysical reflection on the nature of human existence. The visual aesthetic is such that entering the space at The Platform there is the feel of having walked into an all-enveloping sculpture.

It’s always interesting to meet artists thick in the process of making work and hearing what the intentions might be – then to compare and contrast those impressions with what you witness when you finally see the show. I’m impressed by the great metal structures above my head, glinting in the ghostly, deep-sea green light – but my eyes are most strongly drawn to two ‘stations’ on either side of the room: one features an impressive pair of harps; the other a kind of see-through tower flanked by a Chinese pole. I recognise, if that’s the word for something you’ve pulled up from an image in your imagination, Alex’s description all those months ago of creating a ‘Perspex chimney’ with which to play with the notion of ‘rock climbing in reverse’. He said then that he wanted a scene in which all the performers get wedged into the ‘chimney’ together, and that he wanted the audience close up, peering in – and indeed, that’s what we get, although not till the end of the show. My favourite scene using this particular structure is a duet on, in and around the ‘chimney’, a play on quest and struggle and the offering of a helping hand to a fellow human being. And it’s very lovely that it’s a ‘she’ who offers the hand of support from above to the ‘he’ floundering below.

When I met with the company, they had commented on the fact that the equipment often leads the way in the devising process – and that this was particularly the case in the creation of short pieces Memento Mori (a haunting and tender trapeze double by Alex and Charlotte that made them Jeunes Talents Cirque laureates in 2004) and the gorgeously forlorn Arc (which premiered at the London International Mime Festival 2007), performed by the trio of Ockhams on a less conventional piece of circus equipment – a specially constructed tipping and rocking ‘raft’ made of metal bars. These two pieces, with a more lyrical third called Every Action…, formed a very successful triptych that subsequently toured extensively across the UK and really established Ockham’s Razor on the contemporary circus map. A first full-length show, The Mill, premiered at LIMF 2010.

In the case of Not Until We Are Lost, the equipment offering devising possibilities included not just that Perspex tower but also an enormous reworking of the metal rack cum raft idea used in Arc, here mutated into a great swinging thing that occupied the space in many different ways using various planes and levels. At first it makes a kind of triangular configuration with the floor, the five aerialists clambering up like monkeys, or human babies, only to slide down again, or dangle by the arms until ‘rescued’ by their mates. Again, I remember Alex’s voice all those months earlier talking about wanting to work with a kind of human snakes-and-ladders idea. One step forward, two steps back – two steps forward, one step back… the human condition in a nutshell.

At another point in the show, the frame becomes a great big playground swing, the five performers chasing it with childlike glee, playing the game of daring to jump, or chickening out at the last moment. When all five are sitting side by side, it has the feel of a Busby Berkeley moment of unified swinging. Then again, turned upright the frame provides the site and wherewithal for a whimsical threesome (two boys and a girl) to act out signs of flirtation and friendship, acceptance and rejection.

Despite the impressiveness of all the bits of kit, some of my favourite moments of the piece are the small ones: a solo performer way above our heads, up in the ceiling of the space, making her way quietly along the metal walkway usually only used by technicians and riggers; a choir member weaving through the crowd, walking past me, singing and smiling to herself; the harpist completely focused on the creation of the music, almost oblivious to the audience; a performer tearing paper into pieces that float to the ground like the paper leaves in Something in the Air. Time and again I find myself thinking that the development from that piece to Not Until We Are Lost is clearly on display: from working with children with severe disabilities, Ockham’s have developed a lyricism and tenderness in their performance that is very special. All the elements of the piece – the robust but understated physical performance, the angelic music, the magical lighting, not to mention the beautifully understated costumes in their soft and sensual palette of taupe and rust and rose-pink (designed by Bicat & Rigby, Tina Bicat being a long-standing collaborator of the company) – come together to create one very aesthetically pleasing whole.

If there are criticisms of the show, they are minor niggles. There’s a device for moving the audience around using a rope which people are encouraged to catch hold of that just doesn’t work well– at least not on the night I’m there. The fact that it is ‘explained’ at the start of the show by one of the company’s producers is something of an alarm bell – audiences shouldn’t need to be told in advance how they’ll get moved round a space. And the inclusion of a large number of woven bamboo portable stools for the audience to sit on means that there is an incredibly annoying squeak and creak going on throughout, marring the mood set up by the gentle singing and harp-playing, not to mention the trip hazard as we move around. Ditch the stools, folks!

For some people, the fact that the show is made up of a series of self-contained vignettes rather than having an obvious through-line is an issue – but not for me. The analogy with shows of this kind that works for me is that it can be viewed like a book of themed short stories or poems that develop and interweave ideas and images, rather than as a novel or traditional ‘play’ – and personally I can see nowt wrong with that. I’d say further that attempts to forge hour-long linear narratives that hammer home a plot often go awry in circus-theatre. Anyway, as Tina Koch puts it, ‘theatre is naturally inherent in circus’. One thing I’ve always enjoyed about the company’s work is the awareness of, and play upon, those moments of intrinsic theatricality – the arm reaching out to help, the girl passed from hand to hand, the momentum of that swing, the clutch for dear life on the bar… I’m also very fond of the way that the equipment is allowed to tell its own stories: in this case, that things aren’t necessarily what they seem, that nothing in life is as rigid as we think it is, and that a change in perspective can change everything we think we know.

With a decision (to-date, anyway) not to use text in their shows, Ockham’s Razor are working hard at proving that stories – meaningful human stories of loss and gain, joy and sadness, solitude and togetherness – can be told using physical, visual and musical forms. A great choice, therefore, for the opening of the latest London International Mime Festival.

Ockham’s Razor are produced by Turtle Key Arts, and are an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation.

Not Until We Are Lost was seen by Dorothy Max Prior on 10 January, the opening night of the London International Mime Festival 2013, at The Platform Theatre, King’s Cross, London.

Ockham’s Razor tour Not Until We Are Lost across the UK from February to June 2013. For dates and full details see here

Heads Will Roll

So, another London International Mime Festival done and dusted! 2013 saw the usual eclectic mix of work, crossing a whole plethora of artforms that snuggle under the ‘physical and visual performance’ umbrella, including contemporary circus, puppetry and animatronics, theatre clown and mime, live art, and some things that are hard to categorise, other than under the ‘interesting theatrical experiments’ header (cue The Cardinals by Stan’s Café).

I saw five shows – not bad going, you say, until you realise there were fifteen programmed. But still – the editor can’t snap them all up, can she? Those fifteen productions hailed from Australia, Belgium, China, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Russia and Switzerland as well, of course, as the UK. There was also a hefty helping of top-notch workshops, including an intensive day with acclaimed movement director Toby Sedgwick, a week on Making Theatre Without Words with Total Theatre favourites Theatre Ad Infinitum, and a wonderful two weeks learning How To Be A Stupid with clown extraordinaire Angela de Castro.

Some of the treats I didn’t see included new work by Les Ballets C de la B artists Romeu Runa and Miguel Moreira, Switzerland’s circus-theatre stars Zimmermann & de Perrot, the London premiere of Derevo’s Harlekin, and the tenth anniversary revival of Compagnie 111, /Aurélien Bory’s Plan B. There was also a second year’s Mime Fest outing for Gandini Juggling’s Smashed. But come to think of it, I’d seen Harlekin previously at the Edinburgh Fringe, and Plan B I saw first time round. So maybe I can claim I’ve seen seven LIMF 2013 shows? Almost half the programme! There, I feel better now… You can get the low-down on shows seen by TT – which is, we are pleased to say, most of the festival – in our reviews section.

So what I did see was the opening show for the 2013 fest from the darlings of British contemporary circus, Ockham’s Razor. Not Until We Are Lost, presented at a new venue for London, the Platform Theatre at Central Saint Martins art school in King’s Cross, is a gentle and playful piece which brings the audience right into the heart of the action. I’ve weaved my response to the show into a feature-review that gives a little more context and background than a regular review, circling round a meeting I had with the company when they were in the early stages of creating the work. You can read it here.

I saw (and reviewed) another contemporary circus piece, also by an international company of young circus artists, this time based in France. My!Laika’s Popcorn Machine was everything (and more) I was hoping from a publicity blurb boasting influences that included Jacky Chan, The Ramones, and Kurt Schwitters.

The other shows I saw – The Cardinals by Stan’s Café, Les Hommes Vides by Invisible Thread, and The Heads by Blind Summit – I didn’t personally review (others have) because I was there wearing a different hat, as facilitator of the after-show Meet the Artists sessions.

Oh yes, the post-show discussion… I’ll confess here that I often don’t enjoy these, especially if we hear little from the artists about the making of the work and a lot from audience members keen to use the opportunity for a ‘question from the floor’ to ruminate in a long-winded and unfocused way on their own experiences making a similar piece of work (is that too cruel? It has certainly been my experience over the years as an audience member). So, call me a control freak, but when I’m leading post-show discussions I like to keep the focus on the artists’ experiences of making and delivering the work, and keep a firm hand on the whip when it comes to the audience participation. The post-show session for The Cardinals was a little subdued (no whip-cracking needed there, then) and the one after Invisible Thread’s Les Hommes Vides was as entertaining, whimsical and thought provoking as the show itself. I almost came a cropper, though, at the discussion after The Heads (Soho Theatre 21 January). Here’s how it went…

So, despite some worries about too long a gap between show and post-show (due to changing rooms to the cabaret space and a late running show by comedian Alexi Sayle), a healthy number of people stayed on, and we had a great start, with Blind Summit’s co-directors Mark Down and Nick Barnes and the rest of team as eloquent as ever, giving intelligent and thoughtful answers to my questions about the relationship between last year’s hit show The Table and The Heads (which grew out of a six-minute section of The Table), the devising process, use of text versus purely visual work, their collaboration on this show with artist/director Andrew Dawson, and more. Then we opened it up to the audience, and the first question wasn’t a question, it was a rather indignant statement from someone who said that she came because she liked last year’s show, but this one had no story. Which Mark answered very graciously with a reflection on the issues of linear narrative in visual theatre. Despite my efforts to move into other areas of discussion, this is the one that everyone seemed to want to talk about, and we ended up going well beyond the allocated time slot with a feisty debate that took in many and various issues around storytelling with and without words: the choices between through-lines and linked themes; ‘plot’ versus ‘story’; the ‘novel’ versus the ‘book of poems’ approach to making a cohesive theatre piece; the framing – literal and metaphorical – of ideas through images, the role of words in a wordless show (The Heads features many images of reading and writing: books, newspapers, manuscripts, written texts, letters released from their bound slavery to fall to the floor like fluttering leaves). It certainly felt like a real debate was had, even if at moments early in the discussion there seemed to be a worrying amount of criticism of the company – but the balance was restored as this was countered strongly by those, like Mischa Twitchin from Shunt, who preferred The Heads to The Table for its purely visual storytelling, and Mime festival co-director Helen Lannaghan who commended the company for their bravery in making something very different to the 2012 show, rather than just churning out The Table Part Two.

What emerged, expressed very well by Blind Summit’s co-founder/director Mark Down, was that LIMF is a festival prepared to hand over power to the artists it trusts. Both The Heads and Invisible Thread’s Les Hommes Vides are experimental puppetry shows in which the artists concerned decided to be brave and make something in a different way to their previous known and loved works – quite a risk to take when premiering that new work at such a high-profile international festival. LIMF, although also committed to finding exciting theatre works old and new from far afield, has a brilliant track record of ongoing support for UK based artists key to the British visual/physical theatre scene. Thus, many on this year’s roster are companies who we’ve seen in previous years – from circus stars Ockham’s Razor and Gandini Juggling to puppeteers Blind Summit and Invisible Thread (the latter emerging from the ashes of Faulty Optic, another well-loved LIMF company).

It is also interesting to see the boundaries of the festival’s remit stretched with the inclusion of works by companies such as Les Ballets C de la B (who would most usually appear under a ‘dance’ banner, but have made a very different show this time round, by all accounts) and Stan’s Café, who perhaps epitomise the concept of ‘total theatre’ with their extraordinary canon of work that crosses boundaries of form.

We don’t know yet what LIMF 2014 will bring to us – but since 1977 we’ve been getting an ever-more eclectic mix of shows and artists, so there is bound to be new work that surprises from familiar faces, artists never previously seen in London, and… Well, your guess is as good as mine!

My!Laika: Popcorn Machine

A popcorn machine, indeed – the popped corn littering the stage, the smell of burnt oil and singed corn filling the room. Not only, but also: a wonky honky-tonk piano, whirring fan wobbling atop, dry ice puffing out from below; a trunk-load of dismembered mannequins, hands and feet and heads juggled and rolled; a dislocated chandelier trailing fairy lights and ringing with birdsong; a rail of clothing probably salvaged from an am dram group’s cupboard; a trapeze hanging ominously empty centre-stage; various chairs and cellos and amps and guitars; and four louche young people eyeing up the audience insolently, here downstage at the lip of their space chewing non-existent gum, there dragging each other across the space by the hair or ears, and now playing 60s psychedelic garage band guitar solos in party-shop shades.

Although My!Laika look and sound like they could be the bastard child of Forced Entertainment and Os Mutantes, they are in fact the latest hot young circus company from France to be picked up by the London International Mime Festival – laureates of the prestigious Jeunes Talents Cirque Europe (2010). I say ‘from France’, but individually they hail from far and wide: the sole male performer, Salvatore Frasca, is from Italy, and the three women come from Argentina (Eva Ordoñez-Benedetto), Germany (Philine Dahlmann), and Holland (Elske van Gelder).

And oh what a combo, a match made in hell! And how cleverly they weave their wonderfully warped circus acts into this distressed domestic-apocalyptic environment! Eva Ordoñez-Benedetto has the air of a blood-drained victim of Count Dracula. White-robed, red lipped, vacant-eyed she alternates her time onstage between slumping dazed in a chair upstage, muttering voiceless words with an unblinking stare, and performing the most excruciatingly slow and tortured solo trapeze act you could possibly imagine, often with very minimal use of her hands. I’ve seen and marvelled at the dreaded ‘neck hang’ before now; I’ve never seen it done by someone who looks like they’ve actually been hanged.

The other two women have what could loosely be described as an acrobalance partnership, which manifests as a kind of punk Mexican wrestling bout. The tall-and-lanky Dahlmann catches the short-and-muscley van Gelder by her long bleached-blonde hair. Aha, I think, the punchline is going to be that it’s a wig and it comes off, but no – she’s whirled around her partner’s body, and then across the stage, by her hair, which if not her own must be stuck on with superglue, and landing with an enormous thump. As she stares out at us, her head twisted under her partner’s arm, she looks just like the dismembered mannequin head placed on the piano. The pony-tailed and mascara’d one then races full-tilt at her goggle-eyed adversary, more or less running up her body in a wild flying kick. At one point Frasca tries to intervene but he’s caught by his ears and seen off easily.

He’s a great clown – tall and gangly, spouting cod philosophy, leering and posing, juggling dismembered limbs, riding a trick cycle through the debris in his ludicrously tight nylon underpants, or acting out his rock-star guitarist dreams lying prone on the stage floor. The foursome pass the baton of stage spotlight to each other with ease – all disguised as a fearsome battle for attention with ever-more outrageous actions.

Frank Zappa, Jackie Chan, Kurt Schwitters, and The Ramones are all cited influences – the hook that caught my interest. Who wouldn’t want to see a show with that publicity blurb? What was gratifying was that it was all here, and more, in this marvellous Merz / punk / pop art / circus mash-up.

What a find! I feel like I’ve fallen in love (with someone I shouldn’t have fallen in love with), to quote The Buzzcocks, whose sounds see us out of the auditorium, exhausted but exhilarated.