The great joy of the Mime Festival is that whilst a stripped back, poetic meditation on the human condition such as Yoann Bourgeois’s He Who Falls is playing in one venue, across town in another space a dense and anarchic circus show such as Svalbard’s All Genius All Idiot is also playing. And what a contrast these two shows are.

Founded by four graduates of Stockholm’s University of Dance and Circus, Svalbard might, in theatre admin-speak, be called cross-disciplinary, but this wouldn’t come close to capturing the raucous and irreverent spirit of this strangely beguiling band. In fact, a band is probably the closest description of what they are. Svalbard have that thrusting vigour and dangerous sexuality of all the best rock bands; they have the sense of a band of outcasts roaming the hills before descending on unsuspecting villages to outrage the locals; and, more prosaically, each scenario, each ‘act’ is driven along by the songs they sing and the music they make.

This music-making is led by the sinuous and strutting Ben Smith, his malleable voice conjuring different worlds for his fellow performers. Described in the past as ‘a crappy farmer with some skills’, here he might be an echo of the pagan past of his native British countryside or his adopted home of Sweden. Wearing antlers, dressed in fur and fishnets, and rutting like a stag he is the image of the shaman – part in this world and part in the otherworld.

In fact all four performers possess this shamanic quality – the compact and springy Santiago Riuz Albalate, dressed more conservatively than the others, is the band’s trickster – a laughing and unstable figure perched atop the Chinese pole. In contrast, John Simon Wiborn is more earthy and grounded – aggressively (and often literally) pushing the others of the band on into each new moment. And then there is the elfin Tom Brand, who, even whilst he whips around the corde lisse manages to maintain a delicate air.

All Genius All Idiot is circus as a liminal act, on the edge between civilisation and the wilds, between circus and music, between animal and human, between the genders, between and the real and otherworldly. It is a hedonistic celebration of the Bacchanalian spirit. Originally commissioned for the 2015 Glastonbury festival, it embraces Glastonbury’s blend of music and counter-culture, and the result is something akin to a prog-folk-rock album – familiar melodies and sounds reeling and whirring in unfamiliar ways. At first it feels daunting and aggressive, but by the end it kind of makes sense, if not in intellectual sense then on an instinctual level.

Making his British debut, young circus director Yoann  Bourgeois’s He Who Falls (Celui qui tombe) is as intelligent, inquisitive and, most importantly, deftly-pitched a performance as you’ll find in any British theatre this year. These are the kind of performances that the London International Mime Festival is for, and, in the absence of a French level of adventurous, sustained, and systemic funding for the development of circus in the UK, it is likely to be one of the few means by which British audiences can enjoy this type of work on home soil.

He Who Falls begins from an artfully simple premise: subjecting the mass of the human body to forces generated by a single object. In this case the object is a simple, but very large, wooden platform moving about its various axes.

First this platform begins to tilt. The six performers’ bodies that lie prone begin to slide. The platform changes the direction of its tilt. The bodies react to this change, first slowly and then more quickly as the incline increases. The bodies appear lifeless, sacks of meat and bone, sliding ever closer to the edge – to oblivion. Then… a performer stands, they attempt to fight the forces acting on their body. They try to resist. But they can’t overcome the forces. This fundamental struggle sets the tone for the entirety of the work: that the performers are subservient, no, subject, to the object – they are literally forced into action.

The platform settles to the horizontal, and then it begins to spin. The performers attempt to balance, to stay afoot the spinning square of wood. And so continues the pull and push of the object against these six figures. Each time the platform changes its behaviour, so the performers have to learn to adapt and to survive.

This platform, which seems to have a life of its own, might also be a not-so-subtle nod to  Bourgeois’s collaborator at his Atelier du Joueur, Mathurin Bolze’s 2010 work Du goudron et des plumes, which also took place on a giant, suspended wooden platform. But where Bolze’s work is strident and replete with tricks,  Bourgeois’s work is elegant in its simplicity. In this simplicity there are clearer sympathies with the work of fellow Frenchman and pioneer of circus Aurelian Bory (Compagnie 111). He Who Falls recalls the manipulation of the different angles of a single plane in Bory’s Plan B, and the apparent autonomy of a robot arm in his compelling Sans Objet. And, not least of all, the ways in which in Bory’s work simple mechanics are transformed into scenarios of striking beauty and sadness.

Just as Bory forensically investigates a single idea in each of his works, so does  Bourgeois as he (literally) winds the idea up and lets it run. Simplicity is  Bourgeois’s watchword, and it becomes a treat to see the simple, but stirring consequences of human bodies resisting the centrifugal forces of the spinning platform. At times the performers walk, at others they run, or tumble over one another, and then suddenly they freeze – as if caught in suspended animation. In this moment of repose the performers strikingly embody what Russian director Meyerhold would call a rakurs, a position that contains within it ‘the perspective of the continuation of the action’ – even in stillness they are still moving. It is this use of rakurs that generates the poetic heart of the work, as it allows time to absorb and process the moments that have come before and to literally feel within our own bodies the momentum of the bodies in space.

Bourgeois’s work then is essentially a kinetic sculpture, in which physical forces are manifested in the performers’ bodies, and then with careful and delicate use of their gaze and rhythm these manifestations become relationships. It is with these relationships that  Bourgeois shifts the work from ‘mere’ spectacle to poetry. There is the group, there are partners and there are individuals – but these are never sustained for long – as the external forces push the performers into new positions, into new decisions about how to react to the offers the platform makes.

But in spite of the scale and magnificence of the object, the most important and rewarding aspect of the poetry of He Who Falls is the quality of restraint that  Bourgeois and the ensemble apply to the work. There are few recognisable ‘tricks’ in the entire piece, and those that there are, are almost smuggled in behind a gentle and reflective quality. Instead of showy display the ensemble execute their responses to the force with an apparent casual physicality and a sensitive playful response to the sensation of these forces. It is as if any of us could do these things – if the forces were acting upon us.

In some ways even the spectacular nature of the wooden platform is elided over, and it is only when  Bourgeois directs our attention away from the ensemble to the technicians as they change the settings or move the mount on which the platform sometimes sits that the technical complexity of the object becomes clear. Yet, because the technicians’ actions match the pragmatic and prosaic attitude of the ensemble, although we see the workings of the beast, there is still an attitude that this is how things are, and that we don’t need to make a fuss about it.

Through this careful and deliberate use of restraint  Bourgeois manages to locate the power of the physical work in its possibility of being read as a simple example of human beings facing the arbitrary and uncontrollable orbit of the world. And, rather than embellishing or heightening the struggle of human beings he just presents the simple struggle to stand upright, to balance, or to move from one position to another. It is a clear elucidation of Peter Brook’s maxim that it only takes an actor to walk across a stage for theatre to happen. So the work is most powerful when the images are the simplest: a swinging platform striking, dragging, and then lifting the performers from the floor, five performers trying to lift their ‘dead’ comrade onto a rising platform, and finally those same five performers hanging by their hands for as long as they can from the platform’s base – only to drop, one-by-one, into the darkness below. It is in the moment that the idea reaches it awful conclusion – that no matter how much we can negotiate the forces on our lives, at the end there is only one outcome.

This atmospheric response to Monteverdi’s opera Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria is the latest UK premiere from prolific Australian circus company Circa. A regular visitor to London’s Barbican, it is Circa’s first visit as part of the London International Mime Festival.

The Return sees six acrobats (three men and three women) share the roles of ‘a man trying to get home, and a woman waiting for a man who hasn’t arrived.’  By turns reflective and explosive, it surfs the different emotional territories that these two agonisingly pertinent scenarios conjure up.

A long steel wall bars the figures from the upstage area, in a striking echo of the walls erected by Greece, Bulgaria, and Hungary over the last three years as a means to prevent the migration of refugees from the world’s war zones. But Circa aren’t concerned with attempts to scale the wall, or to glimpse the other side; rather the six figures gaze out into the auditorium. More accurately their gaze is fixed beyond the auditorium – a thousand-yard stare confronting the world outside, as if somewhere out there lies the person or place they seek. This is an evocative proposition, and one that provides some fertile territory for the acrobatics, contortion, and acro-balance that dominates the work. This reliance on the capacity of the acrobats, without apparatus, speaks both to the displaced’s loss of material possessions and their loss of stability and security.

There is one scene though where the acrobats turn to apparatus. In turn, each of the three women take their place on one piece of apparatus. First a suspended cube, then a pair of straps, and finally a set of multiple hand-balancing canes. The first two sequences build in intensity, clearly becoming a means to articulate the internal world of the women, but it is the final sequence, with Nicole Faubert twisting and turning slowly atop the canes of various heights, that crowns this sequence. As Faubert teeters and stretches into space, the two other women curl up, immobile at the base of the canes, staring up as if shell-shocked. Here it is the crushing emptiness of waiting for the unknown that stands out.

The Return blends its dynamic acrobatics with a series of extracts from Monteverdi’s opera, played and sung live from a small platform to the side of the stage. Interspersed amongst these extracts are electronic compositions by four contemporary composers in response to Monteverdi’s work. Thus the musical world of the piece shifts between richly nuanced melodies and striking sonic landscapes.

The Return is early into its life in Circa’s repertoire and the acrobats are yet to settle into the ebb and flow of the emotional worlds of each scenario. What is clear about the work is the way in which the emotional resonance of each ‘act’ is clearest in the moments when the acrobatics turns away from explosive movements and towards an attempt to ‘still’, or resist the flow of movement. Most strikingly this occurs when two acrobats, one-by-one, slowly and unsteadily stand one on top of the other, then to be joined by a third, on top of the second, to form a tower of three acrobats. By denying themselves the momentum that might usually be used to arrive in position in this trick the acrobats make it harder to achieve. The result is that the tremors and movement of the actors forced by their attempts to retain their balance becomes more pronounced – the strain visibly heightened by the slowness of the movement. In this moment the tangible strain of the trick achieves a degree of poetry that unlocks the struggle of the dispossessed.

As with many physically taxing performances there is a tangible tension in seeing, up close, the bodies of the performers under stress, a tension that much of the clarity of the world hangs upon. But I wonder if this is also a show that might benefit by watching it from a greater distance, providing a chance to take in the full width of the shallow stage, and with this the scale of the situation that faces these acrobats, and more importantly the people on the shores and seas of the Mediterranean, and in the camps and temporary accommodation dotted throughout Europe and the Middle East.