1980 is one of the seminal productions of the late 20th Century, and in retrospect a production that once seen makes the nature of contemporary performance become a little clearer. Not only does it clarify the myriad ways in which Piña Bausch carved a distinctive figure in theatre and dance, but also hints at many […]

Text and puppetry are different languages. Puppetry speaks through image, movement, and rhythm. Text deals in abstraction – ideas – and specificity, of voice, expression, and thought. Text is of our world, shaping our everyday experience continuously, whilst puppetry retains an otherworldliness which is sometimes part of its appeal. For these reasons puppetry adaptations of […]

What’s Become of You? is the seventh of Compagnie 111’s works to be presented at LIMF, and is, as artistic director Aurelian Bory notes, something of a departure from his usual work. Bory describes this as a portrait of flamenco dancer Stéphanie Fuster, and herein lies the key difference between C111’s usual work and this […]

This taut trio from Catalan company Man Drake is tightly wound around the central physical motif of the staccato repetition of simple human action. A woman sits reading, her gaze gliding back and forth across the pages of a newspaper. A man stands, his head turning back and forth, his shoulders briefly engaging in the […]

Beccy Smith explores mime as contemporary performance in the work of Gecko. In 2002 I stumbled into a Pay What You Can performance at BAC by a company I’d never heard of whose show had been picked up for a longer run after being spotted in a North London pub theatre. This early performance of Gecko’s […]