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!