It’s a minimalist scene on entering: an empty stage, with a large projection screen at the back and projector centre stage. To the left a sound desk, anglepoise lamp, and a couple of guitars. Opposite, on the far right of the stage, is the animation table, a camera on a rostrum, paper and art materials meticulously laid out, and a couple more lamps. All black and white functionality.

The performers enter and at once the music and images begin to appear. We are immersed in the drawn world of the Dark Circus.

At the sound desk is Jean-Baptiste Maillet and stationed at the animation table is Romain Bermond, though the division of labour isn’t quite so clear cut as this image suggests. Maillet’s drum takes on the role of the circus ring, and Jean-Baptiste’s guitar not only delivers the soundtrack for the lion tamer but its beautifully painted neck ‘becomes’ him, and the soundhole the lion’s cage.

An inky brush line begins to appear on the screen. I can see Romain drawing it live on the animation table. I experience slight vertigo seeing the image appear on the screen without the artist’s hand or brush being visible – something to ask about at the end of the show discussion.* The magical black line describes big top, caravan, box office, trees and paths, the city’s skyscrapers, and the road carrying the audience to the see the show.

Hand-cut paper cars and figures on sticks make the Circus Cavalcade. As the background is wound furiously along by Romain’s other hand, the clusters of figures he holds still in front of the camera begin to walk along streets and paths towards the circus. Soon we are arriving at the Big Top. A fantastic sandy transition takes us smoothly inside, where the circus ring and eager audience awaits.

I’m relieved to see Romain’s hands, silhouetted black on the big screen like a pair of puppeteer’s gloves as they move the sand on the overhead projector.

Jean-Baptiste and Romain seamlessly pull focus from one camera to another, mixing high-tech with low, scene by scene, with perfect synchronisation and precision. We can see the action on the screen and are also party to the speedy scene changes and set-ups by one as the other literally draws the audience’s attention his way. It is thrilling to watch the action on the screen and associate it with the strange and precise choreography of the live performers.

The circus performers are introduced in turn, each with their own soundtrack and different style or technique to bring them to life on the stage, each more thrilling than the last. My favourite ‘gasp out loud’ moment was when a beautifully-rendered circus pony suddenly found animated life of its own and made a bolt for freedom, no longer fettered by the artist’s hand it bucked and kicked and galloped around the page, while the artist frantically drew its changing scenery and attempted to draw a fence to keep it in. It’s a moment of alchemy and joy and nicely recalls Eadweard Muybridges’s pioneering stop-motion photographs of running horses and pre-animation techniques.

‘Come for the show, stay for the woe’, the Ringmaster cries, but for me perhaps the woe could have been a bit more miserable: I like my Dark Circus DARK. Dark Circus is a sweet story, even the tragically ‘sticky’ ends of the circus characters are delivered with gentle humour and all are redeemed in the end.

The production was witty, stylish, and fabulously inventive, delivered with dexterous sleight of hand by Stereoptic after what must have been hours, weeks, years of creative play and practice. They promised us that we would see how it’s done, and we can certainly see them doing it but their fluent use of technology and smooth segues between scenes and techniques left the magicians’ sleeves unexamined and their magic intact.

*The artist’s brush and hand wasn’t visible in the opening scene because it was filmed from the underside of the paper.

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.