On stage is a large wheel and a low platform with a moving travelator. There is also a thunder-board and a slatted screen, some boxes, some lights. They are there as tools rather than a set; there are lights around the walls, cables, projectors. It is a casual affair.

We are given a page of translated texts with our programme. It has four extracts on it, three of which refer to solitary walking, as a way of experiencing the landscape and people, and of enhancing creativity. Two male performers enter the space, one goes to the wheel, the other passes a lamp-light over the slatted screen and releases a film, crackly and atmospheric. The walking begins…

Mathurin Bolze is one of the leading lights of French contemporary circus, last seen at LIMF with Du Goudron et des Plumes (2011). This year’s MIme Festival offering, À Bas Bruit, ‘explores what happens when feelings and ideas rebel against the established order of things’, and is inspired by the work of avant-garde film-maker and anthropologist, Jean Rouch. For the first time, Bolze directs without himself performing in the piece.

À Bas Bruit features three performers, Elise Legros, Cyrille Musy and Mitia Fedotenko – all, as you would expect, very highly skilled acrobatics and dancers. There is clever, fluid work on the travelator (which, along with the ‘hamster wheel’, perhaps represents the treadmill of life). There are duets and throws and catches and leaps. The films are projected on to different surfaces and generally feature people walking amongst autumnal scenery. There is a nice scratchy soundscape and some songs to provide a human voice. The lighting (Jeremie Cusenier) is magnificent; and the staging (Frederic Marolleau) and sound design (by Goury) are impressive. It is an accomplished, well-produced and layered piece. The audience can relax and enjoy the physical expertise on show.

For those who seek a bit more than entertainment it is less satisfactory. The relationship between them and us is distant: there is a lack of character, no emotional pull.

There are a couple of very odd segments which do make you sit up. Mitia Fedotenko suddenly goes into a good clown routine. It is the first time there has been any contact made with the audience. It springs out of nowhere and bears no relation to anything that as gone before. It feels shoe-horned in to demonstrate ability and add variety. Elise and Cyrille have a jokey routine on the travelator, then Elise gets battered for being a bit irritating. The male-female dynamic is incredibly stereotyped throughout.

Eventually all three take to the wheel, building up tremendous speed, and then reach a point of total stillness. This would have been a great ending, with just Mitia’s head in a golden light. Instead, the cast shifts boxes around and prepare other surfaces onto which photographed faces of many ethnicities are projected, in homage (we presume) to Jean Rouch’s work on African ethnography.

The title translates as ‘low noise’. I wish it had made its propounded ideas of rebellion and mass movements a bit louder.