Don't laugh at me, I'm an existential clown
MIME was an essential
ingredient of classical dance, its elevated sign language conveying
"the story so far" as no choreography could. Mime language
has been forgotten in Western dance, but it is found nowadays in a strange
marriage with circus, which has produced a new kind of "dancey"
clown.
So I find myself drawn
to the London International Mime Festival, where the edges blur between
circus, dance and mime. The capital is awash with foreign clowns, such
as Slava Polunin, who plagiarised his own Snow-show in Alegria
at the Albert Hall for the Cirque du Soleil.
It was interesting to
see LIMF hosting Polunin's for-
mer partner, Anton Adassinsky,
and his own clown company last week. These are the abrasively miserable
Derevo, who cross over into the kind of thrashing, existential dance-theatre
for which DV8 and Nigel Char-nock are known in Britain.
Polunin and Adassinsky
share an upbringing in communist Russia and a similar bitter humour,
but they have gone clowning in opposite directions. Where Polunin reaches
out insistently for audience love, Adassinsky repels it.
The Red Zone (a
hit at last year's Edinburgh Fringe) starts with a biting street scene
in which four oddly costumed vagrants offer an
Mime
stains of humanity in
that achingly slow Butoh style which gives you time to recite all your
sins and the train timetable twice over before it gets on to the next
tableau.
Much less intense was
the entertainment offered by Les Acrostiches, a trio who can hardly
be called mime artists since they talked incessantly. Like The Red
Zone, this clearly draws on street juggling and tumbling; but unlike
the Russian show it is a simple celebration of their marvellous physical
skills, couched in a comic patter that lightly sends up the group's
Frenchness.
Some of what they do,
especially in their equili-
brism (one of them sings
a tango while balancing upside down on alternate hands), goes beyond
the athletic stunt into a Monty Python world. Yet Les Acrostiches belong
in the street outside a nice restaurant — or, muzzled, in Alegria
— while Derevo belong in basements or dark alleys, or within
the covers of a grimy samizdat pamphlet.
Derevo are touring
until Feb 4 (information: 0181 348 0203)
ISMENE BROWN
Derevo; Les Acrostiches
Purcell Room
unhinged "act"
of inept juggling with street debris, while one of them bashes a tin
drum to summon us and hide any mistakes.
The madness appears to
be an ironic disguise, and before long these Poor Toms, with their whitened
skinny bodies and hollow eye-sockets, reappear in haunting light as
foetuses or prisoners in cells, writhing and fighting mess-ily in primeval
slime.
The hour's progression
has a claustrophobic Russian force to it, but lays on its warning about
the inborn