It’s Tuesday night in The Pit and two bald, middle-aged French men are telling a story. In many ways it’s an old story: girl meets boy, falls in love, goes on an adventure in which they lose and then find one another again. In many more immediate ways, it is not. The man to my right, Romain Bermond, is etching a park boulevard with geometric detail in real-time. Opposite him, the man to my left, Jean-Baptiste Maillet, is playing a drum kit with one hand, space-rock synths with the other and a harmonica in-between. They are Stereoptik and Stellaire is a love-story mime. It is also set in space.

© Christophe Raynaud de Lage.

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A rain poncho. Earplugs. Hand in your belongings. Are you ready to experience what can only be described as Takeshi’s Castle on ecstasy, absurd, frenetic, intense but such a laugh. Presented in collaboration with LIFT Festival, the Barbican Pit hosts Extreme Voices’ Miss Revolutionary Idol Berserker. This show is something ‘I have never seen before’, an immersive production that you will either love or hate.

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Six dancers lost in a continuous cycle of choreography, holding on to past stories and times since vanished. Late Night by the Blitz Theatre Group, in association with LIFT 2016, is an abstract piece delivered in the Greek language set in a dark wasteland of furniture and rubble.

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The London International Mime Festival has yet again unveiled a smorgasboard of hidden gems, delighting audiences with a theatrical vocabulary of the physical, the visual and the genre defying. He Who Falls quite literally rips up the floor boards and levitates expectation with its imaginative charm.

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Figurentheater Tübingen is known for skilful and imaginative puppetry. Founded in 1991 by puppeteers Frank Soehnle and Karin Ersching, who studied under master puppeteer Albrecht Roser, Figurentheater Tübingen explores the limits between puppet theatre and other theatre genres such as object theatre. Elements of prose, figurative arts and music are combined to develop new theatre genres. In every performance the company pushes new limits regarding genre and content, challenging traditional theatrical disciplines. A “Wunderkammer” was once known as a cabinet of rare items and curiosities. This idea frames this evening, a fusion of visual and performing art.

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Stereoptik‘s fourth production was created especially for the 2015 Avignon festival. Based on an original story by the illustrator Pef (Pierre Elie Ferrier), who created the famous character Prince de Motordu, Dark Circus takes us to a dreary town where the Dark Circus gives only one single performance: “Come to the show, stay for the woe.” Presented by a sinister ringmaster, all circus artists meet catastrophic ends: The trapeze artist falls to her death, the human cannonball is shot into space, the lion tamer is eaten, one of the prized circus horses escapes and its rider perishes in its pursuit… Yet then a juggler, who uses only one ball, releases all the colours of the rainbow and changes the dark circus into a world of joy and wonder.

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I’d like to start with saying that for me, Circa are one of, if not the most exciting companies premiering their work at this years London International Mime Festival. This particular piece is developed from Moneteverdi’s Il Ritorno D’Ulisse, consequently becoming part circus show part opera – which is a surprisingly eloquent mix.

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