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MimeLondon is a new curatorial project created by Helen Lannaghan and Joseph Seelig, the directors of London International Mime Festival (LIMF) which ended in 2023 after five decades of award-winning success.
MimeLondon will support occasional collaborations of contemporary visual theatre in partnership with venues in London. Its first season takes place in Jan/Feb 2024 with 8 productions new to London.
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London International Mime Festival (LIMF) 1977-2023 was an established, annual festival of contemporary visual theatre. Essentially wordless and multi-disciplinary, its programme embraced circus-theatre, puppetry/animation, object theatre, mime, live art and physical theatre. Founded in 1977 at the Cockpit Theatre as a one-off event to showcase the work of British mimes, theatre clowns and other physical and visual theatre artists, the festival rapidly grew in scale, quality and reputation. Since that start in one small theatre LIMF involved more than thirty London venues – from Tate Modern and West End theatres, to the Almeida, Barbican, Battersea Arts Centre, ICA, Jacksons Lane, Natural History Museum, Royal Opera House, Sadler’s Wells, Shunt Vaults, Soho Theatre, Shoreditch Town Hall and Southbank Centre. The festival presented almost 800 productions over its long history. 2023 was the 47th and final edition.
LIMF was the UK’s longest established annual, international theatre festival, in receipt of Arts Council England funding from its inception, and latterly being a National Portfolio Organisation. In recent years its productions and its two directors received various honours and awards, most notably three Olivier Award nominations including winner of Best New Dance Production in 2015 (Peeping Tom’s 32 Rue Vandenbranden at The Barbican), a Total Theatre lifetime achievement award and the 2017 Empty Space – Peter Brook Special Achievement Award.
"One of the pleasures of the festival has always been its flagrant disregard for British theatre’s tendency to put art into boxes… The LIMF programme constantly tempts us out of our comfort zones” The Guardian
"An explosively inventive programme of visual performance" Evening Standard
"The Mime Festival has had an enormous impact on British theatre" WhatsOnStage
"January in London always means the varied, zany mime festival, when international performers can be enjoyed without a language barrier... I invariably leave the mime festival invigorated and touched" Quentin Letts
"Too amazing for words - it's the best physical theatre from around the world" Time Out
"The London International Mime Festival might seem a bit of a mouthful as a title. But really it’s a remarkable feat of compression given that it ought to be called “Things That Have Grabbed the Attention of Co-Directors Helen Lannaghan and Joseph Seelig That Others Might Label Variously Dance, Performance Art, Circus and Puppetry, Not Always From Abroad, Sometimes With Talking" Daily Telegraph
Download the 2024 Media Release >
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