La Manékine / The Employees
The Pit, Barbican / Queen Elizabeth Hall London January 2025
An annual festival founded in 1977, MimeLondon (formerly the London International Mime Festival) this year features seven stage attractions, seven participatory workshops, and a movie. As I write, everything but one performance event has sold out.
According to the International Encyclopedia of Dance, mime describes “theatrical presentations that rely greatly on the actor’s movements and gestures” and often includes masks, clowning, and puppets or marionettes. The standard definition doesn’t mention dance, but I went along to the season’s first performance, La Manékine by the French duo La Pendue, to enjoy the movement.
I found a sinister fable about a miller who makes a pact with the devil, enacted by Estelle Charlier, a black-clad clown, wielding an assortment of hand puppets and jointed dolls while growling the text in guttural French. Occasionally taking a bit part onstage, Martin Kaspar Orkestar served primarily as her one-man band, sometimes playing clarinet, accordion and drums simultaneously.
English surtitles and macabre black-and-white photos were projected behind them. Masks and props expanded the cast; acquiring a papier-mâché head behind her own, Charlier inhabited two characters simply by turning around.
Out of curiosity, a few nights later I saw The Employees, a drama in Polish, derived from a dystopian sci-fi novel by the Danish author Olga Ravn and directed by Lukasz Twarkowski. Each of the six actors portrayed both the human and matching humanoid crew member of a spaceship exploring a distant planet. Within a cube of plastic panels surrounded by seating on all sides, the characters discussed their lonely plight in space, their feelings for each other, and the Organization that controlled their work and, possibly, their thoughts and emotions.
We watched them on gigantic screens that formed the upper half of the structure, on smaller screens set into the flimsy panels at stage level, and in the gaps between them. Handheld video cameras brought us into the group meetings and private encounters, often capturing one scene from several angles or different scenes at once. Given permission to change seats and line of sight anytime, the audience wandered around like voyeurs for a closer view of the intimate activity.
Superficially, the two shows have nothing in common, except that neither involves much dance. One is a grim Grimm fairy tale, a spooky blend of spiritual faith and savage violence, the other a futuristic epic of rational debate and irrational sexual attraction.
La Manékine juggles with scale and perspective for its effect; you have to shrink your focus to accept the reality of a hand-puppet baby and a hand-puppet father shaking the bells on their tiny hats to converse. The Employees presents its dramatic arguments exclusively in speech relayed live, without the slightest variation in volume or intensity, through headset microphones.
But here’s the thing. Both productions draw their substance from more or less sophisticated machinery, operated by humans. Essentially inanimate, puppets range in the subtle nuances they can indicate according to their physical construction and the skill of their handlers. Shadow puppets, which produce nothing but silhouettes, and jointed animals like War Horse can express only shape and action; bunraku puppets, each of which requires three operators, can reveal intention as well.
Once merely fictional conceits, robotic bodies are now tangible and increasingly useful, and the artificial intelligence that powers Employees’ humanoids has spread like a hydra into everything from international politics to garden design. Digital developments now dominate our lives. Though we haven’t yet discovered what lasting impact they will have on the arts, in Japan they’re perfecting a robot that can play the piano.
When Merce Cunningham began experimenting with choreography on computers, the software provided him with components of dance phrases that proved impossible for the human body to execute. These two productions raise another issue: human bodies can realize them but only as the support team. In order to perform, the performers have to relinquish centerstage and star billing to the machinery.
MimeLondon continues through February 1. mimelondon.com