For Smashed: Special Edition, the Gandini Juggling show that kicked off the London International Mime Festival on Monday, you had to check two sets of clichés at the door. First, inevitably, the one about mime being a skinny bloke in whiteface and tights, feeling his way around an invisible box. For the LIMF, mime means performing that uses anything other than a text to “say” something. And second, this isn’t the Indian-club kind of juggling, done by men in glittery flares. The Gandinis are more like performance artists who happen to be good at juggling, especially with apples.
Here, the men wear suits and ties, the ladies tight outfits and heels. Smashed is a tribute to the late choreographer Pina Bausch and her distinctive brand of dance-theatre, and quite sensibly — if you can say that about people who like chucking china tea sets about — the Gandinis have asked Dominique Mercy, a founder member of Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, to be their “external eye”. This expanded version scrunches many of Bausch’s signature elements into a 75-minute mini-me of a piece.
You don’t have to know anything about Bausch to enjoy this glorious show, but for fans there are extra giggles, such as the 15 bentwood chairs lined up across the Peacock’s stage, a trademark part of the German company’s stage apparatus. A dozen Gandini jugglers — they are fielding 22 in all here — then stroll on, juggling three apples each. All have that Wuppertal expression: a sort of self-satisfied smile, with a definite hint of seduction. It’s inherently funny even if you don’t know where it comes from. They process in a circle to a crackly novelty number Bausch might have chosen for its schlocky 1940s feel: I’ve Always Wanted to Waltz in Berlin, by Little Jack Little (me neither). Then the real fun begins.
The piece becomes a push-pull between show-off solos and what can only be called formation juggling — rows of apples lofted simultaneously in the air, lines of jugglers “stealing” each other’s apples in strict rotation. There’s no story, though “characters” emerge in routines set to Satchmo and Tammy Wynette and Vivaldi (a live quartet and singer) that explore Bausch’s usual themes.
It’s the emotional landscape of a children’s playground, with its rivalries and daft humour, edging into spitefulness and dodgy sexual politics. Only two of the leads are women (one is Kati Yla-Hokkala, co-founder, with Sean Gandini, of the company), and they suffer the fate of many a Bausch female: being patronised, even mocked and physically pestered, despite their obvious skill and strength — though they get their revenge as smiling smackers of their menfolk.
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Each time the performers go rogue, then slip back into line, a layer peels off their cool united front, until they descend into a glorious anarchy you so want to join in with. In an ideal world, a producer would give this piece a longer life. (Thanks go to the Arts Council for funding this extended version.) The Gandinis are hugely entertaining and gifted — some of them actors and dancers of a calibre Bausch would smile at, too.
LIMF runs until Feb 4; mimelondon.com