Entrañas (Insides) – El Patio Teatro / Barbican

My final MimeLondon outing for 2024 is to Entrañas, an exploration of the human body in all its fragility and wonder.

Back to an Old Question: What is Mime, Anyway?

If you’re just catching up, this is the third event I’ve been to at MimeLondon (first two here and here). MimeLondon is the successor to the London International Mime Festival (LIMF), a festival of contemporary visual theatre which ran from 1977 to 2023. MimeLondon is a smaller curatorial project bringing new and familiar companies to London stages.

The MimeLondon brochure looks back at LIMF as follows:

Essentially wordless and multi-disciplinary, its programme embraced circus-theatre, puppetry/animation, object theatre, mime, live art and physical theatre.

mimelondon-2024-ebrochure-1.pdf

I really love both LIMF and MimeLondon because of their range. I have typically encountered new companies and new forms of theatre and performance each year. But with such a broad range of disciplines within its purview, I do still find myself wondering – what is mime, anyway? Or perhaps a better question is how do we define what is and isn’t mime?

If we understand mime in this context as ‘contemporary visual theatre’, both of the performances I have seen so far this year fit somewhat comfortably into it. Last Rites is a BSL-based production. BSL is language, of course, but it is visual language, particularly when combined with visual vernacular. Additional text is projected in a very visual and engaging manner. Stereoptik’s Antechamber is sort of like live film-making. There’s less use of the performers’ bodies than you might expect for mime, but it is definitely contemporary, definitely visual, and the live projections arguably make it theatre.

And then we have the subject of today’s post, Entrañas (Insides) by Spanish company El Patio Teatro. We will dive into it in more detail in a second, but out of all the MimeLondon events I saw this year it really pushed the boundaries of what I understand mime to be. And the reason for that is how much the storytelling depends on spoken language.

Entrañas

Entrañas, which translates as ‘Insides’, is a beautiful piece of theatre and storytelling. Izaskun Fernández and Julián Sáenz-López work with a simple set, both the wooden workspaces and their apparel contribute to a timeless feeling. They pose, without necessarily answering, simple questions about the human body. The show lasts less than an hour, but within that time covers the history of understanding of human physiology, a number of interesting facts, and deep philosophical questions. They gently encourage us to confront heredity, death, and the remaining mysteries of life. They do this by manipulating hand-crafted anatomical models, utilising simple effects, and through visual storytelling.

Entrañas was, for me, reminiscent of cabinets of curiosity. Something about the space between order and wonder. Parallels are also drawn between our bodies and the rest of the natural world: a model of the circulatory system standing in for undersea coral, for instance. It’s poetic, and very moving.

But is it mime? It really depends how you define it. Is it contemporary? Yes. Is it visual? Yes*. Is it theatre? Yes. So my only hesitation is the ‘Yes*’ to it being visual: without the spoken content (in Spanish with English surtitles), Entrañas would not make sense.

But ultimately the best question might be: does it matter? MimeLondon is what brought Entrañas to London. Without this broad and bold vision of mime as visual storytelling, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see this lovely little show and get to know El Patio Teatro. I am grateful that LIMF’s founders continue to bring work of this quality to London stages.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 4/5

Entrañas on until 10 February 2024