Aurélien Bory is a French circus director who specialises in ingenious design and kinetic play. He’s great at loosening your spatial anchors and up‑ending your sense of scale. Les Sept Planches de la Ruse (The Seven Boards of Skill) is based on a giant tangram, the Chinese puzzle comprising a wooden square divided into seven pieces, including five triangles (two small, one medium, two large), one square and a parallelogram.
Generally, a tangram is a small game, 10-or-so inches, so children can arrange the pieces into thousands of patterns, from geometric forms to fish, flowers, runners, acrobats and cats.
Bory’s tangram is 24-or-so feet square, and his 14 performers pull and push the pieces around like hulking buttresses. They slide between them, walk along them then climb on and jump off them. They balance the black pieces between each other like mamoth seesaws, lay them on the ground and on top of each other, and create shapes that suggest steam pistons and skyscrapers. Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill bronze almost appears before your eyes.
The shapes are endlessly surprising, as is the process of their creation. Likewise Bory’s performers from the Beijing Opera who also sing and occasionally tumble and roll. The mood is careful, with the shift and glide of pieces creating a faintly hypnotic atmosphere. Nothing is rushed or risked, everyone performs quietly, and all the balances, some of them quite difficult, are neatly done.
For 75 minutes the able performers manhandle the Brobdingnag geometry very impressively. You’d be confident of them moving your piano. The closing sequence when the performers reassemble it into a square then push it along like a giant wall or a tank behind a lone man (Tiananmen, perhaps?), is a potent image. But apart from that, you feel strangely short-changed. The puzzle is big, the shapes intriguing, and the performers able. Given the ambitious scale of the moveable set, you feel there should be more.
Until 17 Jan. LIMF until 25 Jan. Information: www.mimefest.co.uk
London International Mime Festival: Compagnie 111/Scenes De La Terre: Les Sept Planches De La Ruse
Barbican Theatre
Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
