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Ockham's Razor, London International Mime Festival | reviews, news & interviews

Ockham's Razor, London International Mime Festival

Ockham's Razor, London International Mime Festival

Mesmerising British company tell human stories in the air

“Don’t look down,” comes the exhortation from somewhere on the floor. "Look ahead." I am testing out a new bit of kit, a large wooden cylinder encased in a metal frame, suspended via ropes and pulleys from a high ceiling. The diameter is big enough for me to be able to stand up and walk. Or not. The inclination is to watch your feet as, like a hamster, you power the rotation of the drum. Trouble is if you look down you lose your balance. So I look ahead and take grandmother’s footsteps which are barely strong enough to get the thing moving at all. "Take bigger strides," comes more advice. But it's no use.

Ockham’s Razor will be performing somewhat more competently on the same piece of equipment at the Linbury Studio of the Royal Opera House at this year’s London International Mime Festival. The LIMF, or MimeFest, as usual includes all manner of performers from the very broad church that nowadays passes for mime. They hail from all over the world. Ockham’s Razor have for the past few years established themselves as a consistently intriguing British presence in this all too unheralded area of performance.

The received wisdom is that you need a PhD in pretentiousness to appreciate the opacities of mime. But like many acts in the festival, the work of Ockham’s Razor is eye-openingly inclusive. Not that it’s easy to pin down exactly what they do. At their genre-defying entertainments, you could easily suppose you’re at the circus, or a performance art installation. Is this, you might well ask, what they’re doing in contemporary dance these days? Or have you somehow strayed into the mind of a video game designer? The one common denominator is that they don’t spend too much time on the ground. Ockham’s Razor are aerialists.

Take their previous shows. In Memento Mori two of them performed a hypnotic pas-de-deux on a trapeze. Every Action... found four of them clambering wittily up and down a huge length of rope slung through a pair of pulleys. In Arc three characters were stranded on a misbehaving metal grid like a trio of shipwrecked survivors.

Watch excerpts from Arc:

Watching them rehearse their new work in a freezing warehouse near the Thames Barrier, it is clear that Ockham’s Razor have moved onto a new plane. Where the three previous works could be performed over one fairly short evening as a triptych, The Mill was commissioned by the LIMF as a full-length hour-long show. The company, which consists of Charlotte Mooney, Alex Harvey and Tina Koch, has been augmented for their new production by two extra performers – their biggest cast yet.

The narrative initially consists of four figures working a complex network of ropes and pulleys linking the huge drum to a wider network of cylinders and shapes. From the figures' clockwork motion it’s as if they’re doing shifts on a production line – the mill of the title. Though mesmerising to watch as they work the equipment back and forth, the dawning reality is that it’s repetitive, even boring - until a fifth character rolls onto the stage, and the drama begins. And drama, it should be stated is what Ockham’s Razor ultimately do: they tell human stories through highly devised means, but with pin-sharp clarity.

“The concept came from the idea of systems where one action affects another,” explains Koch, the company’s resident imp who is usually typecast as the cheeky, disruptive one. “We wanted to use the idea of a system being a lot more open, spatially a lot bigger.” Hence the wheel.

A period of full-time research, development and rehearsal began last August. “It takes that long,” says Mooney, who is bigger-boned and powerful. “You have to learn a whole technique for a new piece of equipment, then you have to work out what the equipment does, and figure out what story that might tell.” Toby Sedgwick, who won an Olivier for his choreography in War Horse, is the director on the ground helping them to develop the narrative.

It’s little wonder they have conjured up a piece about getting tasks done. After four months of full-time rehearsal, the work is still painstakingly laborious. But there is no cutting corners. Learning the personality of the equipment in the past that has involved modifying it as they go along. The metal grid in Arc began as a cube “which was incredibly boring because you couldn’t fall off,” says Mooney. “So we started stripping it away.” It was only when the base was left that their imaginations were fired up. They made a similar breakthrough with Every Action…, whose original premise involved clambering up and down a pair of parallel ropes. The dynamic was altered when they slung one huge length of rope over two pulleys, allowing for a frothy examination of cause and effect through the interplay of weight and balance.

And then there's the risk to factor in. Although rehearsals are partly designed to minimise hazards, no show is without them, especially once the thick carpet of crash mats is removed. “Often in a play you have to act danger,” says Koch. “It’s very different to pretending that you could potentially die. This is why it takes us so long to make a piece. It’s like learning to ride a horse that you haven’t tamed yet.”

The Mill was finally ready for performance in December. Two shows at the Lowry in Salford and the Millennium Centre in Cardiff were, in effect, their technical and dress rehearsals. “From the experience of having made Arc,” says Alex Harvey, who has the classically rugged V-shaped musculature of a male gymnast, “we realised we need to perform it in front of an audience to understand it better. We literally hadn’t run The Mill all the way through a single time before the performance.”

The company’s three members met at Circomedia, the school for physical theatre and circus in Bristol. They all gravitated towards the aerial disciplines of rope and trapeze. Harvey and Mooney, who have since married, initially fashioned Memento Mori and presented it in competition in France in January 2004. “We wanted to make a piece with more people and I knew instantly that Tina was somebody that I wanted to work with.”

They are modest about their talents. “In terms of aerialists none of us are particularly high-skilled,” says Mooney. But then there is an unspoken wariness of aerial trickery for its own sake, which has a career-shortening impact on the body, particularly the knees of the catcher in trapeze work. “Rather than practising one trick over and over again to get it perfect,” says Harvey, “we spend the time making one thing that looks really interesting breathe as a piece of believable theatre. Our aim in setting out was to only include what was necessary.”

Oillycart__020Initially they suffered for their art. Then 18 months ago they won “regularly funded organisation” status with the Arts Council. It meant they could give up doing stilt work at fêtes, part-time teaching and pulling pints. They have repaid the investment with good works. Last year at Manchester International Festival they brought to fruition a two-year collaboration with Oily Cart, the pioneering theatre company which works with young people with learning difficulties, to create an interactive show for autistic children (pictured).

The audience members, with teachers beside them, were suspended in basket-like chairs. “Research about young people who have underdeveloped sense of kinaesthetics is that they can spin fast and it not affect them," explains Mooney. "We developed these these Bond villain egg-chairs and lifted each on on bungees, so that they could bounce, swing and spin. The aerial show happened around them," They called it Something in the Air. In 2008 another children's show called Hang On was developed with Theatre-Rites. Their skills as aerialists were also essential to the spectacular puppetry work in Satyagraha, the Philip Glass opera produced by English National Opera in 2007 in collaboration with Improbable Theatre. It has taken Ockham's Razor to the Met in New York and they return with it to the Coliseum next month.

And what of their name? Easily the most inaccessible thing about them, it alludes to the medieval philosopher William of Ockham and the technique of erasing a mistake on parchment by removing the top layer. “Ockham said that if you’re got two theories to explain the same thing and one of them is simpler, always go for the simplest one,” explains Mooney. “It’s a philosophy that appealed to us. If you could just give someone a hand and that would tell the story better than doing some really complicated elaborate move, then we’d go for the hand. That was the rule.”

“It’s a very complicated way,” adds Harvey, “of saying ‘keep it simple’.”

Ockham's Razor perform The Mill in the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House on from 19 to 21 January. Book online. The London International Mime Festival runs from 13 to 30 January at the Barbican, the Southbank Centre, the Royal Opera House, the ICA and Warwick Arts Centre.

Watch a clip of The Mill in rehearsal:


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