The beautiful, the beatific, the bizarre, the Belgian

DANCE

IN ALL the variety of this year's London International Mime Festival there is one significant omission: classical mime. The direct legacy of Jean-Louis Barreau and Marcel Marceau is nowhere to be seen. During the festival's 20-year life span, the discipline has moved stealthily out of silence and white make-up and into a wider arena, utilising vaudeville, puppetry, circus, and even full spoken text. These days contributors tend to avoid using the word mime in their blurbs, preferring to define their work as "theatre of images". It is about as accurate a description as we can hope for in this parade of the beautiful, the beatific and the bizarre.

At present it is the Belgians - the stereotyped pedants of French jokes - who effortlessly dominate this mercurial realm. Opener of the 1996 festival fortnight was the Compagnie Mossoux Bonte, returning with a wordless show for one performer and five mannequins which turns a searchlight on the murkier recesses of the human psyche.

The stage becomes black, the music ominous. The lights come up on Nicole Mossoux, alone and writing at a desk. Her face is beautiful - heart-shaped, finely chiselled, gaunt - but somehow inanimate and glazed, like a shop dummy. From behind her right shoulder springs a figure, remarkably like her but male, who peers critically at what she is writing, seizes her pen and corrects her work. Submissive and cringing, she clearly loathes and fears him, so why can't she escape? It takes a while to realise that he and she are joined at the shoulder, like Siamese twins. The contortionist illusion becomes all the more startling when the "male" creature lays Mos- soux's staring head on the desk, produces a knife and saws sickeningly through her neck. He then lopes across the stage carrying the severed head wrapped in a cloak.

You could read this as a variation on Mr Punch and the baby, or Dr Frankenstein's creation run amok, but in the scenes that follow a more complex tale unfolds. For the dummies that attach themselves to Mossoux (one, two, even three at a time - at the neck, at the hip, sometimes sharing her legs and arms) are all manifestations of self, "the rascals who overcrowd our ego" as she puts it. Domineering, jealous, sly, aggressively competitive, they try to rock her equilibrium, to invade her body and soul. For us the illusion is complete - the controller is controlled.

Yet even the grimmest moments can tip over into bleak comedy. In a take on the Cinderella story, Mossoux and a female alter ego discover a party shoe and squabble over whose foot it will fit (they have two legs between them). Mossoux tries the right foot - no good. The dummy tries the left - success! She then whips out a third leg from nowhere, which sports the matching shoe, and performs a triumphant swooping dance, dragging the vanquished Mossoux in her wake.

The sustained virtuosity of Mossoux's manipulative technique - aided only by the occasional black-out and some ingeniously cut costumes - is startling in itself. More striking still is the theatrical concept as a whole. Spoken text and explicable gestures could not begin to define the nebulous sensibilities that this show brings into focus. It nudges at the confines of consciousness, the very beingness of being. If this is the way mime is going, then three cheers.

A key policy of this year's festival is to juxtapose new performers with established ones, which paid off handsomely in the case of Compagnie Jerome Thomas, whose billing as a choreographed juggling show woefully undersells it. With more experience the charismatic Thomas may think to forego his pre-curtain chat with the audience, which stretches stilted Gallic charm to the limits and ends by dropping a bombshell of Sixties campus lore. "You know, Theatre exeests. Sink about it. Theatre ... exeests."

But the lovably disingenuous Thomas goes on to prove that theatre does indeed exist in the unlikeliest of routines. His show Hic Hoc divides into two dissimilar halves. Hic plays with the aerial and comic possibilities of illuminated balls strung on long rubber bands. Four bare-chested young blades, their faces beaming a permanent state of surprised delight, manipulate cords tensed from floor to ceiling in time to a lulling minimalist score (Laurence Olivier - sic). A gentle swing develops into a tangled cat's cradle and finally whips up into a spectacular gyroscope of whirring strings of light. When the score stops we can well believe the soughing of the ropes is the music of the spheres, the stage-space an astronomer's map of whirling galaxies.

Thomas himself takes on the second half of the show in tandem with a brilliant extemporising musician, Pascal Lloret. Thomas is a juggler of supreme virtuosity, yet the usual busking routines are not for him. Never once does juggling talent take precedence over an extraordinary choreographic and theatrical invention. It is his genius to transform craft into lyric art, suffused with surrealistic humour and innocent absurdities. Dressed in bathing cap, shapeless granny dress and rubber flippers, he is alternately clown, dancer, Dadaist and wizard. For a quiet finale he weaves an intimate circle of magic by juggling three tiny white curled feathers. For Thomas, the motto is precisely true. "Theatre ... ca existe."

Compagnie Jerome Thomas: Purcell Room, SE1 (0171 960 4242), continues tonight. The Mime Festival continues at various venues to Sun 28 Jan. Information: 0171 637 5661.