Mimes they are a-changin'

A man bounces off a trampoline with the nonchalant agility of a cat, landing serenely on his mate's shoulders. To the giddy strains of Arabic hip hop, furniture flies across the stage like a Jamiroquai video on acid while a runner fights a losing battle with a treadmill. Does any of this say mime to you?

There we have it - the 'm' word. Although the scene above, from trampolinist extraordinaire Mathurin Bolze's exhilarating latest show, reflects what it's really like, the Marcel Marceau stereotype - whitefaced berk pretending he's carrying a pane of glass - still hangs in the air like a bad smell. Even the recent Green Wing special had geeky Martin perpetuating the myth with an old-school mime tribute at a funeral. Funny, yes, but a good 20 years out of date.

For grouped together under the wildly misleading banner of the London International Mime Festival is some of the most exciting, challenging and athletically thrilling physical theatre you'll clap eyes on all year. Leading the way with Bolze is another young French talent, Jean-Baptiste Andre;, who hails from a similar background in competitive gymnastics and circus school.

Andre, 27, greets the idea of being in a 'mime' festival with a typically Gallic shrug. 'Circus is as good a name as any for the kind of work we are doing, if you have to call it anything. But it's a show: people are interested - or not - in what they are seeing. They don't care what it's called. It's about the emotion and how you share the moment and the movement. That's what's important.

'I'm using my body to express emotions and feelings and psychologies. My first show, Interieur Nuit, was influenced by Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. I was trying to build a relationship between the audience and what was going on in my head, finding ways of bringing the inside to the outside.'

If that sounds like a tall order for a bloke doing handstands, then seeing is believing. Interieur Nuit shifted perspectives as Andre adroitly turned the world on its head, with floors turning into walls, and walls turning into ceilings as he muscularly and dexterously shifted position. His follow-up, Comme En Plein Jour, raises the bar by bringing video, dance and a more upfront theatrical style to bear on an exploration of the conflicts and contrasts between our public and private faces. Using the age-old concept of the clown to symbolise the act we all put on, Andre is exploring the never-ending quest to figure out our own identities. 'I'm using the idea of the clown to look at life under the spotlight - the way you become a different person when you know someone is looking at you. I'm still using acrobatics and there's dance in it, too, but most of all it's about using the body to express things words can't say.'

That's a sentiment echoed by 32-year-old Bolze, who, like Andre, is a graduate of the cradle of new French talent, the French National Circus School in Chalons-sur-Marne. 'For me, the power of the skills is the way they can be symbolic. To do triple somersaults is not the aim in itself - it's to harness them to a framework where you can say what you want to say.'

Like Andre, he started out as a solo performer, winning rave reviews for his show Fenetres, a trampolining tour de force that saw the bouncing Bolze become half man, half bird as he told the story of a boy who sought solace by carving out a life among the treetops. But his latest, Tangentes, is built on a much grander scale, with a five-strong, multi-skilled company bringing a raft of skills, including whizzing around in a human hamster wheel, to play.

It's a dark, mysterious extravaganza, shot through with extraordinary skills, which calls to mind French movies such as Delicatessen and Amelie with its off-key charm. And at its heart lies a serious message of survival, with Bolze using the abundant physical tools at his disposal to reflect on the power of the human spirit to withstand the most extreme hardship.

'The book L'Espece Humaine by Robert Antelme was a key influence. He was a prisoner of war who survived a Nazi concentration camp and wrote very powerfully about his experience. Refugees are pioneers of the darkness of human experience. They've been through desolation and come back from that. It's an inspiration.'

In Tangentes, that inspiration takes physical form, the human will expressed by shouldered burdens and feats of endurance. Yet it's far from didactic; the heavy theme is woven into a work that's lightly playful, erotic and ghostly by turn.

But why choose circus skills to make political statements? For Bolze, it's no contest: 'When you speak, there's always the danger of being misunderstood. With the body, you feel a physical experience. It's in the gut.'