With funding increasingly moving outside London, Lina Johansson,joint artistic director of the Hackney-based theatre company Mimbre, speaks to Aysha Imtiaz warning that in 10 years time the borough may not be the creative hub it is today.
Perched precariously on one another’s shoulders, three women contort themselves in impossible ways as they deftly twist, turn and duck. Like birds in collective flight, their fluidity of motion makes the impressive acts look effortless – edging towards the transcendently sublime.
“It’s straddling the impossible, really,” says joint artistic director of Mimbre, Lina Johansson, who founded the Hackney-based company with Silvia Fratelli and Emma Norin in 1999 with a vision of creating strong acrobatic choreographies with women and now co-leads the company’s vision and artistic programme. “People always say, ‘Oh, circus defies gravity’, [but] it really doesn’t. We work painfully aware of gravity. If we fall, it hurts, you know.”
For Johansson and many others, circus is not a sport. It’s a creative act...Keep reading on East London Lines.
Perched precariously on one another’s shoulders, three women contort themselves in impossible ways as they deftly twist, turn and duck. Like birds in collective flight, their fluidity of motion makes the impressive acts look effortless – edging towards the transcendently sublime.
“It’s straddling the impossible, really,” says joint artistic director of Mimbre, Lina Johansson, who founded the Hackney-based company with Silvia Fratelli and Emma Norin in 1999 with a vision of creating strong acrobatic choreographies with women and now co-leads the company’s vision and artistic programme. “People always say, ‘Oh, circus defies gravity’, [but] it really doesn’t. We work painfully aware of gravity. If we fall, it hurts, you know.”
For Johansson and many others, circus is not a sport. It’s a creative act...Keep reading on East London Lines.