Danse

Kiss & Cry is quite simply magical. The collective work organised by the film maker Jaco Van Dormael and the choreographer Michèle Anne De Mey is a small marvel of inventiveness, originality and emotion, which mixes the conventions of film scripts, dance and theatre. On stage we find a little cinema film set, full of strange props, miniature scenery and moving cameras. In front of us, and live, a dozen people create a film whose central characters are the hands and fingers of the dancers. Moving around the scenery, fixed up just like children’s games would be, with plastic figurines, dolls houses and electric trains, these unlikely characters come alive in an instant and lead us into the story, narrated on stage, of the lost loves of Gisèle. Thomas Gunzig’s text opens a multitude of drawers to speak in sweet verse of the finiteness of love, of souvenir, of memory and forgetting – quite simply, of life. We are stunned, as much by the narration as by the "making of" process, which we follow live. A subtle interplay of light and colours in an aquarium are sufficient to illustrate the birth of life, earthquakes begin in sandpits, flying saucers land, a miniature train carries us away. Music by Handel, Ligandi, Gorecki, Vivaldi, Gershwin and John Cage complete the spell. You almost have to forget what went before in order to retain the essential: Kiss & Cry is a show which opens wide the windows of our imagination and speaks with poetry and emotion to every one of us.