Kiss and Cry

Writing about this shining little gem in the festival crown cannot begin to express all the emotive strings it pulls, all the touching moments it portrays, all the incredible co-ordination it requires or all the continuing images and messages that remain.

The basic premise of Kiss and Cry, the program notes explain, “is simple, the kind of simplicity that forges universal tales”. Yet its telling is far from simple. It involves a tightly involved team of performers and technicians working together in perfect harmony on a series of miniature sets spread over a vast stage.

“Where do people go when they disappear from our life, from our memory?”  This question, that haunts a lonely woman sitting on a railway station, has eventually become the theme that Michele Anne de Mey, Jaco Van Dormeal, Gregory Grosjean and their creative collaborators have used to develop their very beautiful miniature narrative.

Arriving at this definitive performance was obviously one that was inspiring and moving and very much a work of love.

The process began in an “attic filled with bric-a-brac … doll’s houses, shells, … plexiglass, mirrors … electric trains …a camera, torches, Christmas lights … dancing hands.”

All these, and more, but especially the dancing hands, became Kiss and Cry.

“We played, we danced, we filmed on tables … lots of little worlds took shape … to produce a show based on memory … everyone wrote and created” . Thus evolved a performance that is a screenplay filmed before your eyes, where dancing hands play out the touchingly simple words of a moving narrative and the sounds of a haunting soundtrack.

The hands dance the narrative through a series of scenarios – a lonely railway station, a night train, a little village, deep water, stretching sand, a shifting shore – all stirring in the memory of the woman. “People who have vanished … were wiped out … torn abruptly from life by a jolt of fate.  More than any other memory, she is haunted by the brief touch of the hands of a boy in a railway carriage many years ago. There is sadness in these stories portrayed through the carefully moving fingers of artistic hands – but there is also gentle humour and wit and soft tenderness.

There are very few performances that blend the arts so skillfully, emerge from such a diverse team of collaborators, involve so many tiny sets, or rely upon such tight timing and so much split second co-ordination. Watching it all evolve, seeing it in miniature as well as on the big screen, following the artists and the camera as they move seamlessly from scene to scene, is totally involving and mesmerizing.

This is a “must see” for any arts teacher or performer who has ever been involved in devising theatre of any kind. It epitomises the art of sharing, imagining, structuring, editing and becoming one with the finished work, especially one as movingly beautiful as this.

Carol Wimmer

Image: Maarten Vanden Abeele