Dance: Kiss & Cry Collective
By Justine Bayod Espoz
arttimesjournal November 14, 2018
 Jaco Van Dormael and Michèle Anne De Mey |
Italians and Spaniards have long known that the most expressive part of the human body are our hands. Yet hands often seem so overlooked in dance and theatre, never quite drawing as much visual attention as movements and gestures made with other parts of the body. So, there is a certain transgressive delight to discovering that the Kiss & Cry Collective, a Belgian company, is reclaiming the power of the hand in visual performance.
The Kiss and Cry Collective is a performance art company that prodigiously fuses dance, theatre and film, giving birth to genre-crossing productions that leave audiences wowed by their seamless complexity. Imagine miniature film sets, lights, cameras, a constantly moving tech team and an equally mobile troupe of performers. Soft lighting from the back stage reveals all the tricks of the trade, everyone moving from one set to another, quickly transitioning and lending a flow to all of the moving parts.
Then imagine a screen hanging above this hive of quiet activity. Projected onto that screen is everything the on-stage cameras capture: miniature sets now made to look life-sized and populated by a plethora of faceless characters. Two knuckles act as a set of hips, while these top-heavy beings use two fingers as strutting legs and a finger and a thumb as arms.
That's right, dollhouse style sets and ingenuous lighting and camera movement may set the scene, and the music and texts read by an omnipresent, yet off-stage, voice may provide the tone and context, but all of the action is performed by pairs of human hands. Join these elements, and you're set for a whimsical experience that transmits more ethos and wonder than more traditional and straightforward styles of performative storytelling.
The fact that the audience can see how scope and perspective are masterfully manipulated to create a series of marvelous vignettes only contributes to the experience. By showing the amount of people, work, rehearsal and choreography that go into a single performance, the audience is left all the more wonderstruck as a complex, well oiled machine produces a seemingly effortless work of art.
Kiss & Cry Collective is the product of a collaboration between husband and wife artistic duo Jaco Van Dormael and Michèle Anne De Mey. Van Dormael is best known for his award-winning film career as director of Toto le Héro, The Eighth Day and Mr. Nobody , while De May is a Mudra-trained dancer and choreographer, whose successful career boasts collaborations with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, founding the company Astragale and a co-artistic directorship of Charleroi Danses.
 Cold Blood |
 Cold Blood updated |
It was only natural that the couple would eventually marry their professions, but who would have guessed that the collaboration would shatter conventional concepts of dance, theatre and film. The international success of their first production in 2011, Kiss & Cry, paved the way for the establishment of the collective and a second production called Cold Blood, which made its UK premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2018.
Cold Blood is a masterwork, engrossing from start to finish, with flashy vignettes set to a brilliant soundtrack that includes Nina Simone, Cole Porter, David Bowie and Ravel. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are brought back to life in the form of two tap dancing hands clad with thimble tap shoes performing on black and white film. In another scene, we're reminded of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, when a white latex gloved astronaut floats inside of his ship and in the blackness of space.
The visual nature of the show alone is awe inspiring, but the texts by Thomas Gunzig add an extra layer of lyricism and depth. Cold Blood takes a poetic yet pragmatic look at death and its often arbitrary nature. Each vignette features a different passing, some mundane and some downright bizarre but all equally final.
With Cold Blood, Kiss & Cry Collective proves itself a force
of nature when it comes to the visual and technical aspects of performance
art, but it also deems the troupe expert storytellers. Demystifying death
is no easy feat, making an audience revel in it is pure genius.