Charleroi Danses’ genre defying show of hands and heartbreak is a masterful meditation on love and memory.

Bay 17, Carriageworks, part of the Sydney Festival
January 23, 2014

It may not sound like the most promising premise: a dance-theatre production where we barely see anything of the performers above the wrist. However Belgian company Charleroi Danses have managed to take the most meagre of resources to create an ingenious, insightful and achingly touching show that I suspect will be looked back upon as the stand-out hit of this year’s Sydney Festival.

Kiss & Cry is a genre-defying mix of film, theatre and choreography, which tells the story of Gisele, a lonely old woman lamenting on the loves and losses of her life. Using a series of miniature sets dotted about the stage, this poignant narrative is expressed through a ballet of anthropomorphised hands that twirl, leap, embrace and seduce one another. This microcosm is captured on film before our very eyes and relayed to a cinema-sized screen above, so that we can see up-close the subtleties and attention to detail that have been carefully woven into every scene of this 85 minute work. We’re guided through Gisele’s ill-fated love affairs by a simple, poetic narration and an expertly selected score that combines Handel, Arvo Pärt, John Cage, György Ligeti and Jimmy Scott’s devastating version of Nothing Compares to You.

This show is as much about cinematography as it is about choreography, so it’s no wonder that Kiss & Cry is the fruit of a collaboration between award-winning film director and screen-writer Jaco Van Dormael and founder member of visionary choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s dance troupe Rosas, Michèle Anne De Mey. This meeting of stage and screen offers more than simply a beautiful film. While the action is being captured and projected onto the overhead screen we see the team of black-clad stage hands and performers creating the patchwork of perfectly crafted scenes below, conjuring snow storms, alien abductions, car crashes and primordial seas from the simplest of materials. Somehow the duality of fantasy and reality combined on stage makes the storytelling all the more vivid, as this world of hands and heartbreak unfolds before us.

De Mey along with Frauke Mariën, whose hands are the stars of this show, are able to communicate an astonishing amount of detail using only fingers and thumbs (and occasionally feet). Whether it’s the evolution of some primitive creature, a sensual pas de deux or a violent sexual encounter, their performance, expertly captured by Kiss & Cry’s many roving cameras, tells Gisele’s heartrending story with exquisite precision and pathos, leaving absolutely no ambiguity as to the significance of each tableaux.

The closing scene of this moving meditation on love and memory snaps us back into the real world of bodies, arms, legs and faces. Suddenly we’re jolted from the miniature universe, seen larger than life on the big-screen, yet the power of this theatrical statement is a guttingly sad yet beautiful cadence to this little masterpiece of a show.

Kiss and Cry is at Carriageworks, part of the Sydney Festival, until January 25.

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