Presented in French (Friday, November 28 with English surtitles)

“Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness.”
Gaston Bachelard

Michèle Anne De Mey (choreographer) and Jaco Van Dormael (filmmaker) reveal what is large in what is small with Kiss & Cry, a polymorphous show for dance, cinema and little fingers. The stage is a veritable film set complete with cameras, miniature landscapes, Lilliputian figurines and gaming tables. An impressive and fertile bric-à-brac that, manipulated with care by a group of artists, is not only a movie filmed live and projected on a big screen, but also a making of. 

A Place for Kisses and Tears

A reference to the area where Olympic figure skaters and their coaches wait until the scores are announced by the members of the jury, Kiss & Cry is a seismic zone that is a jumble of particles of hope as well as the nuclei of ephemeral anxiety, euphoria and bitter disappointment. The entertaining concept imagined by the artists filters the essence of these seismic tremors, revealing their mechanisms.

The point of departure is a woman on a train platform and the question: Where do they go, the people who have disappeared from our lives, from our memory? A locomotive on the tracks, attached to train cars of the past, then chugs into life.

The woman remembers a boy whose hand she touched for a few seconds on a crowded train, an initial flutter of love, after which she is left with only the memory of that hand. Hands visually portray these main characters, small dancing fingers that, onstage and on screen, depict evanescent landscapes and choreograph the various forms of absence.

Kiss & Cry is a delightful combination of rigour and inventiveness, of disarming simplicity and technological conjuring tricks. A fascinating look at a tiny universe created by Belgian artists renowned for their poignant eloquence.