The human hand: a tool, a weapon, a vital source of communication and symbolism. From Dürer’s gnarled hands lifted in prayer to God and Adam’s near-touching fingertips in the Sistine Chapel, the humble hand has been an example of human exceptionalism, intimately connected with the brain, and a focus of art and literature for centuries. Building on this aesthetic tradition and headlining the London International Mime Festival, now in its 40th year, Belgian Charleroi Danses' Kiss and Cry creates an unusual theatrical experience through its singular focus on the human hand. Conceptually the product of experiment, it transforms self-imposed restriction into a unique mode of expression.
Built around the story of Gisele – an old woman remembering her past lovers, the production weaves together choreography performed by hands, clever cinematography, plastic toy figures, and a train-set to create a melancholic, delicate story of loss and regret. The results were bewitching and genre-busting. A moving camera magnified live film to a centre-stage screen as Gisele’s five lovers (one for each finger) are ‘embodied’ by two dancing fingers. While focused only on their hands, to use the term ‘embody’ is no misnomer; somehow, upright on two fingers Michele Anne de Mey and Gregory Grojean’s finger and hand-dancing managed to express a range of emotion as replete with meaning as any face or body; perhaps more so. These two hands expressed: the coquetry of the lover’s first steps towards each other; their first touch as they held hands on the train; the exultation of youthful double-jointed prancing and waltzing and finally, stiffening rejection as their knuckle- joints closed into a fist. This narrative vocabulary was interspersed with hands that joyfully pirouetted and ice-skated across the stage or made abstract geometric shapes and optical illusions using smoke and mirrors.
On a darkened stage, the crew manipulated miniature props, moved the live-feed camera and worked at computer screens. Becoming part of the scenery without disturbing the suspension of disbelief they laid bare the mechanisms behind the creation of Gisele’s world. Table-tops became film sets, across which Gisele’s relationships were dissected while the circling train at the front of the stage represented the passing of time.Stage-props functioned to materialise metaphors throughout the show: abandonment and death became holes and tunnels; depression became a furnished room rotating in space, while past lovers were a suitcase of severed hands kept locked away in nested boxes on a high shelf. Tiny figures lost in sand dunes and the return to an elderly Gisele sitting on a bench reinforced the sense of nostalgia.