It is a rule among them. Not to talk about work at breakfast, in bed and in the bathroom. For the rest, they talk about it constantly. It is as well as the choreographer and the director are put to the challenge, a few years ago: «Is there a way to do a feature film on the kitchen table?» A feature-length dance, which means, since «there is nothing more difficult to film than to show the dance,» they say. A joke of Michèle Anne De Mey has decided the following: «there is more that to put the hands.» Thus is born a subject to the successful Kiss & Cry, an hour twenty for the story of an old woman who remembers her first love crossed in a train. She forgot his face but keeps the memory of his hands. And that is the story told with the fingers, choreographed, as if they were characters, staged in a décor of miniatures and filmed on the big screen.
The beginning and the extension
«Everything goes in directly under the eyes of the spectators, after we spent months to improvise and seek, in a very collective, where the writer mixes of choreography and the director, lights. Then each resumes his role the time of the show,» says Jaco Van Dormael. «Imagine the elation of the cameraman who is part of a hour twenty in a row rather than a minute or two as when running a movie! Imagine also the mixture of scales that is not being used at the cinema: a hand layer in the bed and when she goes out in the garden, it is larger than the house.» Michèle Anne De Mey has been engaged in the casting of hands: «I have judged on their expressiveness, their musicality, their sensuality, their dexterity, their flexibility, sought also to those who could afford. And then, everything was done in creation as with dancers,» she said. The result has a magical poetry. «The hands are the beginning and the extension of everything, in movement, in energy, in language and communication from infancy. The emotion passes by the end of the fingers. This offers a possibility to the imagination and a new framework», says Michèle Anne De Mey. Kiss & Cry has worked so well that the couple has created Cold Blood a show that speaks with a poetry that Delerm does negation not, the flavor of these little things in life that you remember before you die. Hands are here again to lead the dance.
Held in the fingertips, these shows may well claim the arte povera movement, they require a whole battalion. «It’s a barnum of small things», says Jaco Van Dormael. «It takes a guy to hold the flashlight representing the sun, another to shoot a string, another that prepares the scenery, without getting caught by the camera.» Amor is of a different temper. A duo of Michèle Anne, 58, who returned to the scene, and Jaco von Dormael, who is filming. In weightlessness.
«Kiss Cry /COLD BLOOD /Amor», La Scala, 13, bd de Strasbourg (Xe). Tel.: 01 40 03 44 30. Three performances: «Kiss Cry» from 4 to 31 dec., «Cold Blood» from 4 to 27 jan., «Amor» of 29 jan. the 3 feb. Tickets: 16 € 49.