Kiss & Cry, Barbican Theatre, London, review: Hands jump together to have sex

Kiss & Cry is a dance of hands, a surreal story of love, loss and memory. Palms press longingly together, fingers strut their stuff at a retro disco and bodies are both missing and always present. There’s a strange intimacy to this Charleroi Danses production, a mix of wit and tenderness.

Performed as part of the London International Mime Festival, Kiss & Cry takes place mainly on tables. As each hand moves across miniature landscapes, they’re filmed, with the footage projected onto a screen overhead.

At all times, you can see the finished illusion and the work that goes into creating it. On screen, hands materialise out of darkness; on stage, you can see a dancer walking up to the table. The production team scurry about, moving scenery and adjusting cameras. Yet showing how the trick is done doesn’t undermine it: it doubles the jokes, makes the story more touching.

The production, conceived by Belgian couple Michèle Anne De Mey and Jaco Van Dormael, shows a woman remembering the loves of her life, from the teenager she touched hands with on a train to long-term relationship. The hands, filmed in close-up, can suggest entire people, the first two fingers “walking” through tiny, elaborate language. Fingers paw the ground as feet, suggesting nervousness or flirtation. Hands jump together to have sex. In one scene, a wet hand rises from the ocean and “evolves” to walk upright.

Throughout the story, other people come and go. Little figures watch the hands at play, or simply vanish, falling through holes opened up in the surface of the tables. Toy trains carry our heroine away, their journeys giving her time to think. A voiceover explains her life and her memories. “Some love affairs are like cheese graters,” it says, helpfully. “Great for cheese, terrible for anything else.”

The precision is delightful, from hand body language to the elaborate processes needed to set up a romantic tracking shot. Lovers seen through a doll’s house window are real dancers, performing in shadow on the other side of the stage, distanced by film and tiny scenery – it’s an optical non-illusion.

As people go missing from the story, Kiss & Cry plays with the bodies we know are there. In one lament, hands reach for each other, straining to touch – but we can see that, to create those effects, De Mey and her dance collaborator Gregory Grosjean are already twined together.