A big hand for this jolly good, versatile gimmick
Cold Blood Kiss & Cry Collective, King’s Theatre
The dance section of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival opened on Saturday with an unusual, high-concept and really rather enjoyable confection. Following on from Kiss & Cry – seen in London last year, and the show from which this Belgian company took its name – Cold Blood tells the story of seven fictional deaths through live, intricately choreographed performances. So far, so conventional, you might think. Except that, bar just one passage, the only parts of their bodies that the three performers use are their hands.
Throughout the show’s brisk, interval-free 75 minutes, the trio’s movements – playing out against all manner of miniature, often smokefilled sets – are painstakingly captured by a camera crew and relayed live on a stage-filling screen above them all. Indeed, part of the fun is witnessing the contrast between the intimate, film-set-like artificiality of the performances and their surroundings and the remarkably convincing worlds – from mist-shrouded forests to brooding cityscapes – on the screen.
Propelled by a somnolent, secondperson voiceover that veers between earnest and droll, and framed as a kind of under-hypnosis dream, it opens with a “stupid death” involving a poorly timed visit to the lavatory on a plane. There follows – incongruously, but also somehow effectively – a ballet for three disembodied pairs of hands, dancing in close formation, to the transporting adagio from Schubert’s string quintet.
There’s an almost unbearable poignancy to the later section that addresses our first grappling with mortality – cue a lone hand “walking” through a grand constructed house and proceeding from childish innocence to tragic experience. Meanwhile, at the opposite end is another death (dafter, it must be said, than that aviation one) in which, having neglected to heed the instructions, the hand is gruesomely and amusingly ground up in a car wash.
A further highlight is a high-octane interlude in which two pairs of fingers, with thimbles for shoes, tap dance their way through Cole Porter’s Begin the Beguine. The speed and dexterity are remarkable, as is the crystalline razzmatazz Broadway-style set.
Does it (by Michèle Anne De Mey and Jaco Van Dormael) always work? Not entirely. The “decompression death”, to Bowie’s Space Oddity, begins promisingly, with a latex-gloved hand doing a remarkable impersonation of an astronaut spiralling off into the void, but as the scene develops it looks more and more like someone wiggling their mitts in front of a light. The earlier section in which a fully-seen woman drifts forlornly through her apartment is a saccharine and pointless deviation. And it wouldn’t be a massive stretch to see the entire show as gimmicky.
Still, as gimmicks go, Cold Blood’s is a jolly good, dramatically versatile one. At the close, with the help of mirrors, the digits metamorphose into people, zipping about like beads in a kaleidoscope. Earlier, two lovers’ fingers, on the table of a café, tell the story with complete clarity.
A big hand, then? It seems only fair. Until tonight. Tickets: 0131 473 2000