Cold Blood

 
 
Cold Blood
 
Choreographer: Michele Anne De Mey
 
Script: Thomas Gunzig, Michele Anne De Mey and Jaco Van Dormael
 
Narrator: Thomas Gunzig

Dancers: Michele Anne De Mey, Gregory Grosjean and Gabriella Iacono
 
Presented by Canadian Stage at the Bluma Appel Theatre
 
February 10-15 2016
 
 
As in Kiss & Cry, hands play a dominant role. They are choreographed by Michele Anne De Mey, assisted by dancers Gregory Grosjean and Gabriella Iacono. De Mey has danced with Rosas, a company founded by Anne Teresa De Kaersmacker.
 
Using miniature sets Technicians and Dancers create on the spot the film we see on the screen above them.
 
Cold Blood begins with a narrator describing various ways people die, and then asks us to close our eyes and count to ten. On awakening we see planes flying through fog and clouds. One crashes. A technician creates fog for this by smoking a miniature set of trees in a woodland.  His hand places the plane there.
 
There are seven deaths in this production, all darkly comic and absurdist. The disembodied "characters" portraying these parts are created by the hands of the dancers. 
 
Hands poledancing. Hands dancing in Busby Berkeley formations. Hands moving in out as in a kaleidoscope merging, re-emerging into multiple miniature humans and other phantasmagoric figures. A hand under water. Hands tap-dancing like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, their feet the fingers wearing tap shoes (thimbles), creating realistic percussive sounds. Hands dancing to Ravel's Bolero (even we are projected into the piece as the audience).
 
We see a dancer lying on her back, legs raised, body, limbs and hands fluttering reminiscent of that old PBS Mystery Theatre pre-credit segment of a distressed female in the style of Edward Gorey. The camera, though, sees her through a building window, upright and floating up walls within her apartment.
 
Hands drive cars, too. Middle figures steering. An elderly hand in a hospital ward walks with a cane.
 
And the deaths. They are innovative. A hand dies after an allergic reaction to eating mashed potatoes. Another is perhaps brushed to death because he left the roof and windows open in a car wash. An astronaut dies in decompression. One dies by swallowing the hook of the brassiere he is removing from his lover.
 
The music used is a potpourri of classical, pop, and opera.
 
After seeing this show you probably will never see your hands in the same way.