Pittsburgh Cultural Trust to Present KISS & CRY at New Hazlett Theater, 10/2-4

The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust presents Kiss & Cry at the New Hazlett Theater October 2-4, 2013, at 8 p.m. Charleroi Danses, the Choreographic Centre of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (Belgium), brings this U.S. premiere to the city as part of the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts*.

Michèle Anne De Mey and Jaco Van Dormael-together with Gregory Grosjean, Thomas Gunzig, Julier Lambert, Sylvie Olive, and Nicolas Olivier-have created a poetic performance piece that blurs the boundaries between film, dance, text, and theater. This sweeping, romantic work features a woman nearing the end of her life as she recounts her greatest loves, who have since disappeared from her life. She begins with her first, truest love: a boy whose hand she touched for a fleeting moment on a crowded train when she was thirteen years old.

The main characters are visually portrayed with the performers' hands, which sensually move with absolute precision around a set of miniatures from dolls' houses and train sets. The audience watches this distinctively choreographed performance while simultaneously viewing a film being both made and screened in the background. Kiss & Cry disturbs the boundaries between various artistic disciplines to create a piece that is different each time it is performed.

"The works included within this year's Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts will provide a diversity of disciplines (theater, dance, music, puppetry and physical theatre) and, it is my hope that they provide a snapshot of some of the finest work being created in the international contemporary performing arts field and will elicit a wide range of emotion, reaction and excitement from our audiences," shared Paul Organisak, vice president of programming at The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. "As I experienced each of them during various stages of their development, I am struck by how each artist is in some way redefining what we mean by "contemporary" in today's culture. This Festival is designed to ask that question and create an ongoing dialogue for Pittsburgh audiences and artists alike."

Michèle Anne De Mey is a Belgium dancer and choreographer. She choreographs pieces with a special consideration for the relationship between dance and music, having worked with renowned composers Thierry De Mey, Robert Wyatt, and Jonathan Harvey. In 1990 she founded her own Dance Company and created one of her seminal works, Sinfonia Eroica, which was reprised in 2006 and has since toured internationally.

Jaco Van Dormael is a Belgium film director, screenwriter, and playwright. He is most noted for writing and directing three critically acclaimed feature-length films. Toto the Hero (1991) won the Camera d'or at the Cannes Film Festival, and five years later Pascal Duquenne and Daniel Auteuil were jointly awarded Best Actor at Cannes forThe Eighth Day (1996). Mr. Nobody (2009) was awarded a prize at the Venice Film Festival, three prizes at the Magrittes awards ceremony, and the Audience Prize at the European Film Awards. Van Dormael's productions often explore the power of the imagination and the contribution of childhood.

Tickets ($25) may be purchased at the Box Office at Theater Square, online at ww.TrustArts.org, or by calling (412) 456-6666.

Image: Kiss & Cry, NanoDanses (Belgium)

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