Mélanie Per­ri­er explores the many mean­ings of the simplest and most uni­ver­sal ges­ture – hold­ing hands – in a lumin­ous and viva­cious cho­reo­graph­ic and music­al piece. A fam­ily-friendly show with and for children. 

What do these two men hold­ing hands mean to each oth­er? Are they broth­ers, lov­ers, friends, knights, saviors? From this mul­ti­fa­ceted image, cho­reo­graph­er Mélanie Per­ri­er draws the storyline for Et de se tenir la main: seiz­ing, wrap­ping, hold­ing, caress­ing, grabbing, soften­ing, accom­pa­ny­ing. Ges­tures glide into dance, in a con­ver­sa­tion with the joy­ful per­cus­sions per­formed live on stage by com­poser Didi­er Ambact. This energy and the tight links between dance and music form the heart of the piece whose ambi­tion is to train the gaze and the ear of young audi­ences, feed their ima­gin­a­tion and their per­cep­tion of the world. Our hands can con­vey the gentlest soft­ness and the worst type of viol­ence; they have a lan­guage, with its own vocab­u­lary and gram­mar, that we can learn to decipher. This sens­ory exper­i­ment was elab­or­ated under the watch­ful and act­ive gaze of a “children’s com­mit­tee” of 7 boys and girls aged 6 to 10 with whom Mélanie Per­ri­er and her dan­cers shared the vari­ous steps of their ongo­ing pro­ject in order to cre­ate sound­scapes togeth­er. Dance there­fore unfolds as an inter­ac­tion with the children’s words, con­front­ing per­spect­ives and open­ing new ones.