Besame mucho (Kiss me much)

"In the context of a cooperative encounter, from my point of view, it is judicious to begin with a familiar text to get to know each other: to start with the rereading/adaptation of an existing work with the goal of having the dancers come in contact with their own interiority.” Michel Kelemenis

With this new collaboration, a proposal by Laurent Clavel of the IFAS – Institut Français d’Afrique du Sud – Michel Kelemenis discovers a new generation of dancers around an adaptation of Besame mucho, a work premiered in 2004 at the Biennal de la danse de Lyon. The idea appealed as much to Themba Nkabinde, the artistic director of the company, as it did to Sylvia Glasser, the founder, both of them convinced of the importance for young dancers to work with a foreign choreographer. 
The pedagogical intervention shifted into apprenticeship, adaptation and appropriation. Some parts are rewritten to correspond to the unique qualities of each dancer. Soliciting the interiority of each performer, the dance is tinged with gestural accents of bodies shaped differently in the art of movement.