It Felt Like a Kiss, Manchester International Festival

Having spent a few days painting and sewing for the theater company Punch Drunk, working on their Manchester International Festival production, I was invited to a preview performance of ‘It Felt Like a Kiss’, before it opened to its sold out ticket holders.

Documentary making legend Adam Curtis, created his latest work ‘it felt like a kiss’, the piece was formed as an integral part of the punch drunk production with music composed by Damon Albarn. Punchdrunk specialize in interactive theatre and this has to be one of their most ambitious yet! Spread across 5 foors and 24 rooms of an office block in Deansgate, it is a walk through production a “psyco-political theme experience in which you become the central character”, as Curtis describes it! Curtis’s style of political documentary making, consists of collages of historical clips skillfully crafted together to form ‘complex ideological arguments and emotional poems in one’. The film is beautifully weaved with music soundscapes of the era, a time described as the golden age of pop where the US rose up to an enormous power. “I wanted to do a film about what it actually felt like to live through that time…Where you could see the roots of the uncertainties we feel today, the things they did out on the dark fringes of the world that they didn’t really notice at the time, which would then come back and haunt us.” Curtis’s work is fascinated with the unforeseen effects of history, ‘It Felt Like a Kiss’ explores our desires and our feeling of individualism as products of history, that instead of solely coming from within us, are the consequences of political ideas and power.

The experience of actually going round the performance was disorientatingly realistic. On the one hand my mind was saying, ‘this is a set, I helped to build it last month’, on the other ‘that’s a real person standing in that horrific tiled shower with her head hung.’ The effect of the film’s historical montage together with the sounds and even smells of the years before my life time, taunted my senses and I developed an edgy uncomfortable feeling and a dread that this maze of ominous historical memory was leading to a final climax with horrific proportion, a sense that by the end, I would want to run screaming from the building, which is in fact what happened!