Kin review: Migration stories vividly told through movement

In physical theatre company Gecko’s show about people crossing borders, the mood shifts from celebration to uncertainty

Vanessa Guevara Flores in physical theatre company Gecko’s ‘Kin’ (Malachy Luckie)

In Kin, by physical theatre company Gecko, people fleeing persecution are transformed by their journeys. In sweeping stage pictures, we see people in fear and relief, working to keep their families together, building and sometimes losing their identities.

And not just those who are fleeing. In the opening scene, a group of dancers come together under a string of lights, starting a party. Gestures become an exuberant folk dance, arms thrown up, feet stamping. As the scene changes, it becomes clear that these are the border guards. Over the course of the show, they choose to open or close doors, to welcome or humiliate people. Dehumanising behaviour cuts both ways.

Director Amit Lahav starts with his own grandmother, who escaped from Yemen to Palestine in 1932. Vanessa Guevara Flores is picked out from a line of people presenting passports, hoping to get through the gate. It’s a moment of terror: she’s pulled out and let go, without understanding why. Around her, puppets represent the adults of her family, towering above her as they share comfort or alarming grown-up fears. “I don’t think I’ll make it,” one says, “but you children will survive.”

An extrovert family group try to make friends, nudging the audience to clap along for their dance, reaching out to officials. Sometimes they’re welcomed – within limits. One is urged to take off his head wrap, to put on a tie, to wipe his face with a cloth that leaves him smeared with white. The pressure to change can come with brutal humiliation, but as something more insidious, half-joking. Lahav himself plays the migrant who adapts so well that he joins the border guards, throwing parts of himself away in his eagerness to fit in.

Kin tells its migration stories in gorgeous pictures, with fluid movement that swirls from one scene to the next. In Chris Swain’s beautiful lighting design, groups huddle together against the storm, or sit cosily together in a golden glow. A standard lamp breaks into pieces and swings unsettlingly overhead; a single huge spotlight suggest a rescue boat at sea.

The details of Rhys Jarman’s costumes evoke times and places: a knitted tank top, the ruffles on a shirt that become a key part of the guards’ uniform. Dave Price’s music weaves in different folk and classical traditions, setting and changing scenes. Gecko’s ten performers create bold personalities, switching in a moment from family celebrations and squabbles to frozen uncertainty or sly cruelty. It’s a vivid, very human show.