The opera explores the imagery of the seven saving virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope and charity.
Commissioned by Access Arts Queensland and the 1998 Brisbane Festival, The Divine Kiss showcased the talents of performers with disabilities such as blindness and cerebral palsy.
“At any time, it is perception alone that creates reality and defines optimism or pessimism,” says Koukias[2] In the words of the Brisbane News, commenting on the Brisbane performance in 1998, "[i]magery is all in this opera: in one scene, a giant seahorse floats amid a swarm of aeroplanes; in another a blind girl regards the starry night through an antique telescope; in another an astronaut staggers through a wall of fire and Father Christmas speaks in Hebrew.
The text is composed of, and devised from, translations, adaptations, quotations and fragments from the Old and New Testaments of the Bible; Martin Luther; Herbert Maly; Byzantine hymnography; Stephen Hawking; The I Ching by Chuang-tse; the Torah; the Divine Liturgy; Carl Gustav Jung; AION; Ananda K. Coomaraswamy; Monoimos; The Guardian; Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species; Plato; Paracelsus' Hermetic Formula — "Similia similibus curantur" ("Like is cured by like"); and Job ix:20.
The pre-recorded tapes for the opera were produced from numerous recordings of workshops with Access Arts members in August 1997 and April 1998 in Brisbane, Australia.