The Kiss and Other Movements is the sixth album release by Michael Nyman, and the fifth recording (fourth full album) with the Michael Nyman Band. The title track is an "operatic duet" between Dagmar Krause and Omar Ebrahim, based on a painting of the same title by Paul Richards, which is depicted on the cover, and used in a video art project by Richards of the same name. The album includes music from Peter Greenaway's Making a Splash and 26 Bathrooms (originally part of the concert work, Memorial), an excerpt of Nyman's unfinished opera, Tristram Shandy, and a concert piece, "Tango Between the Lines". This is the inaugural album for longtime band member David Roach.

The Kiss was commissioned as part of a Channel 4 series of artists videos, in which Nyman's "operatic duet" plays as Paul Richards creates a painting of a kiss with a Quantel Paintbox. By design, the male voice is a trained singer, the female voice is a self-trained, pop, non-music reader, preferably whose native language is not English, possibly representing an Etruscan. The parts were written for Omar Ebrahim and Anne Pigalle, who performed them in the video. Dagmar Krause replaced Pigalle for the album, and brought to it a darker sonority. The text is based on a collection of 15th century texts about art. The theme line "Images were introduced because many people cannot retain what they hear, but rememember if they see images" is intended by Nyman as ironic—the text originally referred to Biblical scenes versus texts from the Bible. The final bars of The Kiss were later used as a prelude to Nyman's opera with Victoria Hardie, Vital Statistics, with which it shares a common theme. The theme is used to similar effect in their opera, Facing Goya, which is a four-act opera built on the remains of Vital Statistics, which flopped and was withdrawn.

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