Ferenc Balcaen / NTGent - PLEASE, Open the Curtains

In this new creation, six performers embrace melancholy. Not as a disease or romantic image, but as a powerful desire. Throughout time, melancholy has been given many meanings. In the Middle Ages, it was connected to the theory of the four bodily humors; later it grew into an aesthetic ideal in art and literature. What was seen as a temperament or even a source of creativity, however, often hid another reality: the pain of those labeled as melancholic remained invisible or was condemned. 'PLEASE, Open the Curtains' starts from that tension and approaches melancholy not as a disease or a romantic image, but as a form of remembrance of fragility and collectivity, of the desire that something good, something connecting can arise after destruction. Six performers embrace melancholy via collective tableaux in which play, labor and ritual stand side by side. Sometimes light and playful, sometimes slow and silenced. Their bodies form an ensemble in which images and small gestures circulate. The scenography is a living body, a symbolic landscape that evokes, distorts and reconstructs the past.