Please, Open the Curtains

Six performers embrace melancholy in collective tableaux mixing acting, labour and ritual. Not as disease or romantic image but as a space to genuinely feel.

Please, Open the Curtains by promsising Flemish theatre maker Ferenc Balcaen and NTGent approaches melancholy not as a disease or a romantic image, but as a memory of fragility and collectivity. As a desire for something good and unifying to emerge after destruction. 

Six performers embrace melancholy in collective tableaux where acting, labour and ritual coincide. Some are light and playful, others slow and calm. Bodies form an ensemble in which images and small gestures circulate. The scenery becomes a living body, a symbolic landscape that evokes, transforms and reconstructs the past. 

Please, Open the CurtainsThe play is an attempt to reorder the deep furrows of history and future, so that melancholy is no longer a punishment but a space to genuinely feel.