The sound of bare feet on the stage

“Ice cream. Water fights. Staying up past your bedtime and being allowed to watch TV. The word ‘brilliant’. Things with stripes. Rollercoasters. People falling over. The smell of old books. Andre Agassi. Donkey Kong. Burning things. Laughing so hard you shoot milk out of your nose. Making up after an argument. I began leaving Post-It notes around the house, stuck to various things. On her mirror was: Puppies. On the kettle: Marlon Brando. And on her bed: Bed. People asked if they could read the list, add something, copy it. Handwritten scribbles were added everywhere, in every colour of the rainbow, exclamation marks, underlines, stars, footnotes, additions, little drawings and even a couple of graphs.” 

--- From: Every Brilliant Thing (by Duncan Macmillan, performed by Tom Dewispelaere in a guest production by Toneelhuis & Olympique Dramatique) 

It’s only now, as I close my laptop, that I realise. Outside the city is unfolding like a postcard. Blue lights make the mediaeval façades pulsate. An ambulance. “All things of value are defenceless”, as Lucebert said.  
I think about the project I was working on. The dream that is feeling its way towards a fertile soil to grow in. We run ourselves into the ground in the gap between what should ideally be and what actually is, but we’re doing our absolute best.  

“There are a great many ways of handling the unhappiness that inevitably comes with being human: we may rage or despair, we may scream or lament, we may sulk or cry”, says Alain de Botton in his book Varieties of Melancholy. “But there is perhaps no better way to confront the misery and incompleteness with which we are cursed than to settle on an emotion still too seldom discussed in the frenetic modern world: melancholy.”  

We usually contrast melancholy with grief: getting stuck in loss rather than successfully accepting it. Melancholy thus becomes inferior, a disease with no cure. The inability to cope with sorrow and loss. The inability to accept the incompleteness of the world. Grieving for the dream that escapes you as soon as you open your eyes.

It is only as the works doctor is updating my file that I realise. The fake plant on the desk has brown leaves here and there. Perfect imperfection. An encouraging gesture from a courageous worker for the imperfect, imperfectible human. Or a mean trick of neoliberalism (says the left) or postmodernism (says the right) that even cashes in on our vulnerability. 

We’re all children of the Enlightenment, of the optimism of progress, the malleability of humanity. That’s why melancholy is an unproductive emotion. But it is precisely that striving for productivity is what’s blocking us now. Some people believe that not everyone is productive enough. Others are rebelling against thinking in terms of success. Education as an investment, disease as an error, good literature as bestsellers, the other as influencer … no more! The melancholic allows sadness, in all its unproductiveness, and in doing so embraces the failing human.

Melancholy also has a social dimension. “For men, melancholy often had an elevated status: a sign of genius, reflection, an artistic nature”, says Ferenc Balcaen, who is making Please, Open the Curtains for NTGent this season. “But for women and queers, a similar experience was consistently reduced to pathology. Their sadness became ‘hysteria’, their loneliness ‘neurosis’.” Balcaen references Judith Butler, who claimed that this was a way of making their sadness socially invisible, thus turning it inwards. Social unease became an individual problem. The individual struggle, a diagnosis. Now that social security is coming under pressure, the diagnosis is becoming a responsibility.  

How do we deal with that as a society? Barbara Raes, one of our artistic directors, has been asking herself that for some time. In Beyond the Spoken, she has found a healing space at the intersection of ritual and art. When she became an artistic director alongside Yves Degryse, it became her mission to open up that healing effect of rituals — intended as an individual experience — to a wider audience. The bending of individual ‘resilience’ into what cultural journalist Wouter Hillaert calls ‘resistiliance’: the social form he encountered in the merging of ‘resilience’ and ‘resistance’. ‘Rest is resistance’, we heard on Women’s Day this year. Social melancholy!

Back to Alain de Botton: “Because melancholy is based on an awareness of the imperfection of everything, on the perennial gap between what should ideally be and what actually is, the melancholic are  
especially receptive to small islands of beauty and goodness. They can be deeply moved by flowers, by a tender moment in a children’s book, by an unexpected gesture of kindness from someone they barely know, by sunlight falling on an old wall at dusk.”  

Ferenc Balcaen links that sense of beauty to hope. “People who experience melancholy as more than powerlessness may also find clarity in it: a critical distance, a refusal to be blinded by euphoria or illusion. Maybe that’s the power of melancholy in our time. Not giving up hope, but realising that hope is always linked to loss”, Balcaen reflects during the preparations for Please, Open the Curtains. “Not the hysteria of a diagnosis that silences us, but an attentive way of looking at the world — a way that creates space for a new beginning.”  

It’s only when I push down the velvet seat that I realise. The deep red against your fingertips. The glow of the emergency exists. The sound of bare feet on the stage. A light going on, someone looking up, the hope that appears in a face. And us, here, together.