Opening Night

Opening Night will be the first major performance of DE HOE, written by all writers and played by all players, across three generations. In Opening Night we want to explore in play and writing how to represent Great Feelings on stage, a quest we call The New Emotionality. Do we succeed in displaying more convincing feelings on stage than in emotionally saturated and formatted society and visual culture? We explore whether the pursuit of grand gestures - in art, in life - are still of our time. How we can be baroque in a convincing, desperate way, and still be believable. The starting point of this production is the exceptional film work of John Cassavetes and the acting of his wife Gena Rowlands. Opening Night draws inspiration from their ability to show human relationships and emotional states of exception with a rare sensitivity, their ability to find vulnerability on camera that is almost shocking because you can barely see it anymore. As witty as it is purifying, as spontaneous as it is directed. As Olga (2013) is a new Chekhov, Opening Night becomes a new Cassavetes: human intrigue - lots of duos, trios, quartets and tuttis -, unspoken hurts, lots of love, and humor. Opening Night becomes baroque, a cinematic play, a flirtation with patheticness and sentimentality. And always the opposite, too. In the words of Cassavetes himself: "I've never seen a helicopter explode. So why should I make films about it? I did see people destroy themselves in the smallest possible ways, I did see people retreat, hide behind political ideas, behind drugs, behind sex, fascism, hypocrisy, I did it all myself. So I can understand them too. What we are trying to say is so gentle, it is gentleness. We have problems, terrible problems, but our problems are human problems."

                                                      
                                      by & with                                  
                                  
                                  Natali Broods, Willem de Wolf, Carine van Bruggen, Peter Van den Eede, Mitch Van Landeghem, Greg Timmermans, Lien Thys & Wannes Gyselinck                               
                                                          
                                      technicians                                  
                                  
                                  Bram De Vreese & Shane Van Laer                              
                                                          
                                      production                                  
                                  
                                  DE HOE in coproduction with Het Laatste Bedrijf                              
                                                          
                                  This performance came about with the support of the Tax Shelter measure of the Belgian Federal Government and Gallop Tax Shelter.