Opening Night
How do you want to speak? Intensely, no?
You want to speak intensely don't you?
How do you want to live? Grand and compelling, right?
I have always played life intensely.
Everything I know about love, I know by playing love.
And then it happened, in hubris, always in hubris.
Then it happened, then I forgot my lines,
then suddenly I didn't know what to say.
Opening Night is the first major performance of DE HOE, written by all the writers and played by all the actors, across three generations. Influenced by the exceptional cinematography of John Cassavetes and the acting of Gena Rowlands, DE HOE plays on excess, but also on love and vulnerability. Opening Night is a collective search for a New Emotionality in an emotionally saturated society. Flirting with sentimentality play on life and death. Spontaneous, yet directed. Sincere and yet not.
Opening Night is every night's premiere thrown into question. By desperately filling the void left when an actor loses his words, seven actors together undertake a feverish, tragicomic search for how to be as truthful as possible.
"This script is so layered and these actors are so besotted that even yet another deconstruction of their stage reality comes in as something vulnerable. Or hilarious, in the case of Peter Van den Eede." - De Standaard
• DE HOE came into being when Compagnie De KOE and Hof van Eede, two related collectives, merged in early 2023. The permanent core is supplemented every eighteen months by a young collective. De HOE writes and creates itself. De KOE had been a regular feature at Kaaitheater for many years.
by and with Natali Broods, Mitch Van Landeghem, Willem de Wolf, Ans Van den Eede/Laurence Roothooft (tournee) /Lien Thys (TAZ series), Carine van Bruggen, Peter Van den Eede, Greg Timmermans, Wannes Gyselinck (only text) | technical team Bram De Vreese en Shane Van Laer | costumes Fran Labarque | interns Sjoerd Koolma, Jens Dewulf, Tomas Van Balen | thanks to Matthias de Koning | production DE HOE | coproduction Het Laatste Bedrijf | with support of de Tax Shelter-maatregel van de Belgische Federale Overheid
