De aangegrepenen

Since 2019, Mira Bryssinck has been engaging in a research on melancholy. She wrote a text about a world taken over by melancholy, in which the authorities take harsh measures. Based on conversations about melancholy with people who offer different perspectives on the subject (young people, people in a rest home, people in a shelter...), she tries to unravel the account of melancholy. She links this subject to her research on polyphony. Is polyphony an answer to the demand for a more inclusive theatre landscape?

Mira Bryssinck: "We talk very difficultly about emotions, and more specifically melancholia, while they are universal and of all times. In this research, we see melancholy as a form of universal gloom, and as a specific place between 'what was' and 'what could have been'. We repress that place and that feeling to the back of our memory and our ratio, so they sometimes overwhelm us at unwanted moments. More and more people are taking antidepressants or falling prey to burnout. Would that be different if we talked more about melancholy and gave it back a right to exist?"