A fairy tale about fear, blindness and madness. With IN VITRO, the directors Jan Dekeyser and Daphne Kitschen present a story with an open structure that was originally passed down orally. A narrative with double meanings and imaginative imagery: a fairy tale.

STRANGE

Fairy tales are populated by rather unworldly characters who undergo the most improbable adventures and transformations in cryptic language. Admittedly, unlike mythology, they do not tell us about the creation of the universe and its gods, but they delve all the more deeply into the human psyche. Fairy tales are told before bedtime. Closing your eyes or falling asleep is not only entering the night with its dreams and nightmares, but also losing your familiar vision.

FEAR

Fear is one of the most basic human emotions. In earlier times, humans would freeze in terror when faced with their attackers. Their hearts would start beating faster, supplying more oxygen to the muscles, adrenaline would be produced and perspiration would keep the higher body temperature under control. However, humans could also evolve from prey to hunter.

PHOBIAS

Nowadays, we know fear in many forms. There are phobias: animals, spaces, colours or smells that paralyse us when we encounter them. Sensory fears: the (fatherly) voice that rises, the fear of the dark, of physical pain at the dentist. Psychological fears, fear of failure. And finally, there is also the fear of ageing, of deteriorating and dying. Facing mortal fears. Existential fear.

And yet we also seek out fear in haunted castles and labyrinths, in dark tales, thrillers, horror and... fairy tales. The pleasure of frightening entertainment. Fear as a motivator or need. Fear rules under a reign of terror. A group instinctively closes ranks and becomes “united” under an external threat.

FEAR ATTRACTS

Those who understand these mechanisms can manipulate the masses. By creating imaginary or abstract enemies, by media exaggeration of an exceptional excess, by repetitive rhetoric.

In Vitro's production “De Zandman” (The Sandman) deals with fear itself, from “minor” childhood fears to mortal fear, on the one hand, and the methodical (and suggestive) evocation of fear and the techniques that lead to connotations with fear, on the other.

Source: text by In Vitro (link below)