De Speelse Mens

According to Johan Huizinga's famous definition, play is a free activity that is not intended to be serious and is detached from everyday life. There is no direct material benefit attached to it and it provides no practical utility.

Huizinga is one of the guides chosen by author, actor and theatre-maker Geert Belpaeme for De speelse mens. The essay is a philosophical exploration of playfulness in our existence.
According to the author, the actor has an important lesson in store for everyone. Play is connected to the distance you can take from the world, and from yourself. Play has to do with disrupting and exploring boundaries. Instead of striving for a fixed identity, it is better to surrender to the chaos of play, the intangible and the unknown.

Geert Belpaeme's essay is a powerful call to abandon the daily performance of an immobile identity. Our identity is a positively charged ‘nothingness’. In that field of tension, we are indeterminate and at the same time full of possibilities.

Geert Belpaeme is a theatre maker and performer. He graduated in 2010 from the drama programme at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent, where he has also been teaching and researching since then. In his work, he focuses on the power and relevance of clowning as a contemporary practice.