Handle With Care: A theatre show where the audience performs

A theatre show with nary actors, nary directors, nary sets, not adjacent immoderate lighting cues. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? In the mediate of the country is simply a sealed cardboard box. For a while, thing happens. Then idiosyncratic stands up, walks forward, opens the box, and reads its contents retired loud. Within minutes, strangers are up connected their feet, talking and shuffling around, doing assorted tasks. This was Handle With Care, the latest enactment by Belgian theatre radical Ontroerend Goed.

The amusement was brought to Bengaluru by Aaron Fernandes Entertainment connected December 13 astatine Prestige Centre for Performing Arts. The amusement asks however acold audiences volition spell erstwhile the lone things they person are a box, a script, and, astir importantly, themselves.

Out of the box

Often described arsenic “theatre stripped to its essence”, Handle with Care replaces trained performances with whoever happens to turns up connected the time of the show. Guided by letters, objects and instructions hidden wrong the box, the audiences bring the enactment into being.

While the operation is tightly designed, who speaks, who hesitates and who takes the lead, is wholly babelike connected the chemistry of that peculiar group. Needless to say, nary 2 performances are the same.

CEO and laminitis Aaron Fernandes archetypal encountered the enactment astatine the Edinburgh Fringe successful 2024. “I was instantly struck by however unfamiliar and indispensable the format felt,” helium recalls. “A show that lone exists done assemblage information challenges galore assumptions we inactive clasp astir theatre.”

What stayed with him was its insistence connected shared responsibility. “It asks radical to listen, respond, and clasp the acquisition together. That feels particularly applicable successful India now.”

Trust, consent and stepping forward

Given its trust-based format, cautious framing is essential. “Participation is ne'er compulsory,” Aaron emphasises. “People tin participate the acquisition astatine their ain pace, with existent bureau implicit however they engage.” Behind the scenes, Ontroerend Goed supported presenters with elaborate documentation and planetary briefings, portion section teams ensured the container and the surrounding acquisition was handled with care.

For creator manager Alexander Devriendt, the task began with a tricky question: “ Is it imaginable to make theatre this way?” The aim, arsenic helium explains it, was ne'er to make a puzzle. “We marque interactive theatre for radical who don’t similar interactive theatre. No 1 is forced into the spotlight.” Control is deliberately surrendered. “We are not adjacent there. That is the scary part.”

Alexander resists taste stereotypes, noting that audiences everyplace stock much similarities than differences. Even resistance, helium says, is portion of the design. “If you privation to ticker from the backmost seats and bash nothing, that works too.”

For Aaron, Handle With Care was not a one-off staging. The beardown effect it garnered crossed cities has reinforced his content that small, high-concept works tin person heavy impact. In a country wherever a cardboard container tin crook a soundless assemblage into a impermanent community, that aboriginal already feels softly underway.