INHALE DELIRIUM EXHALE plays with six kilometres of fabric of two sorts: silk and cashmere. During the creative process,  Miet Warlop is guided by intuition, association, and inter- action. In this delirium, we are presented with two worlds  of experience that have emerged from working with these fabrics: head and skin. The intensive use of the two fabrics on stage desires a grounding of both worlds. 

Silk forms the head. 

Cashmere forms the skin.

Silk  

The head or skull is like a cave full of veils. The invisible dimensions of your thoughts are stored there, as well as  the different paths you take in life. Seen in this light, a de- scription from Wikipedia takes on an almost poetic pow- er: “Silk is a natural substance that is secreted by certain  insects and solidifies on contact with the air.” Not only silkworms, but also certain species of spiders are suitable for silk production. 

The skull also protects the brain’s soft matter. It is no coincidence that we call the membrane between the hard and soft meninges the “spider web membrane”. The skull is the hardest layer, the protector of our mental cave, with membranes hidden beneath it that range from hard to soft, intertwining and communicating with each other. In this cave, in this mental space on stage, no truths are enacted. The play situations that are being externalised in the group  performance INHALE DELIRIUM EXHALE mainly raise ques- tions. Aggressive images of death and destruction pile up.  We live in a time of information overload, slung around us like dirty laundry until no further thought is possible. There’s a desire for mental hygiene, a desire for control and for a return to reason. Fabrics are scooped up and collected, hung on hooks and theatre scaffolding, and then forced back into the chaos of life.

Cashmere  

Cashmere is the skin and is composed of the soft, downy hair of the cashmere goat. During a conversation with Miet Warlop, she talks about what gets under our skin in these times. How should we remember a mass of people that we never knew, that we’ve never met, and that we couldn’t help when they fell? Our skin protects us, but what creeps  beneath it is what powerlessness does to us. The inevitabil- ity of death is veiled in black cashmere, the mystery of birth  and the subsequent encounter with the world is hidden be- neath white or soft earth tones. White and black, heaven  and hell, life and death, womb and grave. What nestles be- neath our skin is what we carry with us, invisible yet present,  blind yet feeling its way towards the world of our emotions, towards our heart.  

Grounding

The intensive use of such an enormous amount of fabric  during this performance causes static electricity. The elec- trical charge of the materials forms a closed circuit because  they’re placed on rubber rollers before they come into con- tact with a performer. Friction generates electricity and  causes the performer touching the fabric to form a bridge between the charge and the ground. The performers thus  form a linkage for the searching energy caused by the fric- tion and use of the fabrics. A ‘supercharged atmosphere’  can therefore be understood quite literally here. Anyone  who works with fabrics in this energetic way must be con- cerned with grounding. Fabrics are often brought together,  tempered, and reduced to rest. At this performance, there is no distinction between performers and stage technicians. The fabrics they use were sewn together behind the scenes. In each performance, everyone’s energy is interwoven through the use of fabrics. Everyone is grounded. 

The sound waves created by brothers Stephen and David Dewaele are directed at the spectators and help form a bridge to the performers. We feel the thumps, while they experience them. Grounding is an important element in Miet Warlop’s performance work. The delirium can only be experienced if the energy is grounded. There is a chance we might want to be part of the material from which this performance is made, that the performance, set to music, evokes a tactile desire for silk and cashmere.  

I let my intuition have free rein while watching a re- hearsal of this piece. My questions to Miet shaped the in- teraction I had with her work. And during our conversation,  an association arose that I have not been able to shake off since. Silk and cashmere fall from the sky, are unrolled and then shot into the air by an air cannon. The folds they create and the pure materiality of the fabrics place this creation by Miet Warlop and her performers and theatre technicians in a pictorial tradition in which fabrics and the way they fall are employed. The fine layers of paint Van Eyck used to render  the robes of his characters with great precision ultimate- ly led to the drama that Rubens staged centuries later, in  which fabrics emerge to form a sudden backdrop, to rep- resent colour codes and embellish the tragedy of human  existence. Folds seduce the eye; in paintings, they evoke a tactile desire. INHALE DELIRIUM EXHALE wants to literally bring fabrics to life. Fabrics bring blindness and tranquillity, drama and menace. They represent a fall from grace, rolled onto rollers like in a textile factory, folded up until a mere bundle remains, only to then be spread out lavishly into a sea of silk or cashmere.

What they reveal and conceal is our collective blindness and our passivity, our resistance and our distance—in other words, everything that gets under our skin and threatens to disappear between the folds. Head and skin connect us, the  spectators, to this delirium, colouring the lines of human ex- istence with the unapproachable roles of silk and cashmere,  to the inhaling and exhaling of the performers who touch it for us, play with it, and disappear into it, while we, with tingling fingers and a beat pounding in our heart, want to feel it, want to ground ourselves.

Jeroen Olyslaegers, May 2025.

Translated by Jodie Hruby.

Jeroen Olyslaegers is a writer of novels and plays.