The Doors of Perception have opened

Yesterday we premiered the show “The Doors of Perception”, at the Teatro Académico de Gil Vicente, in Coimbra. If you didn’t have the opportunity to attend, there is a final session tonight, at 9:30pm.

 

The idea for this project, based on texts by William Blake, came from the director of TAGV, Manuel Portela, professor of the Anglo-American Studies Group of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Coimbra and translator of several works by that author. The uniqueness of Blake’s “illuminated books”, particularly in terms of poetic content and the multiplicity of construction processes, made them suggestive and desirable fruits for the construction of this transdisciplinary show.

 

From the synopsis: Here we find ideas of freedom for the bodies and the emotions in the form of a new Genesis. A world without absolute scale and time, where the birth of a man is simultaneously the original explosion which generated the finite world. Mind and body are one and closed in the five finite senses. Before it was the infinite and only will determined form. After the fall from Eternity, we were condemned to the limits of the material world we can perceive. Secular institutions like the Church, the State, and part of the scientific community, try to organise this perception in order to legitimate their laws with measures and calculations. To clean the doors of perception will allow to contemplate this conspiracy but also to find the individual incapable of obeying – the unlimited man, who will suffer complexity without hiding behind the horizon.