The Deer House

JAN LAUWERS & NEEDCOMPANY

THE DEER HOUSE

Tijen Lawton © Maarten Vanden Abeele / Needcompany

A Production by Needcompany and Salzburger Festspiele. Coproduction: Schauspielhaus Zurich, PACT Zollverein (Essen). With the collaboration of deSingel (Antwerp), Kaaitheater (Brussels). With the support of the Flemish authorities.

1 JAN LAUWERS ON THE DEER HOUSE

Art is actually all about man and human nature and all good art is a self-portrait of the observer. ‘One sees what one has learnt.’ In good theatre things happen which cannot happen in video, film or art. As a medium, theatre has the most direct link with ‘human nature’ since it is performed by people and for people. It is essential to seek out this human nature so that theatre can redefine itself in order to survive. This means it is necessary to tell new stories.

Each of the three parts of Sad Face | Happy Face deals with a different way of telling a story. The first part, Isabella’s room is a reflection on the past and is the most linear piece I have ever written. I needed this linearity because the occasion for this piece of writing was highly personal: the death of my father.

The second part, The Lobster Shop, is about the future and its structure is that of a dream or nightmare, whichever you wish. In a dream, time, space and place are interchangeable, and in art the beginning is not necessarily the beginning and an end is by no means self-evident.

The third part, The Deer House, is the present. One can conceive of the present in two ways (here we touch on the essence of theatre): the present of the world around us, by which I mean the world in its broad political and historical significance, and the present of the world we perceive when we look at someone who is doing something and knows he is being watched. The medium of theatre and the reality of the actors at the moment it occurs. Good theatre always examines the reality of the medium itself.

I was prompted to write “The Deer House” by the sometimes tragic peripheral events that take place within the close circle of NC. While we were on tour somewhere in France, one of our dancers, Tijen Lawton, received the news that her brother, the journalist Kerem Lawton, had been shot dead in Kosovo. His tragic death provided the starting point for a play about a group of theatre-makers who are increasingly faced with the harsh reality of the world they travel around in. Everything is politics, but art isn’t everything. Art always gets caught between the pages of history: it is futile and has no influence on any events at all, which is where the mysterious necessity for it lies.

Jan Lauwers

The Salzburger Festpiele has invited Jan Lauwers to make a new production, The Deer House, for summer 2008. Together with Isabella’s Room (2004) and The Lobster Shop (2006) this new production makes up a trilogy on human nature: Sad Face | Happy Face. The trilogy as a whole will be performed for the first time at the Salzburger Festspiele.

3 THE DEER HOUSE Erwin Jans

Beneath us the world and darkness above We are full of love

Watch out, the world is not behind you. Graffiti. Sprayed on a wall somewhere in the world. As a warning. It’s a line from The Velvet Underground song Sunday Morning (1966). In the opening scene of The Deer House there is a brief discussion between Hans Petter, Maarten and Misha. Isn’t the line actually Watch out, the world is behind you? So where exactly is the world? This question is not irrelevant to anyone who creates plays and wants to use the resources offered by appearance to say something about being. Where is the world, for a theatre company which, as Benoît summarises at the start of the show, has been on tour for 146 days in a single year and has done 103 performances in 16 countries? Where does being end and appearance begin, and vice versa? Who or what defines the boundary? Who or what guards the checkpoint? How much world is there in the theatre? For anyone who spends more than half their time in the theatre, it becomes part of the world. The company’s life together, performing together and travelling together slowly work their way into the show. Yet the question remains: how much world can the theatre take on? In Rio de Janeiro, a dead child lay in front of the entrance to the theatre. Benoît filmed the child, he tells us, but a woman stopped him and asked him for money to carry on filming. In the meantime, Benoît and his fellow actors are on stage slowly changing into gnome or elf costumes. If theatre is a fairytale, where is the world? Take the example of a war photographer. He photographs the world. He knows exactly where the world is: in front of his lens. The world in front of the lens is all that counts. ‘If you give power to your imagination, you will not survive a war.’ The war photographer does not lose himself in a dream world. He unrelentingly records what he sees, what happens – however horrible it may be. ‘But at the same time he does not want to accept reality. He hopes his photos will have some effect. He hopes they will set something in motion. Make reality more bearable. This is what a photographer does.’ A theatre-maker is no war photographer. The world does not appear in front of his lens. No, the theatre-maker is a gnome. But he doesn’t want to accept reality either. He hopes his fairytales will set something in motion. Make something more bearable. Whatever that something may be. ‘Deer know they will die. So I have to massage their hearts,’ says Grace. Perhaps that is what the gnome wants. Perhaps telling a fairytale is something like massaging the heart. To remove the fear and postpone death a little.

2. ‘I take no part in this war. Yet it is still my war,’ says the war photographer in a diary he has left behind. It seems that since the early nineteen-nineties – the war in Yugoslavia, the first Gulf War – war has been making a ‘comeback’. It’s not about the return of the reality of military operations (they have never gone away), but about the return of war as a figure in our symbolic world. A crucial part of this new set-up is the special relationship between war and the media (and mediatisation). A symbiotic relationship has arisen between them: there is no war or international conflict without television and, vice versa, no news programme without images of violence. In his diary, the war photographer describes the photos he has taken: ‘Photo SR 123-92: 5 pm. The young woman is lying on top of a goat. Both their faces are in a puddle. When I took the photo the goat wasn’t dead yet. Three soldiers pull the woman off the goat. Her whole body falls in the mud. The wind blows her skirt up.

4 She’s not wearing any underclothes. Her labia look fresh and glistening. They tie the goat to a truck with a rope. He bleats and looks foolishly at the woman. Who is beautifully dead. Some of the dead are more dead than others.’ The overabundance of violent photos and films from war zones on the internet has led to what is called ‘war gaze’. A look that loses itself in images of violence and destruction. There are striking parallels between watching pornography and watching the extreme horrors of war. The female bodies that are literally bared to the voyeuristic male eye in porno iconography are strikingly similar to the bodies shot to pieces, mutilated and torn open in war that are offered every day on some sites. In this instance, ‘war gaze’ corresponds to the pornographic gaze. The only alternative to this pornographic handling of violence – a voyeuristic gaze that wants only to consume more, and more extreme, violence – is the gaze of the war witness, the gaze of the witness with a concern for the human misery war brings and which affirms the victims’ humanness. In the mind of the war photographer himself rages the never-ending struggle between pornographer and witness, between voyeuristic lust and authentic compassion. Is this why he describes his photos in his diary, giving them shape once again in words, far from the scene of violence? ‘I take no part in this war. Yet it is still my war.’ The witness no longer keeps the pornographer at a distance. At a certain moment he photographs the execution of women and children in what was once called Yugoslavia. He still thinks he is not taking part in the war. He does interviews and takes photos. He observes and makes notes. He does not choose one side or the other. Until he is forced to take part. He has to make a choice. There is a mother and a child; one of them can live. A gun is put in his hand. This time, when he presses, it will not record a victim, but create one. The choice is his. He has to choose. He kills the mother. It has become his war. Forever.

3. The world is what comes from outside and upsets the established order. At an early stage in the play, for instance, the girl called Yumiko appears. The actors find her in the wings. The group’s whole mechanism of prejudices is immediately activated: all orientals look alike, the Japanese don’t have much hair on their bodies, and so on. And also: is she a refugee, is she an illegal immigrant, what was she doing in the dressing rooms, how come she knows everyone’s name, has she stolen anything? The company immediately splits into two groups, one that wants to look in Yumiko’s bag to see whether she has stolen anything and another that protects her. It is one of the many conflicts that divide the group. Later, at the end of the play, Yumiko will still be pushed off her chair. You can only very slowly become part of a community, however generous it is. But Yumiko is not the only one from the outside world; Tijen also brings the world in. She has just returned from a war-shattered Pristina, to which she had travelled to identify the corpse of her brother, a war photographer. She found a case full of cameras and a diary with descriptions of war photos. The play is an attempt to unravel what happened to the war photographer. How he brings the woman he killed back to her family at the deer house and is there in his turn killed by the despairing husband of the executed woman. And how the girl he saved also commits suicide. The narrative gropes its way through massed misfortunes. The final part of the play draws from this the ultimate conclusion, in the form of a hypothesis: imagine a bomb dropping on the deer house so that everyone dies. What happens then? What story is there still to tell? ‘The story is blown away. War has that power. War can destroy and create stories. Let’s do a reconstruction. Imagine that we had the means of reconstructing this story, or rather its background.’ The story always comes after the catastrophe. Its telling is a gift given by an accident, suffering or death. Catastrophe and death are an inexhaustible source for storytelling. It feeds on the possibility

5 of suffering and death. Catastrophe brings a fragmentation of stories. People tell stories to ward off catastrophe. Death means the end of a story, but at the same time a story postpones death. As long as we tell stories we do not die. The story and its telling can for an instant stop the arrow of time in its flight. This ‘instant’, in which death is postponed and warded off, is what we call literature. ‘The gods bring disaster down on mortals so that they will tell about it; but mortals tell about it to stop the catastrophe ever actually happening, so that its fulfilment is evaded in words that are far removed from it, where they will finally meet their end, even if they wish to remain silent. The point where speech begins is marked by immeasurable suffering, the clamorous gift of the gods: but for speech, or rather in speech, the frontier of death opens up an infinite space. The prospect of death makes speech move hastily onward, but also begins over again, tells about itself, discovers the story in the story and the possibility that no end may ever come to this envelopment. On the line dividing us from death, language reflects itself, encountering a mirror there; and if language wishes to stop the death that calls a halt to speech, it has only one single power by which it can do so: by letting its own image arise within itself, in a game of mirrors that has no bounds’, as Michel Foucault put it. Lauwers’ narrations are always highly self-conscious. They look at themselves as if in a mirror, though in recent years with less narcissism and cynicism. These stories see themselves and also their own finiteness. Viviane has no story with which to cope with her granddaughter’s suicide: ‘Now she's lying there and her little face is gone. Her eyes can't look at me exhortingly. I should have been dead. She has become my story. That's not right. Now I'm no longer a story. Now I need a story. Poor people, who need a story.’

4. Theatre originated at the graveside, claims the Albanian writer Ismaïl Kadaré in an essay on the Greek tragedian Aeschylus. Every theatre performance still bears the traces (now indiscernible) of the funeral ritual. Kadaré sees in the architecture of the Greek theatre (podium, chorus and seating) a remnant of the three parts of the funeral ceremony: the grave, encircled by the wailing women, who are encircled by the family and friends of the deceased. What is now theatre was once the open grave in which the deceased was laid. Those who are now the spectators were once mourners. What is now a play was once a lament for the deceased. In one of its deepest strata, theatre is still related to suffering, mourning and dealing with death and the dead. Theatre is the performance of the possible (or impossible) return of the dead. The ‘fairytales’ Lauwers tells in his plays are about the dead who are never entirely dead but continue to come back to life. The stage is the perfect place for the dead to wander and haunt the living. Which is why the dead are not silent in Lauwers’ plays. The dead are never fully dead. Isabella’s room is dedicated to Felix Lauwers, Jan’s late father. The numerous African ethnological objects displayed on the stage, the property of the deceased, are doubly witness to the past: their own past and that of Lauwers’ father. Death is twice contained within them. The Deer House cherishes the memory of the dead brother of one of the actresses – Tijen Lawton – who as a journalist was killed in Yugoslavia in 2001. In the middle of the stage is a slightly raised platform. It is used as the table around which everyone sits, but also as the base for the complicated ‘love sculpture’ the actors and actresses make with their bodies. But this platform is also the grave in which four dead bodies lie at the end of the play. The place of communion, desire and death is one and the same. Being together, loving and dying: entangled in the same inextricable knot that is called existence.

5. In 1937 Picasso painted Weeping Woman. On 26th April of that year the small Basque town of Guernica was bombarded by Nazi and fascist planes. Picasso captured the human misery caused by the horror of war in his painting Guernica, which he did almost immediately after the bombardment. For months afterwards he continued to paint variations on one of the figures in Guernica: the weeping woman with the dead child in her arms at the left of the painting. Weeping Woman is the last and most fully developed in the series. Her facial features are based on those of Picasso’s lover Dora Maar. Universal sorrow always has a personal face. It is probably no coincidence that Picasso continued to work on the subject of the crying mother with her dead child. The portrayal of the pietà – a mourning Mary with her son, the dead Christ, in her arms – is after all part of the canonised iconography of European painting. The art of sculpted sorrow. In The Deer House, Jan Lauwers continues in this tradition in his very own way. In the play’s key scene, a mother (Viviane) tries to dress her dead daughter (Inge). The body has been brought to her by a war photographer who claims to have been forced to execute her. This dressing scene is a long one, too long. It’s not possible to dress her. The dead girl’s body is too stiff and also frozen due to the cold. The clothes don’t fit. There is too much sorrow. The pietà does not come about. The sadness cannot be sculpted. Is there actually a ‘correct’ way of dealing with grief? Is there any appropriate form for sorrow and mourning? Or doesn’t sorrow have a form? Is it an emotion that goes beyond any formality? Like the face of the weeping woman in Picasso’s painting? The grief tears her face apart. The round, curved lines of her face have vanished. It has become a collage of sharp angles. The pain literally makes her lose her face. A face torn by grief is not an attractive one. It is not a face. It no longer has anything to do with the aesthetic categories of beautiful and ugly. Just like the face in supreme ecstasy: the faces in erotic or mystical rapture also smash any sort of form. It is as if faces that suffer are too much for themselves, as if they can no longer bear their own burden. They are too much for their own bones, skin and

7 muscles. In Picasso’s painting the face seems to have been struck by a grenade from the inside out and shows the splinters of its grief.

6. Every tragedy is a family tragedy. The Greeks already knew this. Greek mythology is an ancient soap. ‘Good stories are dark. Tragic. Full of incest and manslaughter’, says Hans Petter. Family ties and intimate relationships have always been the subject of Jan Lauwers’ plays. What he most likes to examine are the tensions within a small community. His Snakesong Trilogy (1994-1998) was a grim and fatal cocktail of power, desire and voyeurism. Ten years later, in the three plays that make up Sad Face | Happy Face, Lauwers takes a different view of people. With less cynicism and more compassion, less ironic and more empathic. It also has to do with Lauwers’ thoughts on the development of modern art. He plays out Marcel Duchamp against Walt Disney. Both are icons of the visual culture of the twentieth century. It’s true that in the strict sense Disney does not belong in art history, but his impact – including that on other artists – is greater than Duchamp’s. Duchamp’s fundamental gesture was destruction, iconoclasm, breaking down an existing order, while Disney’s fundamental gesture was the creation of a new mythology and iconography. Does the shift from The Snakesong Trilogy to Sad Face | Happy Face represent a shift from Duchamp to Disney, from modernist iconoclasm to a postmodern mythology, even if it is fragmented and hybrid? Is it coincidence that the snake has been replaced by the deer? The deer also appears on Needcompany’s website. Just as the snake evokes a wide range of ‘negative’ associations, the deer evokes as many ‘positive’ associations. Whereas the snake is associated with temptation, treachery, coldness and shiftiness – in the Biblical story the snake is the cause of man’s banishment from paradise – the deer stands for grace, beauty, vulnerability and even a certain mystical power. The snake creates disunity. The deer house keeps a group of people together. But it is an insecure rope. The guardian of the deer, the ‘deer matron’, is Grace, Viviane’s backward daughter. Grace’s relations with people may be difficult and emotionally uncontrolled, but with the deer her communication is direct. She is inadvertently responsible for the death of a child. But although death and destruction cast a shadow over the deer house, in the longings of its occupants it remains a mythical place of security. They sing ‘We love each other and it’s a real art/To build the deer house so strong/that it doesn’t fall apart’. This is perhaps the most important shift in Lauwers’ work for the stage: while in earlier plays the group or community did not have a core and ultimately broke up, in Sad Face | Happy Face they seem to become stronger, precisely through their awareness of their finiteness. Because it is around the memory of the dead that the group takes shape. Anneke says: ‘A funeral is the only social event in any culture where the ritual is fixed immutably and is respected as such. Perhaps the genuine feeling that dominates a funeral – grief – is the only one that keeps all cultures together. Not happiness.’ Is it the void, or absence, much more than fullness or presence, that keeps a group together? How do we prevent the emptiness degenerating into nihilism and cynicism? How do we prevent the void being filled, for fear, with a desperate desire for meaning and cohesion (in the form of nationalism, ethnicity, religious fundamentalism, etc.)? How much emptiness and sorrow can humans take?

7. The Deer House swings between fairytale and tragedy, between naive story and inexpressible grief. Lauwers has over the years achieved an ‘unbearable lightness’ in his writing and his staging: the lightness needed to broach the unbearable. He has created for himself and his actors the means to capture the gravity of existence in the

8 transience of a moment on stage. His writing is a singular mixture of profundity and banality, of minor human worries in a mythical perspective, of biographical (sometimes autobiographical) anecdotes and reflection on the acting, of emotional closeness and intellectual distance, of intimate conflicts and the encompassing world events. His plays move across the tense nerves of our era, contorted as they are by doubt and uncertainty. Our existence is stretched between two extremes: the utopian desire to control and dominate everything and the unspoken fear that it is, fatally, too late for that, that we are once again in the hands of fate, which now takes the form of ecological disasters, blind terror, economic crises, uncontrollable technology and suchlike. Hollywood fuels this apocalyptic vision. Modernity is mankind’s rebellion against his original passivity, against his subjection to fate. The history of modern man is an active, emancipatory project. In modernity, tragic thinking is actively overcome: man determines his own fate; he writes his own story. Man is the subject of every sentence he writes, grammatical and existential. The modernity project is a kinetic utopia, according to Peter Sloterdijk. But modern times have ended up under a layer of ‘postmodernism’: ‘The postmodern era is perhaps best recognised by the fact that it changes the proud, active sentences of the modern period into passive sentences or into impersonal phrasing. This reveals not only a grammatical but also an ontological commitment – it is about nothing more nor less than the possibility of incorporating suffering, events and processes into the contemporary sense of ‘being’ in addition to deeds, productions and agreements. The modern period has overfed us with theories of action – all he could say about suffering was that it could be ‘used’ as a motor for actions. But what would it mean if, in the countless cultural moves towards postmodernism, there turned out to be a need to develop an impassioned consciousness of human finiteness, a consciousness of a second passivity, which can only be formed on the reverse side of the ‘modern era’ project? What, on the basis of a second passivity, does the historically eventful world mean?’ An impassioned consciousness of human finiteness. The point of Lauwers’ work could hardly be described more accurately and succinctly.

8. Politics is the art of the negotiable. Mourning is a confrontation with the inexpressibility of suffering. Politics is discussion and dialogue. Mourning is an endless monologue, a dialogue with gods who do not reply. Mourning recalls what politics wants to forget, or make others forget. Mourning is a form of anti-politics, although it can always be absorbed and mobilised in the form of grand monuments and public commemoration. The Greek polis saw mourning as an excess that was to be barred, both from the official burial ground and the political agora. Mourning was subjected to strict rules so as to avoid chaos. A city full of weeping citizens would destabilise the political order. Mourning found a home in the theatre and in tragedy, which shows its grandeur and extremes at the same time. If the political gender is male, mourning is female. Both the tears and the women were kept out of political debate. But on the stage, that which had been shut out made its return in the frenetic and destructive grief of Medea, Antigone, Clytemnestra, Electra, Cassandra and others. What they express is ‘excessive’ and cannot be contained within the political discourse of the citizen: ‘The spectators of Greek tragedy were individually and collectively addressed less as members of a political community than as belonging to the anything-but-political collectiveness of the human race or, to give it its tragic name, the race of mortals.’ (Nicole Loraux). Between the sort of speech that is intended to express everything and the weeping that has no words, Lauwers has developed the art of singing. The group singing that he has now used intensively in several plays probably comes closer to the Greek chorus than to that of Brecht. It is not a matter of didactic dissociation, but

9 much more of the communication of collective emotion. ‘We are small people with a big heart’, is what everyone sings at the end of the show. This big heart is entirely a question of receptivity, receptivity to others. But it also has to do with receptivity to our own finiteness. ‘We are metaphysical beings insofar as the tragic erupts, to the extent to which we know that our being is a being that loses itself, that loses its way. We know that our state of being is a state of loss. Being lost is a dimension that being human determines more profoundly than we might at first think’, according to the philosopher William Desmond. Or, as we hear in the Song of the Melting Man, ‘There I was and then I was gone / It could have been better / What went so wrong?’ There is no answer to that question. We can only share this question with each other and try to build the deer house as solidly as possible. 'Its a real art'.

CREDITS THE DEER HOUSE

Text, directing, set design Jan Lauwers Music Hans Petter Dahl, Maarten Seghers Except “Song for The Deer House”, which was written by Jan Lauwers

With Grace Ellen Barkey, Anneke Bonnema, Hans Petter Dahl, Viviane De Muynck Misha Downey, Julien Faure, Yumiko Funaya, Benoît Gob Tijen Lawton, Maarten Seghers, Inge Van Bruystegem

Choreography The company

Costumes Lot Lemm Lighting Ken Hioco, Koen Raes Sound Design Dré Schneider Production Manager Luc Galle Assistant to the director and surtitles Elke Janssens

Technicians Luc Galle, Ken Hioco Assistant technicians Elke Van Der Kelen, Lise Lendais Costume assistant Lieve Meeussen, Lise Lendais Ears Denise Castermans Set construction De Muur, Needcompany Advice on deer Dirk Claesen (Zephyr)

English translation Gregory Ball French translation Olivier Taymans English language coach Louise Chamberlain French language coach Anny Czupper Dramaturgical introduction Erwin Jans Photography Maarten Vanden Abeele

Production Needcompany and Salzburger Festspiele Coproduction Schauspielhaus Zurich, PACT Zollverein (Essen) With the collaboration of deSingel (Antwerp), Kaaitheater (Brussels). With the support of the Flemish authorities.

13 PERFORMANCE CALENDAR SEASON 2008-2009

Premiere The Deer House Perner-Insel, Hallein, Salzburger Festspiele 28, 29, 30 July 2008 Kaaitheater, Brussels 25, 26, 27 September 2008 deSingel, Antwerp 9, 10, 11 October 2008 Schauspielhaus, Schiffbau, Zurich 1, 2, 3 December 2008 PACT Zollverein, Essen (Germany) 6, 7 March 2009 Rotterdamse Schouwburg 18 April 2009 Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam 24 April 2009 de Warande, Turnhout 29 April 2009 STUK, Stadsschouwburg, Leuven 6 May 2009 Stadsschouwburg Groningen 6 June 2009

As a part of Sad Face / Happy Face, A Trilogy, Three Stories on Human Nature Perner-Insel, Hallein, Salzburger Festspiele 1, 3, 5 August 2008 Schauspielhaus, Schiffbau, Zurich 5, 7 December 2008

Maarten Seghers © Maarten Vanden Abeele/Needcompany

14 WORK FOR THEATRE – JAN LAUWERS & NEEDCOMPANY

1987 Need to Know Opening: 24 March, Mickery, Amsterdam 1989 ça va Opening: 18 March, Theater am Turm, Frankfurt 1990 Julius Caesar Opening: 31 May, Rotterdamse Schouwburg 1991 Invictos Opening: 18 May, Centro Andaluz de Teatro, Seville 1992 Antonius und Kleopatra Opening: 14 February, Teater am Turm, Frankfurt 1992 SCHADE/schade Opening: 21 October, Theater am Turm, Frankfurt 1993 Orfeo, opera by Walter Hus Opening: 23 May, Bourlaschouwburg, Antwerp 1994 The Snakesong Trilogy - Snakesong/Le Voyeur Opening: 24 March, Theater am Turm, Frankfurt 1995 The Snakesong Trilogy - Snakesong/Le Pouvoir (Leda) Opening: 11 May, Dance 95, Munich 1996 Needcompany's Macbeth Opening: 26 March, Lunatheater, Brussels 1996 The Snakesong Trilogy - Snakesong/Le Désir Opening: 6 November, Kanonhallen, Copenhagen 1997 Caligula, No beauty for me there, where human life is rare, part one Opening: 5 September, Documenta X, Kassel 1998 The Snakesong Trilogy, reworked version with live music Opening: 16 April, Lunatheater, Brussels 1999 Morning Song, No beauty for me there, where human life is rare, part two Opening: 13 January, Lunatheater, Brussels 2000 Needcompany’s King Lear Opening: 11 January, Lunatheater, Brussels 2000 DeaDDogsDon´tDance/DjamesDjoyceDeaD Opening: 12 May, Das TAT, Frankfurt 2001 Ein Sturm Opening: 22 March, Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg 2001 Kind Opening: 21 June, Het Net, Bruges 2002 Images of Affection Opening: 28 February, Stadsschouwburg, Bruges

15 2003 No Comment Opening: 24 April, Kaaitheater, Brussels 2004 Isabella’s room Opening: 9 July, Cloître des Carmes, Festival d’Avignon 2006 All is Vanity Opening: 8 July, Théâtre Municipal, Festival d’Avignon 2006 The Lobster Shop Opening : 10 July, Cloître des Célestins, Festival d’Avignon 2008 The Deer House Opening: 28 July, Perner-Insel, Hallein, Salzburger Festspiele 2008 Sad Face / Happy Face, A Trilogy, Three Stories on Human Nature Opening 1 August, Perner-Insel, Hallein, Salzburger Festspiele

16 PUBLICATIONS IN BOOK FORM BY OR ABOUT JAN LAUWERS

– LAUWERS, Jan, Leda, Bebuquin (Antwerp), a coproduction with IT&FB publishing company, Amsterdam, 1995. – VANDEN ABEELE, Maarten, The Lucidity of the Obscene, Needcompany in cooperation with IT&FB publishing company, Brussels/Amsterdam, 1998. – LAUWERS, Jan, La Chambre d’Isabella followed by Le Bazar du Homard, Actes Sud-papiers, Paris, 2006. – STALPAERT, Christel, BOUSSET, Sigrid, LE ROY, Frederik, (eds.), No Beauty for Me There where Human Life is Rare. On Jan Lauwers' theatre work with Needcompany, Academia Press, IT&FB publishing company, Ghent/ Amsterdam, 2007. - LAUWERS, Jan, Restlessness, Mercatorfonds, BOZAR Books, Needcompany, Brussels, 2007. - LAUWERS, Jan, Sad Face | Happy Face, Drei Geschichten über das Wesen des Menschen, Fischer Taschenbuche Verlag (Frankfurt), 2008.

PRIZES – Mobil Pegasus Preis, Internationales Sommertheater Festival Hamburg, for the best international production, ça va, 1989. – Thersitesprijs, Flemish theatre critic prize, 1998. – Obie Award in New York for the play Morning Song, 1999. – Kinematrix Prize for Digital Format, International Film Festival Venice 2002, Goldfish Game, 2002. – Grand Jury Honor for Best Ensemble Cast, Slamdance Film Festival, Goldfish Game, 2004. – Le Masque, prize awarded by the Académie Québécoise du Théâtre in Montréal, Canada, for the best foreign production, La Chambre d’Isabella, 2005. – Prize awarded by the Syndicat Professionnel de la Critique de Théâtre, de Musique et de Danse in France, for the best foreign production, La Chambre d’Isabella, 2005. - Culture prize awarded by the Flemish Community 2006, theatre literature category, for the De kamer van Isabella and Ulrike scripts.

17 JAN LAUWERS (long version) Jan Lauwers (Antwerp, 1957) is an artist who works in just about every medium. Over the last twenty years he has become best known for his pioneering work for the stage with Needcompany, which was founded in Brussels in 1986. Over the years he has also built up a substantial body of art work which was shown in an exhibition at BOZAR (Brussels) in 2007.

Jan Lauwers studied painting at the Academy of Art in Ghent. At the end of 1979 he gathered round him a number of people to form the Epigonenensemble. In 1981 this group was transformed into the Epigonentheater zlv collective which took the theatre-world by surprise with its six stage productions. In this way Jan Lauwers took his place in the movement for radical change in Flanders in the early ‘80, and also made his international breakthrough. Epigonentheater zlv presented direct, concrete, highly visual theatre that used music and language as structuring elements. Their productions were Already Hurt and not yet War (1981), dE demonstratie (1983), Bulletbird (1983), Background of a Story (1984) and Incident (1985). Jan Lauwers disbanded this collective in 1985 and founded Needcompany.

NEEDCOMPANY Jan Lauwers needs company. He founded Needcompany together with Grace Ellen Barkey. They together are responsible for Needcompany larger-scale productions. The group of performers Jan Lauwers and Grace Ellen Barkey have put together over the years is quite unique in its versatility. Their associated performing artists are MaisonDahlBonnema (Hans Petter Dahl & Anna Sophia Bonnema), Lemm&Barkey (Lot Lemm & Grace Ellen Barkey), OHNO COOPERATION (Maarten Seghers & Jan Lauwers) and the NC ensemble, which includes the inimitable Viviane De Muynck. They create work of their own under Needcompany’s wing.

Since Needcompany was founded in 1986, both its work and its performers have been markedly international. Its first productions, Need to Know (1987) and ça va (1989) – which received the Mobiel Pegasus Preis – were still highly visual, but in subsequent productions the storyline and the main theme gained in importance, although the fragmentary composition remained.

Lauwers’ training as an artist is decisive in his handling of the theatre medium and leads to a highly individual and in many ways pioneering theatrical idiom that examines the theatre and its meaning. One of its most important characteristics is a transparent, ‘thinking’ acting and the paradox between ‘acting’ and ‘performing’.

This specific approach is also to be found in his adaptations of Shakespeare: Julius Caesar (1990), Antonius und Kleopatra (1992), Needcompany’s Macbeth (1996), Needcompany’s King Lear (2000) and, at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, Ein Sturm (2001). After directing Invictos (1996), the monologue SCHADE/Schade (1992) and the opera Orfeo (1993), in 1994 he started work on a major project called The Snakesong Trilogy, which signalled his first full emergence as an author: Snakesong/Le Voyeur (1994), Snakesong/Le Pouvoir (1995) and Snakesong/Le Désir (1996). In 1998 he staged the reworked version of the whole Snakesong Trilogy.

18 In September 1997 he was invited to take part in the theatre section of Documenta X (Kassel), for which he created Caligula, after Camus, the first part of a diptych called No beauty for me there, where human life is rare. With Morning Song (1999), the second part of the diptych No beauty..., Lauwers and Needcompany won an Obie Award in New York. In May 2000, at the request of William Forsythe, Lauwers created, in co-production with Ballett Frankfurt, the piece entitled DeaDDogsDon’tDance/DjamesDjoyceDeaD (2000).

Images of Affection (2002) was created on the occasion of Needcompany’s 15th anniversary. Jan Lauwers presented three monologues and a dance solo under the title No Comment (2003). Charles L. Mee, Josse De Pauw and Jan Lauwers wrote pieces for Carlotta Sagna (‘Salome’), Grace Ellen Barkey (‘The tea drinker’) and Viviane De Muynck (‘Ulrike’) respectively. Six composers – Rombout Willems, Doachim Mann, Walter Hus, Senjan Jansen, Hans Petter Dahl and Felix Seger – wrote a musical composition for the dance solo by Tijen Lawton. Broadly speaking the themes of this performance are those Lauwers has reformulated and redefined ever since the start of his work with Needcompany: violence, love, eroticism and death. A collection of several thousand ethnological and archaeological objects left by Jan Lauwers’ father urged him to tell the story of Isabella Morandi in Isabella’s room (2004) (Avignon theatre festival). Nine performers together reveal the secret of Isabella’s room with as central figure the monumental actress Viviane De Muynck. This play was awarded several prizes, including the 2006 Flemish Community Culture Prize in the playwriting category.

In 2006 he created two pieces for the Avignon Festival, one of which is The Lobster Shop, whose script he wrote himself, and All is Vanity, a monologue by Viviane De Muynck, which the actress herself adapted from Claire Goll’s book of the same name.

The Salzburger Festpiele has invited Jan Lauwers to make a new production, The Deer House, for summer 2008. Together with Isabella’s Room (2004) and The Lobster Shop (2006) this new production makes up a trilogy on human nature: Sad Face / Happy Face. The trilogy as a whole will be performed for the first time at the Salzburger Festspiele.

SOUL PROJECTS In 1999 Jan Lauwers launched Needlapb, a one-off occasion for ideas, notes, sketches and random thoughts. Needlapb enables one to see the initial stages of various projects in which experimentation gropes its way towards the stage. Just for Toulouse (Théâtre Garonne, 2006) was the first of a series of evenings when Needcompany’s associated performing artists presented installations and performances. In 2007 Just for Brussels was presented at BOZAR.

Jan Lauwers founded OHNO COOPERATION together with Maarten Seghers to give concrete shape to their mutual artistic commitment. In O.H.N.O.P.O.P.I.C.O.N.O. Maarten Seghers and Jan Lauwers went in search of the iconography of pop music. For this first version they worked with the video artist Nico Leunen (Cobblersson Incorporated) and made a distorted version of pop iconography. This was a highly sensory installation whose subtitle was ‘the tragedy of applause’.

19 Deconstructions were made by Jan Lauwers using disused museum material.. These museum installations have already been shown at BOZAR (Brussels) and the haus der kunst (Munich) in 2007. They formed the setting for a six-hour marathon performance by the NC ensemble on which the whole of Jan Lauwers’ mental world converged.

FILMPROJECTS Jan Lauwers also has a number of film and video projects to his name, including From Alexandria (1988), Mangia (1995), Sampled Images (2000), C-Song (2003), C-Song Variations (2007) and The OHNO Cooperation Conversations on the O.H.N.O.P.O.P.I.C.O.N.O. Ontology (2007). During summer 2001 Lauwers shot his first full-length film with the working title Goldfish Game (2002). The script was written together with Dick Crane. Goldfish Game is the story of a small community of people who are violently torn apart. The premiere took place at the Venice Film Festival (in the New Territories (Nuovi Territori)) category. The Kinematrix internet magazine (Italy) proclaimed Goldfish Game the best film in the Formati Anomali (Unusual Forms) category. The jury report said: ‘An innovative style of directing that surpasses the limits of the digital medium’. Goldfish Game was selected for the Buenos Aires International Human Rights Film and Video Festival in 2002, the Ghent Film Festival in 2002 and the Solothurn Film Festival in Switzerland in 2003. At the Slamdance Film Festival (January 2004), Goldfish Game was awarded the Grand Jury Honour for the Best Ensemble Cast.

In February 2003 Jan Lauwers made a silent short film on violence, called C-Song. This film has been shown to a limited audience several times, during the Needlapbs at STUK in Leuven and the Kaaitheater Studios in Brussels, and also in ‘War is Not Art’ at the Vooruit in Ghent. In April 2004 C-Song had its official premiere at the Courtisane short-film festival in Ghent. It was subsequently selected for the International Short-Film Festival in Hamburg in 2004 and in July 2004 was screened in the old water-tower at Bredene on the Belgian coast as part of Grasduinen 2004, SMAK-aan-Zee. C-Song Variations (2007), a short film made in connection with The Lobster Shop, had a preview at BOZAR (Brussels) in April and its premiere at the Temps d’Images festival in La Ferme du Buisson (Paris) in October 2007. It was then shown at the haus der kunst (2007) in Munich. For the SPIELART Festival in Munich (2007) he did a video project together with Maarten Seghers: The OHNO Cooperation Conversations on the O.H.N.O.P.O.P.I.C.O.N.O. Ontology.

VISUAL ART At the request of the curator Luk Lambrecht, Jan Lauwers took part in the Grimbergen 2002 exhibition together with 8 other artists (including Thomas Schütte, Lili Dujourie, Job Koelewijn, Atelier Van Lieshout, Jan De Cock and Ann Veronica Janssens). In spring 2006 his work was included in the DARK exhibition at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. In 2007 Jan Lauwers had his first solo exhibition at BOZAR (Brussels), curated by Jérôme Sans (former director of Palais de Tokyo, now at the BALTIC centre for contemporary arts). To accompany this exhibition he also compiled the first book to focus on his art work from 1996 to 2006. At the Artbrussels art fair (2007), Lauwers was invited to make a site-specific work for BOZAR.

20 Deconstructions were made by Jan Lauwers using disused museum material.. These museum installations have already been shown at BOZAR (Brussels) and the haus der kunst (Munich) in 2007. The House of Our Fathers – a house measuring 20 x 5 x 5m – is the basis for a major new project by Jan Lauwers. A ‘house’ work of art that examines time, place and perception (the essential difference between theatre and art). It will be expanded over the years to form an entirely independent work of art to which Jan Lauwers invites other artists.

21 GRACE ELLEN BARKEY Grace Ellen Barkey, born in Surabaya in Indonesia, studied dance expression and modern dance at the theatre school in Amsterdam and afterwards worked as an actress and dancer. She choreographed several productions before co-founding Needcompany in 1986 and becoming its full-time choreographer. She created the choreography for Need to Know (1987), ça va (1989), Julius Caesar (1990), Invictos (1991), Antonius und Kleopatra (1992) and Orfeo (1993). She also acted in several of these productions, as well as in The Snakesong Trilogy - Snakesong/Le Voyeur (1994), Caligula (1997), Needcompany’s King Lear (2000), Images of Affection (2002), No Comment (2003), The Lobster Shop (2006) and The Deer House (2008). She was one of the cast of Goldfish Game (2002), Jan Lauwers & Needcompany’s first full-length film.

Since 1992 she has been steadily and successfully building an international career with her own stage creations. Her first pieces, One (1992), Don Quijote (1993) and Tres (1995) were coproduced by Theater AmTurm in Frankfurt. These were followed by the Needcompany productions Stories (Histoires/Verhalen) (1996), Rood Red Rouge (1998) and Few Things (2000). Few Things was received very enthusiastically both at home and abroad. With (AND) (2002) she transcends all the boundaries of theatre, dance and music with an irresistible flair. In 2005 Grace Ellen Barkey presented her new stage show, Chunking and was nominated for the Flemish Community Culture Prizes (2005). The Porcelain Project (2007) is her latest dance piece, for which she created a porcelain installation together with Lot Lemm.

In 2004 Grace Ellen Barkey & Lot Lemm set up Lemm&Barkey to give shape to their close artistic cooperation: they designed the costumes for Isabella’s Room (2004) and were responsible for the concept, set and costumes for Chunking and The Porcelain Project. In 2007 they created a porcelain installation for the production The Porcelain Project. It has been shown at BOZAR (Brussels), the Benaki Museum (Athens) and elsewhere. The curator Luk Lambrecht then invited them to take part in the group exhibition I am your private dancer at Strombeek cultural centre in January 2008.

ANNA SOPHIA BONNEMA From 1982 to 1986 the Dutch Anna Sophia Bonnema studied at the theatre school in Amsterdam. She staged several plays and also wrote a great many, including De bomen het bos, staged with the Nieuw West theatre company, and Tegenmaat. Since 1995 she has worked with Hans Petter Dahl in the L & O Amsterdam performance group. They have created several pieces including the love show Tantra & Western (1995), What have you done with my poem? - Sing-Dance #1 (1996), Made in Heaven – Sing-Dance #2 (1997), Attention - Sing- Dance #3 (1998) and the multidisciplinary performance Post coitum omne animal triste est (1999), with a different improvising dancer every night. For these projects they worked with people from several disciplines such as Liza May Post (artist), Oyvind Berg (writer), Tom Jansen (actor) and improvising dancers including David Zambrano, Laurie Booth, Eva Maria Keller and Michael Schumacher. In 1997 they did a coproduction with Bak-Truppen called Good Good Very Good. As a duo they created the performances Nieuw Werk (2001) and Shoes and Bags (2003). The latter was made on the occasion of the opening of their virtual house for fashion, art and concepts, MaisonDahlBonnema. In 2005, they made their thoughtful piece Not The Real Thing together with Robert Steijn (as performing dramaturg). Their latest piece, The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny – a pop opera (2007), receives production support from Needcompany.

Needcompany’s King Lear (2000) was Anna Sophia Bonnema’s first production with Jan Lauwers. Since then she has also appeared in Images of Affection (2002), Goldfish Game (2002), The Lobster Shop (2006) and The Deer House (2008). In No Comment (2003) she replaced Carlotta Sagna. She has already written several things including pieces for Needlapb and The Liar’s Monologue for Isabella’s room (2004).

HANS PETTER DAHL From 1987 to 1995, Hans Petter Dahl worked with the Norwegian company Bak-Truppen. In 1995, together with Anna Sophia Bonnema, he founded the L & O Amsterdam performance group. They have created several pieces including the love show Tantra & Western, What have you done with my poem? - Sing-Dance #1 (1996), Made in Heaven – Sing-Dance #2 (1997), Attention - Sing-Dance #3 (1998) and the multidisciplinary performance Post coitum omne animal triste est (1999), with a different improvising dancer every night. For these projects they worked with people from several disciplines such as Liza May Post (artist), Oyvind Berg (writer), Tom Jansen (actor) and improvising dancers including David Zambrano, Laurie Booth, Eva Maria Keller and Michael Schumacher. In 1997 they did a coproduction with Bak-Truppen called Good Good Very Good. As a duo they created the performances Nieuw Werk (2001) and Shoes and Bags (2003). The latter was made on the occasion of the opening of their virtual house for fashion, art and concepts, MaisonDahlBonnema. In 2005, they made their thoughtful piece Not The Real Thing together with Robert Steijn (as performing dramaturg). Their latest piece, The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny – a pop opera (2007), receives production support from Needcompany.

It was in Needcompany’s King Lear (2000) that he first worked with Jan Lauwers. Since then he has also appeared in Images of Affection (2002), Goldfish Game (2002), Isabella’s room (2004), The Lobster Shop (2006) and The Deer House (2008). In No Comment (2003) he was one of the six composers. He also composes music for Needlapb, for Isabella’s room and for The Lobster Shop (2006).

VIVIANE DE MUYNCK Viviane De Muynck is best-known as one of the principal actresses in Needcompany. In the early nineties she met Jan Lauwers, artistic director of Needcompany, with whom she has since done much captivating work.

She studied drama at the Conservatory in Brussels, where she was a student of Jan Decorte. From 1980 she was a member of the Mannen van den Dam collective and acted in Strindberg’s De Pelikaan, Feydeau’s Het laxeermiddel, Bernhard’s De macht der gewoonte and Strauss’ Het Park. In 1987 she won the Theo d’Or Prize for her performance as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which Sam Bogaerts directed for the De Witte Kraai company. After that she joined Maatschappij Discordia and performed in Alfred Jarry’s UBU ROI, Judith Herzberg’s Kras, Handke’s Das Spiel vom Fragen, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Twelfth Night.

Collaboration with three theatres in the Netherlands resulted in Count Your Blessings with Toneelgroep Amsterdam, directed by Gerardjan Rijnders, Iphigenia in Taurus with the Nationaal Toneel in The Hague, directed by Ger Thijs and Hamlet with Het Zuidelijk Toneel, directed by Ivo Van Hove. She also acted in two Kaaitheater productions: in 1994 in Pijl van de Tijd (Martin Amis), directed by Guy Cassiers and in 1995 the part of Odysseus in Philoktetes Variations (Müller, Gide, Jesuren) by Jan Ritsema, alongside Dirk Roofthooft and

23 Ron Vawter. She also made guest appearances with The Wooster Group in O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape and other plays. She acted in Relazione Pubblica, a choreographic piece by Caterina and Carlotta Sagna. In 2007 she played the leading part in Ein fest für Boris, a creation for the Salzburger Festspiele.

Viviane De Muynck also works with musicians, such as on La Trahison Orale (oratorio by Maurizio Kagel) with the Schönberg Ensemble (conductor Rembert De Leeuw), Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte (Arnold Schönberg) with Zeitklang (conductor Alain Franco) and the Spectra Ensemble (conductor Philippe Raté), Lohengrin (Schiarrino) with Neue Musik Berlin (conductor Beat Furrer and director Ingrid von Wantoch Rekowski). She collaborated with Eric Sleichim and the Bl!ndman Saxophone Quartet on Men in Tribulation (May 2004). In 2006 she took part in the production Walking in the Limits, a joint venture with Franz Krug & Heiner Reber.

She makes regular appearances in film and TV productions. She acted in Vinaya, a film by Peter van Kraaij and Josse De Pauw and in De avonden, directed by R. Van den Berg, after the book by Gerard Reve. Two other notable film parts have been in Vincent and Theo (directed by Robert Altman) and The Crossing (directed by Nora Hoppe). She was twice nominated for the ‘Gouden Kalf’ at the Utrecht film festival: for the film De avonden and for the TV-drama Duister licht by Martin Koolhoven. In 2005 she acted in the first full-length film by Fien Troch, Someone else’s happiness and also appeared in Geoffrey Enthoven’s film Vidange Perdue (2006).

Viviane De Muynck is much in demand internationally as a guest lecturer on theatre courses and workshops. In addition to this she has taken to stage directing in Germany. In 2000 she directed the first performances of Die Vagina Monologe at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, and As I Lay Dying (2003), an adaptation of William Faulkner.

Since the opera Orfeo (1993) by Walter Hus and Jan Lauwers, she has acted regularly with Needcompany. Over the years she has appeared in The Snakesong Trilogy (Le Pouvoir, Le Désir and the full version), Macbeth (1996), Caligula (1997), Morning Song (1999), DeaDDogsDon’tDance/DJamesDJoyceDeaD (2000), Goldfish Game (2002), No Comment (2003), Isabella’s room (2004), All is Vanity (2006) and The Deer House (2008). For DeaDDogsDon’tDance/ DJamesDJoyceDeaD she joined Jan Lauwers in writing the script. For All is Vanity, she adapted Claire Goll’s book of the same title herself. In 2006 she was awarded the Flemish Community Prize in the performing arts category.

MISHA DOWNEY Misha Downey was born in Leicester in England. He trained at the London Contemporary Dance School from 1989 to 1992. Afterwards he co-founded the Bedlam Dance Company, which was led by the choreographer Yael Flexer. He worked with the Adventures in Motion Pictures (AMP) dance company on The Nutcracker and danced for the Harlemations Dance Company led by the choreographer Bunty Mathias. In January 1994 he joined Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas dance company, where he took part in the creation of Kinok and Amor constante más allá de la muerte, as well as being involved in the revival of Toccata. Before he joined Needcompany, he also danced Swan Lake (1996) for the choreographer Matthew Bourne. In 2000 Downey co- founded the Belgian company Amgod for which he created and performed in What Do You Want? (2001), Second

24 Album (2003) and As Simple As That (2005). In 2005 he danced in Flesh and Blood by Lea Anderson’s Cholmondeleys in the UK. He also worked in Switzerland for the Gisela Rocha Company.

The first Needcompany production Misha Downey danced in was Grace Ellen Barkey’s Rood Red Rouge (1998), later he also appeared in Few Things (2000) and The Porcelain Project (2007). His collaboration with Jan Lauwers started when he acted in the rerun of Caligula (1998). Later he appeared as an actor and dancer in Morning Song (1999), Needcompany’s King Lear (2000), Goldfish Game (2002), Images of Affection (2002) and The Deer House (2008). In Isabella’s room Misha Downey replaces Ludde Hagberg.

JULIEN FAURE Julien Faure, born in France, studied performing arts at INSAS in Brussels from 1995 till 1998. After his studies he worked with Pierre Droulers on Multim in Parvo (1998) a creation for the KunstenFESTIVALdesArts. As from 1998 he worked with Karin Vyncke, Julie Bougard, Jean-François Duroure and Cie Osmosis. In 2001 he created his first choreography Stamata #1-Et si demain voit le jour.

(AND) (2002), by Grace Ellen Barkey, was his first production with Needcompany. He replaced Timothy Couchman in Images of Affection (2002). In addition to this he also appeared in Isabella’s room (2004), The Lobster Shop (2006), The Deer House (2008) by Jan Lauwers and Chunking (2005) and The Porcelain Project (2007) by Grace Ellen Barkey.

YUMIKO FUNAYA Yumiko Funaya was born in Japan and studied dance at the Japan Woman’s College of Physical Education in Tokyo (2002-2004). In 2004 she entered P.A.R.T.S. contemporary dance school.

She started working with Jan Lauwers & Needcompany for the creation of The Deer House (2008). In Isabella’s room she replaces Louise Peterhoff. In The Porcelain Project by Grace Ellen Barkey, she replaces temporarily Taka Shamoto.

BENOÎT GOB Benoît Gob studied painting at the academy of art in Liège and then continued studying at INSAS in Brussels. In 1998 he joined Wim Vandekeybus’ dance company Ultima Vez and danced in several productions including The day of heaven and hell, In spite of wishing and wanting and Inasmuch as life is borrowed.

He collaborated for the first time with Needcompany in (AND) (2002) by Grace Ellen Barkey. He replaced Dick Crane in Images of Affection (2002). In addition to this he also appeared in Isabella’s room (2004),The Lobster Shop (2006), The Deer House (2008) by Jan Lauwers and Chunking (2005) and The Porcelain Project (2007) by Grace Ellen Barkey.

TIJEN LAWTON Tijen Lawton, born in Vienna to a British father and a Turkish mother, was raised in Austria, Italy and Turkey, and finally ended up in Great Britain. In London she studied dance and music at the Arts Educational School

25 from 1984 to 1988 and at the London Contemporary Dance School from 1988 to 1991. In 1989 she spent a year at the prestigious Juillard School in New York. She participated in various dance workshops in Paris and Istanbul.

In 1991 she co-founded Foco Loco, a company that concentrated on research and development in every area of dance. In 1992 she joined Emma Carlson & dancers and toured Great Britain and Germany with the performance Inner Corner. In 1996 she came to Brussels to work on several productions by Pierre Droulers: Les Beaux Jours (1996), Lilas (1997) and Multum in Parvo (1998), followed by international tours. In the meantime she worked on the first choreographic pieces of her own: Les petites formes (1997) which contained Je n’ai jamais parlé, Les Beaux Jours and Plus fort que leurs voix aiguës (1998).

Her collaboration with Jan Lauwers started with her work as an actress and dancer in the revival of Caligula (1998) and in Morning Song (1999). Since then she has been a constant presence in Needcompany productions. She has appeared in Needcompany’s King Lear (2000), Images of Affection (2002), Goldfish Game (2002), No Comment (2003), Isabella’s room (2004), The Lobster Shop (2006) and The Deer House (2008). She also appears in Few Things (2000), (AND) (2002), Chunking (2005), The Porcelain Project (2007) by Grace Ellen Barkey.

MAARTEN SEGHERS Maarten Seghers studied stage directing at the RITS (Brussels). In the meantime he continued with his own work (theatre and music compositions). In 2001 he created the stage production Angel Butcher with the theatre company d a e m m e r u n g. His collaboration with Needcompany started with the production Images of Affection (2002).

He wrote music for and performed in Images of Affection (2002), Isabella's room (2004), The Lobster Shop (2006), The Deer House (2008) and Needlapb by Jan Lauwers, and (AND) (2002), Chunking (2005) and The Porcelain Project (2007) by Grace Ellen Barkey. He wrote music for No Comment (2003) and The Unauthorized Portrait (2003) – a film about Jan Lauwers by Nico Leunen.

He founded OHNO COOPERATION together with Jan Lauwers to give concrete shape to their mutual artistic commitment. Up to now this has taken the form of listening to, looking at, thinking about and making art. The songs and sounds were either for specific purposes (Images of Affection, No Comment, Needlapb), independent and for no particular purpose (The Grenoble Tapes, et al.) or else were given visual form (O.H.N.O.P.O.P.I.C.O.N.O. installation). In 2007 Maarten Seghers made So man, a hysterical audiovisual performance, in collaboration with SPIELART Munich.

INGE VAN BRUYSTEGEM Inge Van Bruystegem studied dance at the London Contemporary Dance School (1996-99), followed by various workshops in Antwerp, Vienna, Luxemburg, London and elsewhere. She worked as a photographic model for several years, but in the meantime participated in several projects: performances including wolv goes international

26 (2002) with Veronika Zott in Vienna, drindrunkmehr (2003) for the Tanzqwartier Wien, Pasavoir (L’Aeronef/Victoria, 2001), Aarschot-Mechelen (Gand Cru, 2004) and a guest performance in Project 1 (Poni, 2004). She has also appeared in short films by Hans Brysssinck, Hans Van Nuffel and Ingrid Vanderhoeven, among others.

Jan Lauwers’ The Lobster Shop (2006) is her first play and her first venture with Needcompany. She replaced in addition temporarily Louise Peterhoff in Grace Ellen Barkey’s play Chunking (2005). She is a member of the cast of Jan Lauwers’ play The Deer House (2008).

Hooikaai 35 B-1000 Brussels tel +32 2 218 40 75 fax +32 2 218 23 17

www.needcompany.org

Contacts

Managing director: Christel Simons / [email protected] / +32 477 66 34 66 Assistant managing director: Thijs De Ceuster / [email protected] Coordination Manager and Sales: Inge Ceustermans / [email protected] / + 32 495 27 17 24 Production management: Luc Galle / [email protected] Assistant director, dramaturgy and promotion: Elke Janssens / [email protected] Tour management: Frank Van Elsen / [email protected] Assistant press officer / publications: Eva Blaute / [email protected]