The ego's hunger
The debate between art and entertainment is long and tiring. The prejudices always emerge with amazing effrontery. But with the creations of Jan Lauwers everything is exposed. The ghosts are reduced to mere buffoons of the ruling intelligentsia, the one that runs like a dog when one throws the bone of easy applause, but they are applauding themselves and the rest are just watching.
Jan Lauwers is an artist that knows no borders. His artistic training goes so far as his own vision of expressiveness. He plays in every artistic room for his own pleasure and free expression. The Needcompany was born from this attitude, a theater company that draws on all the arts and all languages. Few nests of creativity as vigorous and counter have been in the theater scene since 1986 this company was founded in Belgium.
The name comes from his own need: I need company. Creative in solitude and in collective, he has taken his work to the field of literature, painting and film. Along with Grace Ellen Barkey, his partner with her own creations, founded the company and all converge in the theater, dance and performance. Two minds, two enormous talents.
Before the Needcompany was born, he created in 1979 in Ghent along with other artists the Epigonenesemble movement that led to the ZLV Epigonentheatre, being ZLV leiding zonder van, in Dutch, under the nobody’s direction. That’s very funny now when the world is desperately seeking new leaders. Thus, from the beginning he stressed the flamish renovating scene from the eighties coming up today. With him, interpretation and game are facing each other.
Now Needcompany presents The art of entertainment (2010) and he tastes the darkness again. Needcompany plays the death of a very distinguished career actor on the stage. New creative step for Jan Lauwers, talking about ego's needs. The work shows an actor who wants to die because he’s losing his memory. Memory is the soul without you is nothing. Then, he decides to approach a reality show with millions of viewers around the world called The art of entertainment in order to end his life. He wants to show his own death but shows the decay of a Western world that does not see beyond the ego.
Again, the Needcompany teaches us the other side of the mirror with a constant sea force, as that C-Song that according Lauwers "is constructed as a composite sensory that awakes in the audience very specific feelings in an abstract way”.
Again, the Needcompany teaches us the other side of the mirror with a constant sea force, as that C-Song that according Lauwers "is constructed as a composite sensory that awakes in the audience very specific feelings in an abstract way”.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
First photo by Phile Deprez
Second photo by Miel Verhasselt