sarma

1.
In Pearls, the first scene in Le Voyeur (1994), which is also the first part of The Snakesong Trilogy, the dancer-actress Grace Ellen Barkey tells a story in English about a broken necklace. She trembles, literally feverish in her bodily movements; she takes hardly any trouble to brush the strands of hair out of her face; she holds her lower arms crossed horizontally in front of her stomach: each arm ends in a closed hand, a clenched fist. She is suffering, and it is clearly visible because it is physical, but from what? She says, "She tries to press at least one tear out of her eyes, but to no avail. She cannot express her sorrow."

The performance has only just begun, but we are immediately in media res: from the very first scene we are confronted with a theatrical language that thematizes both itself and its reception by bringing the text and the body, words and theatricality into action against each other. There was no beginning, no opening in the strict sense of the word. Someone, a woman, walked on to the stage, and started to move and to tell a story, without the least narrative context or reason. The woman started to speak and at the same time she demanded our visual attention by means of her body.
The words spoken describe the character and the role of the woman and her movements, but this self-description does not immediately provide greater clarity or understanding. In fact the actress is simply describing herself from an external, objective point of view: she regards herself through the eyes of the audience. Her words translate our gaze and she says out loud what we are thinking in silence. And that's it: any narrative excuse to keep on watching vanishes, and we are thrown back roughly on to that voyeurism that is, like a stylized, highly civilized urge to watch, essential to every stage performance. The voyeur to whom the title of the play refers is after all also the spectator himself or herself. He or she sits in the auditorium to satisfy in a legitimate, high-culture and therefore subliminated way, a Schaulust which motivates this watching like the familiar blind-spot.
Every public performance presupposes the existence of something like the original voyeur, an original spectator whose gaze was decisive for the performance: directing is synonymous with critical observation. But perhaps it is mainly this blindspot, which accompanies every look, that is constructive to directing, and that every director tries over and over again to capture himself or herself when giving instructions to actors. In any case it seems to me to be incontrovertible that both the reception and" production of theatre is permeated by an eroticism, usually unspoken, which is located primarily on the level of watching and being watched, of voyeurism and exhibitionism. This erotic device underpins every form of performing art or performance, as well, of course, as the handling of images from works of art to TV soaps. 

If critics sometimes have a problem with the work of Jan Lauwers and Needcompany, it is perhaps mainly because, not only in Le Voyeur but in just about all their plays, an occasionally perfidious, even perverse game is played with the erotic aspect of watching. For instance, the actor Mil Seghers standing still for an unbearably long time in the middle of the stage in Julius Caesar (1990), and actress Viviane De Muynck who undresses down to her scanty lingerie in the closing section of Le Pouvoir (1995) and displays her womanly (but not young — youthful, girlish) body to the audience unmoved, and with an indifference bordering on contempt for death. These are two pregnant scenes in which "all of a sudden the audience's watching loses all its naturalness, through being confronted with something — with a singular body — which it does and at the same time does not want to see, which in the very same movement repels and fascinates. Such a pronounced thematization of the audience's Schaulust is embedded in Needcompany's work in a network of images that have an unceasing effect on the eye. The proposition often heard in this connection, that Jan Lauwers, originally a visual artist, is making some sort of 'visual theatre' and devoting a conspicuous amount of attention to the scenery, the lighting and, more generally the scenography, is, all things considered, no more or less than a digression. This is praising or criticizing the theatrical design in order not to have to discuss the directed interaction between image and viewer, actor's body and the desire to watch. In short, one wishes to remain 'offside' ('offscreen'), whereas it is precisely the familiar offside-trap from football that every Needcompany piece plays recurrently in order to involve the spectator in the action on the stage. 

To summarize: Jan Lauwers is a capturer of glances. He knows that theatre, dance and other performing arts appeal to an unconscious desire to watch, in which the act of watching itself always affords a desire in which one is inevitably mistaken. He transforms this knowledge into a game, possibly with himself (with his own desire to watch), but certainly with the spectator. There is a stake in this game, beyond all formal and aesthetic considerations:  how  to   establish  a  different  relationship between the viewing subject and the viewed image in the midst of the general voyeurism of the media or entertainment society? How to make the eyes, which are usually indifferent and accustomed to images of porn and violence, keen again to appreciate what they see hic et nunc — for themselves, and to the difference (the distinction) between the desire to watch and the image? Every Needcompany play attempts, among other things, to answer this question or, more precisely, tries to play on it, in the sense of making it actable, presentable and representable. Theatre, in the accepted sense of the word, is often all too limited for this, however. 

In order to rise beyond the limitations of theatre as a play of visual desire and aversion, Lauwers has in the past shifted to opera (Orfeo, 1993) and video films (From Alexandria, Rabbit Day, A Drawing in the Snow). And what he mainly did was, in performances primarily conceived as theatre, to increase the possibilities for playing on the audience's desire to watch by introducing dance sections and non-speaking tableaux vivants. In the play of light and sound with which Le Pouvoir opened, this quest for new acting resources reached a provisional peak: powerful, dramatic music (composed by Rombout Willems), intense female singing, scenes on stage reminiscent of baroque paintings... The ultimate meaning of this playing with the spectator's eye, every aspect of which was thoroughly thought out, was revealed from the very beginning. After all, the complete darkness with which the play began symbolized not only the very beginnings of man's existence, but also the blind 'lustspot', necessarily remaining dark, which directed the view during the rest of the" performance. 

(Aside: Lauwers' play is inevitably biased, and so too is the answer to the question that arose earlier. Because the eye is always sexed, male or female, and never two-sided or neutral. Yet the ample fact that male voyeurism is different from female makes Needcompany's plays only more emphatic: at the moment the desire to watch is suspended, as already mentioned, the male eye is castrated. But this is literally aside, since the eye is still coloured by several other social differences. There is, for instance, a voyeurism of the poor and a desire to watch among the well-off, a white and a black voyeurism, a Catholic and a Protestant, etc. Anyone who in spite of this sees the difference between male and female watching as being privileged, is misled by the sexual aspect of the human body: one is blind to one's own blind spot, one does not see what one sees...) 

2.
Le Voyeur, a French title, but in the first scene English is spoken by an actress whose native tongue is Dutch. The words delivered therefore sound false, unnatural: the speaking of a foreign language increases the strangeness of the scene, the unnatural start at the beginning of the play. At the same time the words in this way also lose their self-evident character. As well as what is being told (the content or the message), the spectator also hears a faltering hand, a stem trying in vain to inhabit the house of a foreign language. It is not only what is said that is heard, but also the saying itself, the communication or speech act as such. It no longer seems so natural that someone should speak. "She cannot express her sorrow": the actress lacks the ease of language, of flowing words, of a linguistic mother's lap which, apart from security, also always offers the illusion of 'being able to say it', of the imaginary availability of words that seem to fit perfectly one's own feeling and affects. 

But there is more. In several Needcompany plays a variety of languages are spoken at the same time. The multinational make-up of the cast can be not only seen, but also heard. So much linguistic multi-nationalism is still rare in the theatre, and so attracts attention. Whence does it come, this choice of the land of Babel, of linguistic multiplicity and complexity? Why does Lauwers make it easy for his actors one moment (letting them speak their own language) and extremely hard the next (when they have to speak a completely foreign language)? It is not sufficient to observe that Needcompany operates on an international level, because the characters often also speak 'a foreign tongue' when abroad, a language not used on the spot. Probably a decisive factor in this is a form of language/linguistic politics, though insufficiently recognized as such, on the one hand, and of communication ethics, on the other.       
Languages are ceaselessly at war with each other. Dutch wants to conquer Flemish, English wants to overtake French as the world language of culture, the Antwerp dialect imagines itself to have more political relevance to a cacophonic Belgium: this is more than clear. But in Needcompany's multilingual, polyglot plays no single language wins or loses. After all, what do these plays show us if it is not the limitations of each language. In fact no one, in any language, can really say how sorrow or mourning, pain, death, 'coming', etc., affect the body. "She cannot express her sorrow": the language of the body cannot be translated into any spoken language. In a word, the actress's 'bad English' symbolizes every language's expressive shortcomings when compared with the affective richness of every human body. Words always fall short as spokespersons for the body. 

In Le Voyeur and Le Pouvoir, Lauwers has made and expressed his theme: the impotence of the 'order of discourse'. There is an interrogation scene in each play — in Le Pouvoir it comprises the whole of the second part after the opening scene — in which a woman is questioned on her pleasure during the sexual act. Both scenes involuntarily remind of Michel Foucault's analysis of the confession technique in La volonté de savoir. According to him, both the traditional Catholic confession and presentday psychoanalytical treatment revolve round discovering the truth of sexuality. The 'will to know' makes use of the interrogation method so that the sinner or the patient will bring out the truth in the act of speaking — in a confession in which language and body, the occasion of its being expressed and the account of what once happened, the bodily pleasure experienced in the past, all seamlessly coincide.
As the interrogations staged by Lauwers also show, during this kind of cross-examination the apparently detached and disinterested ascetic 'will to know' creates an ever greater passion in the pursuit of the mystery of sexual, erotic desire. But with every additional question the mystery to be solved recedes even further, because the orgasm, the heart of sexual jouissance, is a physical experience which is absolutely beyond language. It is not a conscious self that enjoys it, nor a linguistically competent subject, but a decapitated, unconscious 'one'. In the enjoyment of the orgasm, or 'little death', consciousness and competence in language vanish for a few moments, which are experienced as eternal, into a formless obscurity that cannot be articulated in words. The only possible form of speech is an indecipherable panting or screaming, the only memory remaining is a trace imprinted in the body that, like an unreadable hieroglyphic, thwarts, endangers and undermines the 'order of discourse'. Anyone who yet wishes to express this trace, under pressure from others or not (confessors, psychiatrists, over-inquisitive parents or partners, etc.), inevitably loses the scent. In the light of language, the obscurity of physical experience becomes only more opaque, more impenetrable, more puzzling. It would seem to me that in several respects the work of Needcompany revolves round the impossibility of genuine, clear speech, round the illusoriness of la parole pleine and — connected to this — uninhibited, transparent (in all sense of the word) communication. Because the use of several languages in one and the same play here signifies considerably more than just a simple 'export tactic' or an all too obvious symbol of art international, 'interlingual' attitude. In fact it is part of the game Lauwers is playing with the spectator, in this case with the desire to know, to grasp, to understand.
The average theatregoer expects clarity from a play. What is put on stage should be about something; text and action serve to make a subject explicit, in a more or less dramatic way. Conversely, Lauwers refuses to reduce language and speech purely to illustrations of a theme. He terminates the accepted implicit pact between the dramatist and the audience by understanding. At the same time he is thereby demanding attention for the stage as a place for discourse, a place filled with linguistic events.

Speech is synonymous with the production of events, marking the flow of time with the help of words. We are usually blind (or rather, deaf) to this because of our bias towards the word. This also leads to the dominant view of communication, which most so-called scientific theories in all their naivety endorse: communication is the transfer of messages from a transmitter to a receiver. This reduction of communication to information ignores the simple fact that everything said (enoncé) presupposes a saying, an active use of language (énonciation). It is precisely this saying, as such, which Lauwers underlines each time he makes an actor or actress employ a foreign language. The articulation then once more becomes an event, a deed in the full meaning of the word. Cut off from their native tongue, the actor or actress must on each occasion once again win a place amidst the foreign words, which demands concentration, will-power and energy. At the same time, the speaking of a foreign language unavoidably focuses the audience's attention on the act of speaking itself (as well as on the speaking body, which can no longer rely on inflections, intonations, etc., learned as a child). 

The multilingualism in Needcompany's plays also hinders too easy a Verstehen on the part of the audience. The spectator has to make an active effort to discover exactly what is being said, by, for example, simultaneously translating under the breath. Generally speaking there always comes a time at which one can no longer follow the text, or when the spoken lines, due to an inadequate knowledge of the language, are transformed into a meaningless haze of sounds. This is never pleasant, of course: the spectator's narcissistic fantasy of omnipotence is shattered. For a moment there is nothing but noise, pictures without subtitles. And this is probably exactly why Lauwers does it: for a short time transform what is seen into an opaque, cryptic reality — in an image no longer tamed by words. So, in short, his choice of multilingualism can be understood as an attempt, during the performance, regularly to dissociate and separate word and image, listening and watching. The fact that the actors and actresses speak non-native languages again gives the communication with the audience the character of an event, while conversely this same audience, at the times when it no longer understands the spoken lines, is confronted with images pure and simple. 

3.
One cannot easily mention the work of Needcompany without bringing in Shakespeare. Fragments from Antonius und Cleopatra (1992) were already being used in Needcompany's first production, Need to Know in 1987. Five years later, Jan Lauwers took up this play once again, having already directed Julius Caesar in 1990. At first sight it may appear natural that a director stages plays by Shakespeare. Indeed, together with those of Beckett, they form the ultimate test of the capacities of any stage director. Apart from Shakespeare, however, Lauwers has not staged any other plays from the repertoire. He has worked either with his own textual material or with fragments of works classified as literature.
So why Shakespeare? Why only Shakespeare, and not Racine, Ibsen, or Brecht, for example? Lauwers himself has always emphasized that it is mainly the theme of power in Shakespeare that attracts him. In this body of work, power still has a personal, sovereign form. It is personified, it is inseparably linked to the moods, actions and lunacies great and small, of one single person. As such, the figure of the ruler in Shakespeare's dramas also inevitably becomes the focus of all kinds of intrigues, including the fatal settling of scores. It is precisely then that the sovereign shows himself to be a worthy king, in and through the skilful manoeuvring and the tactical manipulation of both supporters and opponents. But this game of power is also always shot through with incalculable, irrational passions, bonds and 'submissions'. The court is a man's world, but behind many a man there is a woman. 

Shakespeare's history plays of course conjure up a completely out-of-date image of the political order. The age of sovereign power is behind us: nowadays, the exercise of political power is generally weakened by elections and parliamentary debates, media reports (public opinion), actions by pressure groups, etc. And yet we keep on linking the power game, in part, at least, to the personal qualities of ministers and other officials. From the entirety of the countless small decisions someone makes, we deduce whether we should consider that person to be courageous or persistent or, on the contrary, an unprincipled careerist. The game of politics remains personalized, particularly in media reporting. We no longer expect, and this is the decisive difference from the world Shakespeare conjures up for us, that a politician will assert his desire for power by means of war and repression on the one hand, and by an immediate confrontation with his own death or mortality on the other. Because in Shakespeare's history plays the sovereign is usually also a king who does not shrink from the possibility of his own downfall. In the end his sovereignty rests, as Georges Bataille also emphasized, on a sovereign attitude to the possibility of losing everything, and first of all his own life, his own body.
In Lauwers' stagings of Shakespeare, especially Julius Caesar, the participants in the power game appear to be perpetually fascinated by the possibility of their own downfall. Both the characters' speech and actions are marked by a striking casualness, even indifference, with regard to their ultimate fate. So in these versions there is no space for grand feelings, passionately spoken phrases or tearful death scenes. Nothing theatrical, and that's why the vanishing point of sovereign actions, including the non-kingly, is presented that much more succinctly. So the 'spare acting' method here not only unmasks the false or unreal in the play, it also has a point to make regarding the content. This is because the indifference with which the actors speak their lines, or literally die quietly, reflects in a soundless and yet abundantly clear way the longing for death that consumes Shakespeare's characters. Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet and all those other renowned, noble figures: what are they other than slaughterers whose violent deeds were nourished by the wish to go beyond the limit at which they will themselves be slaughtered? 

In short, in his Shakespeare productions, Lauwers wants, in everything, to remain faithful to a possible implicit text. In this way it is not 'Shakespeare' (the dead body that theatre academics, dramaturges, etc., have mummified) that he is directing, but rather his Shakespeare — his relationship with life and death, power and desire.
The specific commitment in Lauwers' handling of Shakespeare's works means that productions like Julius Caesar and Antonius und Cleopatra do not stand apart from Needcompany's other work. On the contrary. Le Pouvoir, for instance, also deals with the inevitability of death, and particularly the sovereign attitude that can be taken up regarding man's fate. In the unutterable 'little death' of the orgasm, which is the explicit theme of Le Pouvoir, there ultimately lies hidden a longing for death that is much more difficult to express, the infra-human desire to go beyond the limits of human life, towards the organic nothingness. It is precisely for this reason that the character played by Viviane De Muynck kills herself when she hears that her daughter is pregnant, and returns from the realm of the dead to be among the living again. She was beyond the border, at least in the play (and so: fictionally, purely imaginarily). Those who, despite the fragmentary composition of the play, did not see this rigorously logical, almost conceptual thread running through it, were watching with their eyes shut. 

In Invictos (1991), Lauwers provided the clearest dramatization of the inhuman and simultaneously all too human longing for death, which is of course always a longing for immortality too (or for monumentality?). The actor Tom Jansen, sitting at a table, pen and paper within reach, meditated on life. The explicit fragments of text originated from Hemingway, whose death-wish Jansen portrayed theatrically by swallowing glass after glass of whisky. Is the glow of alcohol the unwitting premonition of the heavenly paradise? Perhaps. In any case, this was a   powerful, unmistakable statement: through   this Hemingway/Jansen  figure,  Lauwers  was   confronting  the audience with a longing it knows only too well, but which it usually denies. Because our culture literally no longer offers any space for death or dying. 

After the studies of Philippe Ariès and others, it is a cliché to describe modern culture as inimical to death. Death has indeed become taboo, surrounded by a mist of silence, a terrifying silence. The less it occupies a public position — in the form of public rituals or collective memorials — the more death inspires every individual with fear. Even so, this private fear is still socialized by a struggle against any possible foreshadowing of death, a struggle which is, all in all, exceptionally magical. Everything that reminds us of man's mortality is damned: smoking, drinking, immoderate eating, unsafe sex, etc., as well as dirt, waste, and mutilated, worn-out bodies or any body no longer glowing with health.
Banished from and robbed of a public language, the longing for death still finds a hideaway in popular visual culture. Under the guise of public enlightenment (images of war in news reports) or entertainment (action films) one can 'satisfy' the fascination for death daily in a sublimated form. Conversely, Needcompany's work asserts the possibility of a sovereign attitude towards the inevitable, and thereby also the existence of Such a thing as Thanatos, in a public space. In other words, the cultural-critical charge of this body of work should be sought where it is not usually expected. And this is in the unceasing, thematizing, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, intertwining of life, death and longing. 

4.
I have spoken of voyeurism and the desire to watch, of the body, sexuality and language, of power and death. In reality it was all about something else — 'something', the je ne sais pas quoi that is called desire.