Interactions between image and text on stage and on paper

Abstract

Jan Lauwers (Antwerp, Belgium, 1957) is a playwright, theater director
and artist. In plays, in his dramatic writing and his installations Lauwers
combines different “national” languages and different artistic disciplines
(dance, singing, but also painting, installations, video art) in an attempt
to “de-focus”, to “decentre the look”. By altering the logic of discourse
and normalization, he tries to reflect, in the theatrical convivium, of the
necessary partiality of the perception of the reality of the subject and the
difficulties of communication in society, in a globalized world dominated
by the mass media and social networks. Lauwers tries to generate in his
theater a commotion through the interruption of the discourses, which
aspires to achieve a true communication through the materiality of the
bodies, the great diversity of objects and elements of the pictorial tradition
that in his work they are resignified in a paratactic juxtaposition in
which all hierarchies are annulled. The author and director invites us to
go through his texts and read them as a landscape, to question all order
(chronological, hierarchical, temporal) normalized by tradition, in an attempt
to free ourselves from ties of look and communication.