Isabella's Room

It's a performance which stays with you long after it has ended, like a white shadow that follows you along the street and through the night.

- Brigitte Salino, Le Monde

Jan Lauwers (Antwerp 1957) is one of the exponents of the generation of Belgian artists who do not believe in restricting themselves to particular genres or disciplines.

His productions, full of imagination and free of all preconceptions, have been performed in a range of theatres and festivals around the world. He is an architect of works of great visual intensity. He reinterprets, through his performances, eternal themes such as love, violence, eroticism and death.

The enormous collection of archaeological objects, which his father left him in his will, led him in 2004 to stage the story of Isabella Morandi. In Isabella's Room, nine actors and dancers recount the life of Isabella through word and song, with the formidable actress, Viviane De Muynck, centre stage. She takes on the role of a formidable woman who has learned to love life, exhorting us to laugh and not to be afraid of the unknown.

Isabella, old and blind, in her Paris room, surrounded by thousands of exotic objects plundered from Ancient Egypt and Africa, recalls an existence marked by the 20th century: the First and Second World Wars, Hiroshima, colonialism, the development of modern art, including figures such as Joyce, Picasso and Huelsenbeck, the journey to the moon, the Ziggy Stardust of David Bowie, the famines of Africa and the appearance of the far-right Vlaams Blok party in Antwerp.

www.needcompany.org