'Imagined Garden | Night version' combines sound, visual art, science, technology and botany in a single installation and transforms the Hektagon into a mysterious nocturnal experience space, a garden of possibilities and memories.
A Sublime Mistake — played by Gonzalo Cunill — is a new character based on all the slightly lost male characters in Jan Lauwers’ oeuvre. An intimate portrait of a man who looks at the world in astonishment and fails to understand why he is even part of it.
For Billy's Violence, Victor Afung Lauwers researched the ten tragedies of Shakespeare and rewrote them into violently loving, intimate dialogues in which the woman is the central focus, stripped of any historical reference or anecdotal content.
After the success of Billy's Violence, the desire to continue this intense tale was so strong amongst the artistic team, cast and crew that it has led to a sequel: Billy’s Joy. Once again, Victor Lauwers turns his hand to reworking Shakespeare’s plays and see what they can still mean in our time - a time of great controversies, vulgar polemics, cancel culture, structural racism, climate change, war. What is there left to laugh at? Is humour the coward's weapon or a form of activism?
The libretto 'Lee Miller in Hitlers Bathtub' is a portrait of a woman who at the end of her life said that she felt like a cow who had been milked dry. A woman in the shadow of many men. Famous men. Notorious men. Jan Lauwers wanted to make a portrait that was no longer that of Lee but of so many women in the history of art who have been gagged. And then there is this one photo: 'Lee in Hitler’s bathtub' What does it mean for Lee that she chose to
take a bath in the monster’s bathtub? What does it mean moreover to let her photo be
taken there? The text begins at the moment when Lee Miller stands in
front of Hitler’s bathtub in her stinking clothes, which still reek of the corpse smells from
Dachau.