Jan Lauwers Re-Enchants the World, Infinitely Pluralist and Resolutely Feminist, in "The blind poet"
Fabienne Arvers - Les Inrockuptibles (18 October 2017)

Jan Lauwers presents a brilliant group portrait as a time machine and dismantles prejudices with the last opus of the Needcompany: "The blind poet".

One can discover the Needcompany, founded by Jan Lauwers and Grace Ellen Barkey in 1986, by going to see The blind poet and one will come out, overwhelmed and ecstatic, having been introduced to them and the members of their troupe, going back in time, across generations, telling us about humanity – about us through them; about an ‘us’ that includes their ancestors without breaking the chain of the generations to form the odd motive of existence in the present. Autonomous and free. Loving and resilient. Typical of the Needcompany is the bringing together of several nationalities made up of a geographical blend of cultures and sagas where, when one looks closely, the history of wars, religions and cultures, where our era falters, was plotted.

We can also trace the creations of the Needcompany back to their beginning because we had the chance to see their first piece, Need to know, at the Théâtre de la Bastille at the end of the 1980s, and fell in love with their theatrical madness, furiously mixing the energy of the bodies with that of music, acting with theatre designs equally inventive and rudimentary. And this scene, both obvious and premonitory, in which Grace Ellen Barkey jumped onto a table to the sound of Lust for Life by Iggy Pop, is forever on our ‘best of cult scenes’ list.

So we came out of this Blind poet dazzled, in a state of bliss. This is not an oxymoron. It’s anything but a stylistic formula, it’s about trying to get as close as possible to the emotion provided by this succession of portraits which forms the backbone of the show, in which each of the performers traces their family tree in an extraordinary exposé of funniness, delicate brazenness, jumping from one continent and from one century to the next as in a spatio-temporal game of the goose in which encounters and chance generate stories which eventually are reflected in and coincide with our lives, our experiences, our souvenirs.

History is written by the victors

"I got the idea for The blind poet during my visit to the Great Mosque of Córdoba, writes Jan Lauwers in the presentation dossier. Córdoba was the capital of that world (in the 8th century; editor’s note), with its 300,000 to 1 million inhabitants. The women were powerful, translated Plato, atheism was common. There were several libraries, holding more than 600,000 books etc. By way of comparison: The largest city of the Christian world was Paris, with about 30,000 inhabitants. The largest Christian library had 60,000 books, and Charlemagne was illiterate. What exactly does that mean? Why does history always lie to us and cheat us? History is written by the victors. By men."

The blind poet opens with the portrait of Grace Ellen Barkey, born on the Island of Java, in Indonesia, of which she wears the flamboyant costume, her fingers elegantly bent. With her painted face and clown shoes, she introduces herself and repeats her name to the point where she starts chanting it, shouting it, mourning it, accompanied and supported by the actors and musicians who take place before the stage. An explosion of electric guitars and voices precedes a narrative of laughter to describe her Indonesian, Muslim, Chinese, German, Guianese origin, the departure of her family who flee to Europe and end up in the Netherlands where she grows up, before meeting Jan Lauwers and going to live in Belgium.

Then it is the turn of Maarten Seghers, nephew of Jan Lauwers, performer and composer with the company since 2001, who tells us about his ancestors-blacksmiths and armourers, the Norwegian Hans Petter Melo Dahl and the Dutch Anna Sophia Bonnema, explosive couple and navigators at heart.

The Identity at the Heart of the Show

After the intermission, we dive with delight into the delicate art of Benoît Gob to evoke a chaotic childhood, and into the evocation of the flight from Minsk, in 1941, by the Jewish grandfather of the American Jules Beckman, irresistible cowboy on LSD, raised by a hippy mother. Finally, a ray of sunshine illuminates the stage, the Tunisian dancer Mohamed Toukabri closes the show in Arabic with the sumptuous verses by the 10th-century blind Syrian poet Abu al’ala al Ma’arri, which gives the show its title.

On the set created by Jan Lauwers, if the performers follow one another from portrait to portrait, they interact with one another, support one another, interrupt one another and handle the accessories of the set. From the carcass of a horse to archaic robots that fight with the sword, from an armour put on like a chastity belt to a plastic giant ball bristling with thorns in which struggles Grace Ellen Barkey, and which depicts, in a fun and monstrous way, Lynch syndrome, the cancer she fought.

It’s because the identity that is at the heart of the show goes far beyond the petty and nauseating notion that pollutes modern history and gives The blind poet a dimension that is both political and intimate and which one dreams of sharing with as many people as possible.

In an explanatory text offered to the public Erwin Jans writes: “Everyone has only one identity, says Amin Maalouf, but it is composed of several facets and horizons. That’s why, in addition to an ‘examination of conscience’, he suggests also carrying out an ‘examination of identity’. This resembles the genealogical method propagated by Nietzsche: The further back we go in time, the more layers we find that make up our identity, and the more ‘impure’ we become. (…) Maalouf also uses this image: ‘A person’s identity is not a patchwork, it is a drawing on a stretched skin; if just one part is touched, the whole person vibrates.’ (…) Jan Lauwers takes seriously this Islamic vibration within the European identity and he managed to retain it clearly in his show.”

There are still five days left to go and see The blind poet. A piece of advice: go there with drums beating.

Needcompany
Ensemble weNEEDmoreCOMPANY Invisible Time Contact
 
productions
Jan Lauwers Grace Ellen Barkey Maarten Seghers performing arts visual arts Film
 
tour dates
Full calendar
 
Publications
Books Music Film
 
Newsletter
Subscribe Archive
NEEDCOMPANY  |  info@needcompany.org  |  Privacy  |  Pro area