Needcompany's new production was unanimously announced as a performance that was to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the company around Jan Lauwers (DM 28/2). No wonder that it turned out to be a production full of references to Lauwers's earlier theatre work. For instance, at one point, a female dancer assumes exactly the same pose as the woman in Caligula (1997). There are the familiar images of the stacked vases and of the hat covered in fruit. And then there is the very brief but very literal visual quote from Morning Song (1999) in which a male dancer clasps the head of a female dancer on points. In its balance between dance, theatre and music too, this performance is reminiscent of Morning Song. Especially the dance scenes are uncommonly sophisticated. There is a very short but extremely energetic duet that takes place on the dividing line between the stage and the wings. A literally 'marginal' scene that is, as such, illustrative of the way Lauwers's dramatic idiom works: with very little unity and a very great sensitivity to the subtlest detail. A fragmented idiom which subjects the status of perception and of reason to continuous cross-questioning. The performance is structured around an ostensibly thin story about a man whose wife was killed in an explosion in a kebab shop, just before the war. But it's never clear whether it was the explosion that killed her, or the first bomb of the war. In the course of the performance, the story is told from different points of view. What remains, is mainly an attack on the reason of the spectator, who cannot help but look for some unambiguity and consistency in the performance. Images of Affection is about the offhand way people often treat death and violence. On the stage, when a 'living' character asks a 'dead' character whether he doesn't miss anything now that he's dead, the answer he eventually gets is "Yes, I do. Pockets in my trousers. It's a strange sensation to be without trouser pockets." Lauwers is on a quest for a disturbing but blood-curdling balance between the leaden pessimism of violence, war, adversity and death on the one hand, and the unbearable lightness in reply to that pessimism on the other. The two components are inseparable. The best example of this duality in Images of Affection is the image of the rabbits. The rabbit stands for the affection in the title. But the rabbit-head masks are made from the same rock-hard material as nuclear warheads and bullet-proof vests. In that respect too, ambiguity has the upper hand. And that way, every detail in this performance is a representation of lying, deceit, the hoodwinking of perception. "Love it, trust it and leave it" is the quote from Don DeLillo's Underworld which Lauwers selected as the leitmotiv for this production. Whoever dares to adopts this hardly self-evident attitude towards his theatre, will realise that, in spite of all its fragmentation, it is a particularly consistent way of making theatre.