Violence, eroticism, death: the words come so easily that we seldom pause and reflect on their existential implication. Theatre maker and visual artist Jan Lauwers has continually attempted to illuminate the actual significance of these words in his work, without lapsing into simplistic statements. 'No comment' is a new step in this search. This time with as point of departure the personality of four actresses who have played a major role in Lauwers' 'Needcompany'. The four women: Grace Ellen Barkey, Carlotta Sagna, Tijen Lawton and Viviane De Muynck. For each of them a new text was written, or in the case of dancer Tijen Lawton, a new score. Felix Seger, alias Maarten Seghers, and Jan Lauwers wrote an 18-minute guitar work for Tijen Lawton to which five other composers (Rombout Willems, Hans Petter Dahl, Walter Hus, Doachim Mann and Senjan Jansen) added new sound layers. The extremely complex score allows Lawton to express the entire register of her refined, razor-sharp dancing. Josse de Pauw wrote 'The tea drinker' for Barkey. This text is based upon Barkey's past and the figure of the 'tea drinker'/Balinese dancer that she had already given form in a surrealistic way in 'Images of Affection' and 'Caligula'. Jan Lauwers: 'In this text, Grace Ellen makes explicit the image she had to fulfil for the spectators as Balinese dancer. This is pure exoticism: the spectator wants to see a nice picture and also wants to feel something pleasant. But s/he does not want the image to talk back. However, here Grace briefly revolts, only to finally return to her original submissiveness. I have packaged this in a very baroque image. Balinese dancers are an innocent variant of the objectifying gaze of exoticism. I remember a documentary on people dying in the Sahel. Evidently a reporter had never before thought of letting the starving speak. A journalist addressed a dying woman and learned that she had studied philosophy. Understand me well: in other circumstances you would have had a normal discussion with her. However, here she was presented as a mute image. Equally disconcerting was her statement that dying of hunger causes terrible headaches. It is not simply a matter of fading away. These are images that make an impact. An image is only an image when, like this woman, it speaks back. When the recollection remains. Thus, what you see on MTV is not an image.' Alarmingly recognisable In the texts of Carlotta Sagna and Viviane De Muynck, no trace remains of exoticism, however illusory. Both stage a character that is nevertheless already alarmingly recognisable in its gruesomeness or incomprehensibility. Charles Mee, an American author, wrote 'Salome for Sagna. She earlier played Oscar Wilde's interpretation of this murderous 'femme fatale' in Lauwers' 'Le D?©sir'. Mee takes us with him into the depths of this character's soul. Sagna tells her life story as if it was about someone else, an accumulation of continually new perversions and transgressions that ends in the murder of her sister and other young girls. At first sight this seems to barely touch her. It could have ended differently, she asserts, but after each new perversion there appeared to be no path back. This casualness, however, is only an appearance: between the lines of the unrelenting enumeration of always-greater atrocities, you feel the growing desperation of the character speaking. Jan Lauwers: 'Charles Mee is a respected leftist author in the USA. He found our 'Morning Song' one of the best that he ever saw, and wanted to do something with us around the figure of Salome. Carlotta then left for New York to speak and write with him. Mee writes in an unusual way: just as 'sampling' has become very commonplace in other forms of art, he often paraphrases existing texts. He finds this perfectly legitimate: you may also 'sample' his texts as much as you want. In this text he draws inspiration from texts by, among others, Cath?©rine Millet, Vanessa Duries, Camille Paglia and Colette. 'Salome' is a hard, morbid text. Salome is known as a predatory female, but she was brought up this way by her mother who saw it as a means to climb the social ladder. She is a woman educated in amorality. This has left its mark. The text says literally: you don't know who you are until you have accomplished something. This is not obvious. Salome can only speak of herself in the third person. It is only this distance that makes it bearable. Charles Mee has made Salome the wife of Dutroux, without even knowing the Dutroux story. But there are also parallels with the recent story of the judge who, out of love for his wife, gave in to her perverse desire to sew her vagina up. Salome also acts out of a strange love for her husband. This text demonstrates that something like this is not obvious or innocent. Perversion is not something that you just do, even though the media like to present it that way. In essence it always concerns a transgression of boundaries. Whether it concerns sex and violence or soldiers in Iraq. How can you, as a sixteen-year-old soldier, kill children? Either you are totally traumatised afterwards, or you enjoy it. With the present war, just the reading of this text automatically leads to these considerations.' Violence Still more awkward is the performance of the last text. 'Ulrike', played by Viviane De Muynck, is a text written by Jan Lauwers himself. We run with Ulrike Meinhof through a store, on the way to the ultimate suicide attack. In poignant details De Muynck brings to life the unreal experience of this character resolutely heading towards her end. Jan Lauwers: 'If you think about what happens now, you automatically become a walking time bomb. You cannot accept the fact that you are forced to resort to violence. But what can one do when faced with someone attacking you with a gun? It is an appeal to also become violent. We have transgressed a certain limit. The account of the Jews in the ghettos who allowed themselves to be slaughtered, has become almost incomprehensible for us. Extreme Jews like Sharon began their career as terrorists. At that moment they also transgressed a limit for which there was no way back. Terrorism today has nothing in common with the attacks that took place in the 1960s. The psychology then was easy to understand. Now it has become 'big business'. Salman Rushdie summarised it well when he said that after 11 September we must decide whether we are prepared to commit suicide for the right to wear a miniskirt in the face of others who are prepared to sacrifice their life to be able to bury their women in bhurkas.' In the text of 'Ulrike', Lauwers' obsession with images as a mute witness to something that can no longer be expressed surfaces. The title of the show, 'No Comment', actually refers to a TV programme on Euronews that presented news images without commentary. The show is about this indifference and, at the same time, bewilderment. Like Lauwers' Ulrike Meinhof transforms everything to images, images that haunted her endlessly, it concerns a strategy to keep unbearable reality at a distance. Lauwers likes to refer to Andy Warhol's strategy of derealizing things, to emasculate things by making an image of them. However, in the meantime we are a good quarter of a century further. The digital revolution has made it possible for everyone to (re)produce images. 'Sampling' makes everyone an artist. Paradoxically for Lauwers, the theatre, more than the visual arts, becomes a place where essential things can be said. Jan Lauwers: 'In the visual arts, virtuosity now has a bad name. In order to proceed, you must cultivate a form of naivete. In the same way, in music, sound is now more important than composition. This strategy makes it appear that anyone can create art. This leads to a new cry for virtuosity. Even the destruction of virtuosity has been presented as a new form of virtuosity. But such virtuosity is of course a bourgeois form of bad taste. In the nineteenth century, Paganini was already an early example of this. The audience wanted to see the artist working and suffering, and even secretly hoped that he would not reach the highest note. But this is imitation art. In Carrara even young children are able to easily copy a Pieta in marble. Their familiarity with marble as material has allowed them to achieve a high level of virtuosity. However, this does not make them genuine sculptors. Just as Wolfgang Tillmans received a Turner prize for a photo of a pair of jeans on a radiator, it concerns here not the virtuosity of the activity but the vision that emanates from it. However, this 'other' type of virtuosity is undermined because anyone can make a photo. That is what makes theatre so exceptional. With theatre you cannot 'sample' or digitize. It concerns what is happening here and now. Previously, visual artists looked down upon theatre. It was a vulgar form of amusement that allowed no real artistic expression. In the theatre, people looked up to what took place in the visual arts. Now the situation has been reversed. People from the visual arts take energy and inspiration from the here-and-now notion of the theatre. Nevertheless, in the theatre you also have a vulgar and an interesting form of virtuosity. Many theatre makers display their abilities in the most explicit way, and thus follow the model of Paganini. However, acting only becomes really fascinating or authentically virtuoso when you no longer notice the acting itself. I want to create images about things that I myself no longer understand. How to achieve that? We have not figured that out ourselves. The play must evidence a sort of casualness, as if the actors are inventing it on the spot. The image must have something inevitable about it. You must believe that it could only be this way. The slightest perception of craftsmanship undermines such an image. It is working with daggers drawn. One system that we use is called 'the psychology of the door handle'. How often does it occur that someone departs and, with the door handle in hand, makes one last remark, which subsequently appears to be the most important of the entire discussion. Everyone's attention is already focused on something new, and precisely at that moment the essential occurs. This is the way it must also be in theatre.'