Needcompany presents four solos in "No comment" "No Comment" is the new production by Jan Lauwers and Needcompany. It is in fact four productions. Four solos for four women, all performers who have been involved with Lauwers' company for a long time. "No Comment" is four times something different. But at the same time also four times unmistakably pure Lauwers. The production begins with a monologue written by Josse de Pauw and performed by Grace Ellen Barkey. "The tea drinker" is a text for a Balinese dancer. Lauwers has already staged this dancer several times. The first time was in "Caligula", a production created on the occasion of Documenta X in 1997. Barkey also appeared as that prototypical example of exoticism in "Images of affection", Lauwers previous production. In "The tea drinker", she performs in an overwhelming setting. She sits on a box floating back and forth in the air, accompanied by as many as one hundred lights. These burn softly at first and then you are looking at a star-filled sky. At the end of "The tea drinker" it is as if burn very brightly and look at you. Solid as a rock and unavoidable. The lighting in "No Comment" is a topic in itself. After the baroque lighting in "The tea drinker" comes the more sober but no less gripping lighting in "Salome", the solo by Carlotta Sagna, written by the American writer Charles L. Mee. At the very front of the stage she tells her story, wrapped in a dress that is as green as the flickering - stuttering? - background against which she stands. Much more sober, as we said, but the image is no less gripping. The dance solo for Tijen Lawton in "No Comment" is seemingly still more sober. She completely fills up a uniformly white-lit stage. Completely. In the razor-sharp, quick and encompassing dance language that is her own. Looking at Viviane De Muynck's performance "Ulrike", you ask yourself how this simplicity can in fact be reconciled with the excess that was so determinative in "The tea drinker". De Muynck requires no more than a spotlight. Lawton fills up the stage, De Muynck charms the audience. She presents her text face to face, a text written by Lauwers himself and based upon the life of Ulrike Meinhof. "Why can I not simply register the images," she asks herself. "Why must I always search for cause and effect?" Precisely the same question haunts you as you run through Lauwers' oeuvre itself. The leitmotifs in his work are innumerable. Not only because they are numerous, but above all because they always repeat themselves in different combinations. Themes like death, love, violence and eroticism continuously return. The same applies to the performers, to the images, the attention to music and sound. Dramatist and theatre expert Erwins Jans, in a text written on the occasion of "No Comment", speaks of a network. This word seems somewhat vague, but is at the same also quite correct. A diversified network of themes, images and languages, behind which, nevertheless, is very clearly one single artist. "No Comment" is an absolute must for those who feel called to lose themselves in that network.