Jan Lauwers

Jan Lauwers is an artist who works in just about every medium. Over the last thirty years, he has become best known for his pioneering work for the stage with Needcompany, which was founded in Brussels in 1986. Throughout this period, he has also built up a substantial body of visual artwork, which has been shown at BOZAR (Brussels) and the Ming Contemporary Art Museum (McaM) in Shanghai, among other places. From 2009 until 2014, Needcompany was artist in residence at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Jan Lauwers was awarded the Decoration of Honour in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria in 2012. At the Venice Biennale in 2014, he received the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement, the first Belgian to be awarded this prize in the theatre category. In 2018 the Salzburg Festival presented L’incoronazione di Poppea, the first opera staging by Jan Lauwers. This production was also shown at the Vienna State Opera in May 2021.

Jan Lauwers studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. In 1979 he gathered a number of people to form the Epigonenensemble. Two years later, this group was transformed into the Epigonentheater zlv collective, which took the theatre world by surprise with its six stage productions. Jan Lauwers thereby took his place in the movement for radical change in Flanders, while also making his international breakthrough. Epigonentheater zlv presented direct, concrete, highly visual theatre that used music and language as structuring elements.

Jan Lauwers founded Needcompany together with Grace Ellen Barkey. Since 2001, Maarten Seghers is also a member of Needcompany. In addition to his unmistakable presence as a performer in the work of Jan Lauwers and Grace Ellen Barkey, his compositions make a substantial contribution to their productions.

Since Needcompany was founded, both its work and its performers have been markedly international. Historically, Needcompany was the first to play trilingual performances on stage. While its first productions were still highly visual, the storyline and overarching theme gained importance in subsequent productions.

Jan Lauwers’s work has been labelled as post-dramatic and for the last few years, he has been redefining this term. Its most important characteristics are transparent acting and the paradox between acting and performing. His most recent production, Billy’s Violence, premiered in July 2021 with a text by Victor Afung Lauwers, who researched and rewrote the ten tragedies of Shakespeare.