Marketplace 76

A deadly explosion, mourning and child abuse, suicide: misfortunes rain down on the characters of Marketplace 76, Jan Lauwers' latest creation. The master of ceremonies that he portrays charges us to imagine this poor, remote village, while reassuring us: “Here, it is nothing but theatre.” How, a year after the death of 80 people in an explosion at the marketplace, can the village in mourning resist the sequestration of a child, lasting 76 days, by one of its inhabitants. An anonymous street-sweeper, soon joined by an immigrant who fell out of the sky, are the guides alongside whom we observe the small community tighten, come apart, accuse, embrace and put itself together again. Here, the guilty are not demons and the innocent are not saints: each individual can be sucked up at any moment by his own shortcomings. In search of consolation, each one aspires to the happiness and comfort of love. Jan Lauwers stages a community of actors as much as villagers who sing, dance and play, handling fantasy as much as seriousness, to distance the sadness of the narrative and transform it into a musical, humorous and spirited fable. His troupe composes a gallery of portraits that are both realistic and monstrous, projected into a kaleidoscopic story cadenced by the passing of the seasons, each of which is the subject of a musical composition interpreted live. With his theatre, Jan Lauwers channels the deepest emotions in shimmering tableaux vivants. He thus highlights, without any cynicism or moralizing aim, a few failings or disturbances of our societies, such as the confusions, sometimes maintained, between sentence and punishment or the place to which foreigners are relegated in the city, because it is a full-fledged city that we will form in the Cloître des Célestins alongside the Needcompany interpreters, sharing their terrors and their joys, their fears and their hopes. RB

text, direction and images Jan Lauwers
music Rombout Willems (sring, summer),
Maarten Seghers (automn), Hans Petter Dahl (winter)
costumes Lot Lemm
dramaturgie Elke Janssens
choreography assistant  Misha Downey

with Grace Ellen Barkey, Anneke Bonnema, Hans Petter Dahl, Julien Faure, Yumiko Funaya, Benoît Gob, Sung-Im Her, Elke Janssens, Jan Lauwers, Romy Louise Lauwers, Emmanuel Schwartz, Maarten Seghers, Catherine Travelletti

production Needcompany
coproduction Ruhrtriennale (Bochum), Burgtheater (Vienne), Holland Festival (Amsterdam)
with the support of Autorités flamandes