The play "Isabella's Room" is held under the auspices of the general partner of the 49th MESS Festival BH Telecom  

Performance

Isabella's Room confronts the basic problems of 20^th century Europe: Belgium's colonial past, the Second World War, and the controversies concerning the so-called „humanitarian“ interventions in Africa – all subsumed in the life and times of Isabella Morandi, whose life spans ninety years. It was the collection of ethnological relics belonging to Jan Lauwers' father, containing over 5,000 artefacts from Africa), that, as Lauwers explains in the introduction, inspired his work on this performance. It is exactly this material heritage that creates the basis on which Lauwers and his cast construct a performance that is a symbiosis of dialogue, dance, song and music. Through these elements, the play tells a story about the life of blind, vivacious and persecuted Isabella, from her turbulent childhood years on an unnamed island, growing up surrounded by her parents’ fairytale-like deceptions, to Paris, where she inherits a collection, like the one mentioned, and becomes a anthropologist - to working in Africa. The rest of the casts serve to embody her memories, which are now brought to life for an audience to see, for her to see. She is in fact participating in a scientific experiment, where her memories are directly projected to her mind, enabling her to see and relive them once again. However, Isabella ends up willingly distancing herself from the memories that surface, as a lie, told to her in her distant childhood, materialises itself as her salvation – the salvation offered by imagination in the eyes of the horrors of reality.

Director

Jan Lauwers was born in Antwerp in 1957, and currently lives and works in Brussels. He studied painting at the Academy of Art in Ghent. In late 1979, he brings together several professionals and establishes the Epigonenensemble Group. The group changed its name to Epigon Theater zlv, and became a company that would surprise the world of theatre with six independent productions. In this way, Lauwers marks his place in the movement that brought radical change to Flanders in the early 1980s, also becoming a part of the international theatre scene.

In his artistic work Lauwers developed his idiom in theatre idiom - one that re-examines existing instances of theatre and the way they are interpreted. One of the characteristics of his approach is the transparency and sophistication of his actor, and the paradox between acting and performing.

Lauwers is an artist with a multimedia approach, who has been known in the past twenty years for his work in the NEEDCOMPANY troupe, which he founded in Brussels in 1985. His artwork has also been showcased at an exhibition in Brussels in 2007. 

Theatre

NEEDCOMPANY is a theatre group established in 1986, as a cooperation between Jan Lauwers and Ellen Barkley, who are also behind all its best-known productions. The group of artists that Lauwers and Barkley brought together under the roof of the company, being very diverse, went on to diverge into smaller sub-troupes: MaisonDahlBonnema, Lemm&Barkey, OHNO Cooperation and NC ensemble, which all function as a compact part of NEEDCOMPANY.

Their first productions, Need to Know (1987) and ça va (1989) received the Mobiel Pegasus Preis Award. Other, well-known productions include: Images of Affection (2002) – which was created by pure chance on the 15^th anniversary of the NEEDCOMPANY troupe, No Comment (2003), Isabella's Room (2004), which, among other awards, also received the Flemish Community Culture Award for Best Screenplay, as well as several other adaptations and dramas. Generally speaking, the thematic thread that ties all of these productions are their constant reformulation and redefinition of Lauwer’s main interests: violence, love, eroticism and death.