Belgian playwright wins lifetime achievement award

Theatre director and playwright Jan Lauwers, who this week turns 57, has been awarded a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in the theatre arts at the Venice Bienniale. Lauwers is co-founder and director of Brussels-based Needcompany, a multi-disciplinary company working to fuse performance film, music and visual arts.

Lauwers was born in Antwerp and studied painting in Ghent’s fine arts academy, where he set up his first theatre company, the Epigone Ensemble, in 1979. He founded Needcompany with choreographer Grace Ellen Barkey in 1986, in the full flow of the new wave of Flemish theatre.

The company has a reputation for pioneering work, and Lauwers has been the recipient of awards from festivals in Hamburg and New York. In 2006, he received the Flemish Community Culture Prize for playwriting, and in 2012 the gold medal for services to the Republic of Austria. Needcompany is artist in residence at Vienna’s Burgtheater.

Lauwers also continues to work as a visual artist; Bozar exhibited a retrospective of his work in 2007.

www.needcompany.org

Photo by Phile Deprez/Needcompany