TA MAL OU, Louise Bergez and Laurens Aneca — Theater Malpertuis

When I was sick as a child, I reenacted the death scene of Nicole Kidman in the film Moulin Rouge. I thought it was a game. Meanwhile, I know better, because I have trained, for five years. I have trained in waiting in waiting rooms, hopping from doctor to doctor, longing for an answer. Trained in staying inside, not daring to go outside, in taking pills, in dancing in the hospital. —Louise Bergez TA MAL OU places a chronically ill patient in the center of the stage. A deserter in a world that at first glance looks healthy and unbroken. Illness disrupts. First of all your body: the body refuses. Then your head. Pain withdraws from the logic of sentences and grammar. Language is missing. A sick person who wants to explain a headache to the doctor soon notices that the words from the dictionary are too flat and too distant. What remains is the search for new forms, new expressions that make the unspeakable graspable. By pressing pain and raw sound against each other, wringing and kneading them together, something new is created: a word that never existed before but that presents itself as the only possibility. In collaboration with musician Jasper Segers, the performance becomes a comic strip trip with a beating heart.