Theater Malpertuis / Louise Bergez - ARE YOU HURT

Theater Malpertuis / Louise Bergez - TA MAL OU Theatermaker Louise Bergez starts from her own experience with chronic illness and brings it to the stage. As a child, she observed illness mainly through images from films and stories. Now she knows the body as a terrain of waiting, repetition, and medical wanderings, from doctor to doctor, in search of an answer that does not come. Together with Theater Malpertuis, director Laurens Aneca, and musician Jasper Segers, a performance is created that seeks the boundaries of language. A chronically ill patient is central: a deserter in a world that at first glance looks healthy and unbroken. When words fall short, the search for another form of speaking begins. Sound, rhythm, and imagination wring themselves through the emptiness of language and make something new visible: fragile, raw, and necessary. TA MAL OU is a physical trip: a comic strip with a beating heart. Or as Bergez describes it: “When I was sick as a child, I acted out 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.