Amour

Amour is a performance about how love guides and shapes our lives. How do we try to love both the other and ourselves? Seven queer actors use their voices and their bodies to tell a universal and loving story. A performance like a heartbeat, a breath, a churning sea.Inspiration comes from the life and work of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. His dark, lonely, often theatrical visual language creates a world of imagination in which Amour also takes place. Louis Janssens writes a new play text where confessions, declarations of love, thoughts, rejections, and desires interweave. Short fragments rhythmically follow and complement each other. That way, a piece of sheet music arises where love is presented in all its facets: a filmic mosaic that takes you through various conversations, meetings, retrospectives and confrontations.The actors seem to have become one body, speak as one voice, in one breath, in one movement. Personal experiences are combined with fictional stories. The male, the female and everything in between constantly alternate. The actors become everyone’s man and wife. They personify the lives and suffering of us all. In recent years, Louis Janssens successfully created a number of intimate, personal and minimalist performances. He created the solo performance Serenade (selected for #nieuwjong at Het TheaterFestival 2021), the duet Analoog with Willem de Wolf/De HOE (selected for Het TheaterFestival and Nederlands Theaterfestival 2023), Desire (selected for Het TheaterFestival 2024) and Family last season. With Amour, he creates a larger-scale performance for the first time in collaboration with Peter Seynaeve (NTGent, Het Zuidelijk Toneel), Marjan De Schutter (Toneelhuis, Artemis), Mourad Baaiz (Artemis/Het Zuidelijk Toneel, Ontroerend Goed), Leonore Spee (Ontroerend Goed, Teletext), Sophia Bauer (Kopergietery, Tibaldus) and Rein De Koninck (intern Conservatorium Antwerpen).