In TA MAL OU, the body refuses to cooperate. What seems self-evident—speaking, moving, understanding—is thrown into disarray. Pain takes root where language falls short.
Theater maker Louise Bergez draws on 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 realm of waiting, repetition, and medical wanderings, from doctor to doctor, in search of an answer that never comes.
Together with Theater Malpertuis, director Laurens Aneca, and musician Jasper Segers, a performance emerges that explores the limits of language. A chronically ill patient takes center stage: a deserter in a world that, at first glance, appears healthy and unbroken.
When words fall short, the search for another form of speech begins. Sound, rhythm, and imagination wriggle through the void of language and reveal something new: fragile, raw, and necessary.
TA MAL OU thus becomes a physical journey: a comic strip with a beating heart.
“When I was sick as a child, I reenacted Nicole Kidman’s death scene from the movie Moulin Rouge. I thought it was a game. Now I know better, because I’ve trained for five years. I’ve 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.”
Duration: 45 minutes
In Dutch
