Marketplace 76

Lifeboat

Marketplace 76 is the story of a village that is startled by an explosion. Twenty-four people lose their lives, including seven children. The tragedy weighs heavily on the surviving villagers. Grief dominates their lives. Until one day a lifeboat falls from the sky.
  
In Marketplace 76 Jan Lauwers has written a new epic, a kaleidoscopic story composed of four seasons. It is a meticulous report on the villagers who have been overtaken and driven forward by time, and in spite of everything are able to survive heroically. Marketplace 76 reconciles dark themes such as mourning and sorrow, incest and abduction, paedophilia and suicide with excessive love, friendship, happiness and survival

• In Marketplace 76 Lauwers and his group of all-round performers promise us a ‘festive performance with lots of live music and spectacle’. It will be premiered at the RuhrTriennale before coming to their home city of Brussels.

'Jan Lauwers’ wonderland [is] a profoundly human place, that deserves all the applause it gets.'  -  Der Standard

'Marketplace 76 is about morality, without taking a moralising tone, and takes a particular position without condemning. This courage to remain ambivalent, this refusal to simplify, which goes with an unconditional love of mankind, makes this performance a sort of artwork, which compels the spectator to define his own position – and also to an uncommonly exciting piece of theatre.'  -  Wiener Zeitung