Hotel Malaria

To be seen by another

An older man and a young woman have drawn up and signed a contract. The man receives the young woman in his house. She will remain here, says the contract, ‘until what must happen has happened’. 

The performance is like a film. There are flashbacks. Delirious dreams. There are sounds – Bangkok? Thailand? There are discussions in which both the man and the woman speak very openly. Is the woman a prostitute, or a nurse? And how does it concern her, that the man advocates a life of excess? Both make the audience complicit in the most universal and yet most intimate yearning: to be seen by another. This production is a tribute to the recently deceased French director Alain Resnais.

To accompany this production we are presenting a number of installations in which Verhelst shows his artistic kinship with such artists as Johan Tahon and Maud Bekaert.

• Peter Verhelst is a poet, novelist, playwright and director. For NTGent he has also directed the monologues Lex, Julius Caesar, Nero and Africa. In March 2014 he created a surprising Parsifal with Wim Opbrouck and Christoph Homberger.  

To accompany this production we are presenting a number of installations in which Verhelst shows his artistic kinship with such artists as Johan Tahon and Maud Bekaert. In the Kaaistudios you will certainly be able to see Lake of Tears, in which the central element is a crying figure in plaster by Johan Tahon: the falling tears together form a pool of water. In House of the dripping stones, a creation by Verhelst and Bekaert, the public is invited to write wishes on cards and then burn them. The ash is mixed with drops that fall from the stones and is then smeared onto a sculpture by Tahon.

Peter Verhelst will also hold a discussion after each show, always from a different angle.