About this event
Lee Miller. (War) photographer and journalist, top model, cover girl, and alcoholic. Abused, reviled, adored, and discarded. And then there is that one photo: ‘Lee in Hitler’s bathtub’. What possessed Lee to enter Hitler’s apartment and wash herself in his bathtub? The performance begins the moment she stands before Hitler’s bathtub in her stinking clothes, suffocated by the stench of Dachau. In a stream of thought, Lee Miller takes the viewer into her approach to photography, into her view of her own body and beauty, which were so often viewed as objects. She describes the war images she photographed, her struggle with the horror and the craftsmanship, in search of beauty or authenticity, absurd thoughts about Hitler and his wife Eva Braun, about her Parisian connections with avant-garde artists, her relationship with Man Ray, the abuse she suffered, the painful treatment, Lee’s father who photographed her from a young age, and the nightmares that haunted her. Lee Miller in Hitler's Bathtub is not a biographical portrait of Lee Miller, but uses a number of moments from Lee Miller's life to create a portrait of a woman in the shadow of so many famous and infamous men. I wanted to create a portrait in which it is no longer about Lee, but about so many muzzled women in art history. — Jan Lauwers • Maarten Seghers (Antwerp, 1982) is a performer, theatre-maker, and composer. In his performance oeuvre (among others, Concert of a Band Facing the Wrong Way), Maarten Seghers confronts himself with autonomous sound, movement, and visual artists. The drama of his performances does not unfold in the psychological conflict between characters, but in the physical confrontation between the bodies of his performers and the musical composition. His music includes compositions, songs, and sound installations for dance and theatre productions as well as concert performances. From exploration of the boundaries of vocal, musical, and performative engagement, works emerge for live ensembles, such as in De blinde dichter (2015) or Al het goede (2019), for voice and tape, as in De kamer van Isabella (2004) or Billy’s Violence (2021), and he writes song cycles such as Songs of Disconnection (2023) for voice and contemporary classical ensemble and the composition for mezzo-soprano Ellen Rose Kelly and a five-piece ensemble based on Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub (2025).• Jan Lauwers (Antwerp, 1957) is an artist who employs virtually every medium. Over the past thirty years, he has become best known for his groundbreaking theatre work with the company Needcompany, founded in Brussels in 1986. In the meantime, he has built up a substantial oeuvre of visual work that has been exhibited at BOZAR (Brussels), McaM (Shanghai), and others. Jan Lauwers studied painting at the Ghent Academy of Fine Arts. In late 1979, he gathered a number of people in his sphere to form the Epigonenensemble. In 1981, this group was transformed into the collective Epigonentheater zlv (without leadership of), which surprised the theatre landscape with six theatre productions. Jan Lauwers co-founded Needcompany with Grace Ellen Barkey. The group of performers that Jan Lauwers and Grace Ellen Barkey have assembled is unique in its versatility. In 2001, composer and performance artist Maarten Seghers joined Needcompany.
