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A symbiotic relationship has arisen between them: there is no war or international conflict without television and, vice versa, no news programme without images of violence. (...) A lookthat loses itself in images of violence and destruction. There are striking parallels between watching pornography and watching the extreme horrors of war. The female bodies that are literally bared to the voyeuristic male eye in porno iconography are strikingly simiiarto the bodies shot to pieces, mutilated and torn open in war that are offered every day on some sites. In this instance,'war gaze'corresponds to the pornographic gaze. The only alternative to this pornographic handling of violence - a voyeuristic gaze that wants only to consume more, and more extreme, violence-is the gaze of the war witness, the gaze of the witness with a concern for the human misery war brings and which affirms the victims' humanness. In the mind of the war photographer himself rages the never-ending struggle between pornographer and witness, between voyeuristic lust and authentic compassion,'! take no part in this war. Yet it is still my war.'The witness no longer keeps the pornographer at a distance. At a certain moment he photographs the execution of women and children in what was once called Yugoslavia. He still thinks he is not taking part in the war. He does interviews and takes photos. He observes and makes notes. He does not choose one side orthe other. Until he is forced to take part. He has to make a choice. There is a mother and a child; one of them can live. A gun is put in his hand. This time, when he presses, it will not record a victim, but create one. The choice is his. He has to choose. He kills the mother, it has become his war. Forever. 3. Every tragedy is a family tragedy. The Greeks already knew this. Greek mythology is an ancient soap. Family ties and intimate relationships have always been the subject of Jan Lauwers' plays. What he most likes to examine are the tensions within a small community. 4. The Deer House swings between fairytale and tragedy, between naive story and inexpressible grief. Lauwers has over the years achieved an 'unbearable lightness' in his writing and his staging: the lightness needed to broach the unbearable. He has created for himself and his actors the means to capture the gravity of existence in the transience of a moment on stage. His writing is a singular mixture of profundity and banality, of minor human worries in a mythical perspective, of biographical (sometimes autobiographical) anecdotes and reflection on the acting, of emotional closeness and intellectual distance, of intimate conflicts and the encompassing world events. His plays move across the tense nerves of our era, contorted as they are by doubt and uncertainty. 5. Politics is the art of the negotiable. Mourning is a confrontation with the inexpressibility of suffering. Politics is discussion and dialogue. Mourning is an endless monologue, a dialogue with gods who do not reply. Mourning recalls what politics wants to forget, or make others forget. Mourning is a form of anti-politics, although it can always be absorbed and mobilised in the form of grand monuments and public commemoration. (...) The Greek polis saw mourning as an excess that was to be barred, both from the official burial ground and the political agora. Mourning was subjected to strict rules so as to avoid chaos. A city full of weeping citizens would destabilise the political order. Mourning found a home in the theatre and in tragedy, which shows its grandeur and