Category Archives: Jan Fabre

In the mailbox

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"It's a Jungle Out There." Bodysuit by Alexander McQueen. Brown leather with bleached denim and taxidermy crocodile heads. 1997-98.

Contemporary Theatre Review‘s uniformed delivery boy was at my door at six this morning, bearing with him the new issue 21.4; my review of this summer’s Alexander McQueen exhibition at the Met appears in the “Backpages” section of this new issue, along with an essay on “New Women Playwrights” by Aleks Sierz, a history of Martin Crimp’s plays in Australia by Vicky Angelaki, and Philip Hager’s discussion of the protests in Athens. Indeed, this issue of the journal is just packed with goodies: before you get to “Backpages,” there is an extensive discussion of Tim Crouch’s play The Author, with contributions from Helen Iball, Chris Goode, Stephen Bottoms, and Crouch himself. The issue is available online here. My academic friends may be able to access this through their institutions — I’m afraid I can’t help the rest.

I first wrote about McQueen on 9 May 2011; that post is below.

People find my things sometimes aggressive. But I don’t see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic, dealing with a dark side of personality.
Alexander McQueen

Elegance, glamour and couture are anathema to the progressive collectivist; in fashion, they exploit the individuality of the body, not its absorption into a mass; especially couture, clothing fitted for the specific individual and resistant to mass reproduction. In the 1990s many designers — several of them British — used fashion and couture to examine the close relationship of the body, eros and death, as several British dramatists used the theatre and drama to explore the same relationship. In her 2007 book Fashion at the Edge, Caroline Evans wrote about these designers:

[Fashion] can be a symptom of alienation, loss, mourning, fear of contagion and death, instability and change. Like psychoanalysis, it “investigates the domain and configuration of incoherence, discontinuity, distruption and disintegration.” …

Fashion, with its affinity for transformation, can act out instability and loss but it can also, and equally, stake out the terrain of “becoming” — new social and sexual identities, masquerade and performativity. … If the imagery of late twentieth-century fashion seemed dark or bleak, it may be because it signalled an attempt to chart new social identities in a period of rapid change, while reflecting contemporary concerns with death and decay.

This description especially applies to the work of Alexander McQueen (1969-2010), whose career is now being investigated and celebrated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, running through 31 July. The resemblance of fashion to drama in McQueen’s dark but highly sexualized and erotic collection was noted even by The New York Times‘ Holland Carter in a review of the show last week, headlined “Designer as dramatist, and the tales he left behind.” “Clothes [in McQueen's later career] become costumes,” Carter writes, “with sensuous, sumptuous lives of their own” — an admission of the erotically transformative effect of couture, clothes making the woman as well as the man. Carter also writes:

Mr. McQueen repeatedly said, as have many other designers before him, that his intention was to “empower women” through his designs, though the impression often is that he’s hobbling, even tormenting them. And while his insistence on political content is one of the more intriguing aspects of his work, it is also one of the slipperiest and least resolved.

Both fashion and theatre are fetish and metaphor, the object standing in for an abstraction. Carter above touches on but does not resolve or investigate the darker reaches and redefinitions of the empowerment of the bodies and individuals within these costumes, for it’s an empowerment and imagination that touches and even exceeds at times the taboo. There is a torment in the furthest reaches of ecstasy and desire: a giving-up of the self; through costume and theatre we play with the imaginations of this torment, as well as its furthest reaches of associated pleasure. In constriction and restraint there is a coursing of ecstasy in the body that, because restrained, can’t be released in gesture; instead it flows, again and again, over and over, circulating endlessly through the flesh, without respite. Far from objectifying the wearer, in the theatre the spectator, male or female, can participate in the erotic and subjective reconstruction of the wearer, provided they are open to the empathetic imagination. (If women can imaginatively participate in the “male gaze” that Molly Haskell identified in cinematic spectatorship in 1972, it’s certainly possible for men to participate in a similar “female gaze”: a more difficult project, however, for it requires an ever greater repudiation of a conventional sexual consciousness embedded in the Culture Industry and its products.) Erotic tragedy requires a costume designer who acknowledges the elitism of couture; the darker intersections of politics, culture, eros and death; and the possibilities of imaginative erotic expression through the clothed body.

There are other theatremakers, such as Jan Fabre in Belgium and Piotr Tomaszuk in Poland, who recognize couture’s erotic and tragic contribution to theatrical presentation. It is no surprise that the British dramatist closest to McQueen’s sensibility is Howard Barker. Barker, who designs the costumes for his own productions under the pseudonym Billie Kaiser, is keenly aware of the nexus of fashion, drama, tragedy and eros; his costumes, too, strain against the regimented conformity of everyday fashion in an attempt to touch on the tragic and erotic streams that run beneath experience and can empower new human possibilities of imagination. He acknowledges that this attempt requires a daring eroticization and surrender of the self through its cultural representation in clothing — one gives one’s self up to what one wears in a process of erotic transformation. In a 2010 interview with Mark Brown, included in the recent collection Howard Barker Interviews 1980-2010: Conversations in Catastrophe, Brown asks Barker about the subject of high heels in Barker’s work (“about which things have been written,” Barker laughingly responds):

BROWN: I’m intrigued by the use of high heels in much of your work. It subverts the vapid use of them as a mere fetish. It elevates  physically, of course, and enhances, for many actresses, their capacity for elegance.

BARKER: There are two stage aspects to this garment. One is that it gives height, obviously, and posture, because it alters a woman’s shape profoundly. Women have been wearing high heels since at least the third century BC; it’s well recorded. So, they’re inherent in European culture; there’s something profoundly historic about this garment.

You might say it has a symbolic relation with sexuality and its opposite, appearing and disappearing with climates of erotic expression and repression. Also — speaking purely artistically, purely of the stage and film — heels have a tremendous sonic value. The actress appearing and disappearing — announced and then the sound slowly decaying — must recall every child’s memory of the passage of women on the pavement, one of the deep resonances of infancy, and embedded in the sexual imagination.

BROWN: Some actresses seem to grasp this from your work, almost instinctively. I discovered this recently, whilst working on … [a] reading of your (Uncle) Vanya. The young actress Nicola Daley — although she was, in fact, playing Chekhov — talked about her sense that she required high heels. Even playing a male role, she sensed from the play the need for her, as a woman on the stage, to have that elevation and authority. It wasn’t being required of her; she herself suggested it.

BARKER: … There was a generation of feminists who regarded high heels as the purest manifestation of enslavement to a sexual stereotype. These ideas seem less influential now. A new generation of women just sees them as part of the great cultural tradition of being a woman, which, first and foremost, elevates your arse.

The metaphysical and ideological implications of arse-elevation aside, Barker’s comments can be interpreted to encompass more of couture than footwear, of course. There is a fine online preview of the Met’s exhibition here.

Alexander McQueen, dramatist

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"It's a Jungle Out There." Bodysuit by Alexander McQueen. Brown leather with bleached denim and taxidermy crocodile heads. 1997-98.

People find my things sometimes aggressive. But I don’t see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic, dealing with a dark side of personality.
Alexander McQueen

Elegance, glamour and couture are anathema to the progressive collectivist; in fashion, they exploit the individuality of the body, not its absorption into a mass; especially couture, clothing fitted for the specific individual and resistant to mass reproduction. In the 1990s many designers — several of them British — used fashion and couture to examine the close relationship of the body, eros and death, as several British dramatists used the theatre and drama to explore the same relationship. In her 2007 book Fashion at the Edge, Caroline Evans wrote about these designers:

[Fashion] can be a symptom of alienation, loss, mourning, fear of contagion and death, instability and change. Like psychoanalysis, it “investigates the domain and configuration of incoherence, discontinuity, distruption and disintegration.” …

Fashion, with its affinity for transformation, can act out instability and loss but it can also, and equally, stake out the terrain of “becoming” — new social and sexual identities, masquerade and performativity. … If the imagery of late twentieth-century fashion seemed dark or bleak, it may be because it signalled an attempt to chart new social identities in a period of rapid change, while reflecting contemporary concerns with death and decay.

This description especially applies to the work of Alexander McQueen (1969-2010), whose career is now being investigated and celebrated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, running through 31 July. The resemblance of fashion to drama in McQueen’s dark but highly sexualized and erotic collection was noted even by The New York Times‘ Holland Carter in a review of the show last week, headlined “Designer as dramatist, and the tales he left behind.” “Clothes [in McQueen's later career] become costumes,” Carter writes, “with sensuous, sumptuous lives of their own” — an admission of the erotically transformative effect of couture, clothes making the woman as well as the man. Carter also writes:

Mr. McQueen repeatedly said, as have many other designers before him, that his intention was to “empower women” through his designs, though the impression often is that he’s hobbling, even tormenting them. And while his insistence on political content is one of the more intriguing aspects of his work, it is also one of the slipperiest and least resolved.

Both fashion and theatre are fetish and metaphor, the object standing in for an abstraction. Carter above touches on but does not resolve or investigate the darker reaches and redefinitions of the empowerment of the bodies and individuals within these costumes, for it’s an empowerment and imagination that touches and even exceeds at times the taboo. There is a torment in the furthest reaches of ecstasy and desire: a giving-up of the self; through costume and theatre we play with the imaginations of this torment, as well as its furthest reaches of associated pleasure. In constriction and restraint there is a coursing of ecstasy in the body that, because restrained, can’t be released in gesture; instead it flows, again and again, over and over, circulating endlessly through the flesh, without respite. Far from objectifying the wearer, in the theatre the spectator, male or female, can participate in the erotic and subjective reconstruction of the wearer, provided they are open to the empathetic imagination. (If women can imaginatively participate in the “male gaze” that Molly Haskell identified in cinematic spectatorship in 1972, it’s certainly possible for men to participate in a similar “female gaze”: a more difficult project, however, for it requires an ever greater repudiation of a conventional sexual consciousness embedded in the Culture Industry and its products.) Erotic tragedy requires a costume designer who acknowledges the elitism of couture; the darker intersections of politics, culture, eros and death; and the possibilities of imaginative erotic expression through the clothed body.

There are other theatremakers, such as Jan Fabre in Belgium and Piotr Tomaszuk in Poland, who recognize couture’s erotic and tragic contribution to theatrical presentation. It is no surprise that the British dramatist closest to McQueen’s sensibility is Howard Barker. Barker, who designs the costumes for his own productions under the pseudonym Billie Kaiser, is keenly aware of the nexus of fashion, drama, tragedy and eros; his costumes, too, strain against the regimented conformity of everyday fashion in an attempt to touch on the tragic and erotic streams that run beneath experience and can empower new human possibilities of imagination. He acknowledges that this attempt requires a daring eroticization and surrender of the self through its cultural representation in clothing — one gives one’s self up to what one wears in a process of erotic transformation. In a 2010 interview with Mark Brown, included in the recent collection Howard Barker Interviews 1980-2010: Conversations in Catastrophe, Brown asks Barker about the subject of high heels in Barker’s work (“about which things have been written,” Barker laughingly responds):

BROWN: I’m intrigued by the use of high heels in much of your work. It subverts the vapid use of them as a mere fetish. It elevates  physically, of course, and enhances, for many actresses, their capacity for elegance.

BARKER: There are two stage aspects to this garment. One is that it gives height, obviously, and posture, because it alters a woman’s shape profoundly. Women have been wearing high heels since at least the third century BC; it’s well recorded. So, they’re inherent in European culture; there’s something profoundly historic about this garment.

You might say it has a symbolic relation with sexuality and its opposite, appearing and disappearing with climates of erotic expression and repression. Also — speaking purely artistically, purely of the stage and film — heels have a tremendous sonic value. The actress appearing and disappearing — announced and then the sound slowly decaying — must recall every child’s memory of the passage of women on the pavement, one of the deep resonances of infancy, and embedded in the sexual imagination.

BROWN: Some actresses seem to grasp this from your work, almost instinctively. I discovered this recently, whilst working on … [a] reading of your (Uncle) Vanya. The young actress Nicola Daley — although she was, in fact, playing Chekhov — talked about her sense that she required high heels. Even playing a male role, she sensed from the play the need for her, as a woman on the stage, to have that elevation and authority. It wasn’t being required of her; she herself suggested it.

BARKER: … There was a generation of feminists who regarded high heels as the purest manifestation of enslavement to a sexual stereotype. These ideas seem less influential now. A new generation of women just sees them as part of the great cultural tradition of being a woman, which, first and foremost, elevates your arse.

The metaphysical and ideological implications of arse-elevation aside, Barker’s comments can be interpreted to encompass more of couture than footwear, of course. I will be writing more about tragedy, eros, clothing and the McQueen exhibition for Contemporary Theatre Review later this year. In the meantime, there is a fine online preview of the Met’s exhibition here.

Jan Fabre’s Olympian Gotterdammerung

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Prometheus — Landscape II. Concept, direction and scenography: Jan Fabre. Text: Joroen Olyslaegers (based on Aeschylus) and Jan Fabre. Music: Dag Taeldeman. Assistant artistic direction and dramaturgy: Miet Martens. Lighting: Jan Dekeyser. Costumes: Adrea Kränzlin. Sound: Tom Buys. Performers: Katarina Bistrovic-Darvas, Annabelle Chambon, Cedric Charron, Vittoria Deferrari, Lawrence Goldhuber. Ivana Jozic, Katarzyna Makuch, Gilles Polet, Kasper Vandenberghe and Kurt Vandendriessche. A production of Troubleyn. Running time: 80 minutes, no intermission. Peak Performances @ Montclair State University, Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair, New Jersey. 20-30 January 2011. Schedule and tickets here.

PROMETHEUS: I caused mortals to cease foreseeing doom.
CHORUS: What cure did you provide them with against that sickness?
PROMETHEUS: I placed in them blind hopes.
CHORUS: That was a great gift you gave to men.
Aeschylus
Prometheus Bound (250-53)

Mythology seeks to explain the world to us — and ourselves to ourselves — through character and narrative. In truth, of course, there are no gods: they place the original responsibility for the human condition beyond the human race itself. (Humankind continues to do so, as the prologue to Prometheus — Landscape II suggests, seeking for a hero outside itself, irreducible to psychology.) The three great Greek tragic dramatists slowly edged the gods from the center of their stage and, by the time of Sophocles and Euripides, placed them silent and in the wings. Prometheus Bound, however, a comparatively late tragedy attributed to Aeschylus, places the god Prometheus the Fire-Giver at center stage — immobile and bound, in Jan Fabre’s Prometheus — Landscape II, and suspended between the stage floor and the flies, spreadeagled, for the duration of the spectacle, and unlike Aeschylus’ god he speaks only once, at the very end of the narrative.

The fire that Prometheus gave to man provides heat — a tool for cooking food, for fashioning other tools — but provides light as well, and his ambivalent gift was not only the ability of the race to change the physical world as it sees fit, but also the light of consciousness as individuals alienated from the world around them: conscious of death, but not of the date and time set for it. They are also conscious of themselves as physical bodies, simultaneously alienated from and a part of the natural world. Fabre’s Prometheus accepts mythology, but accepts it ironically: this is a religious service dedicated to dead gods. And his focus, as such, is not on the story of Prometheus himself, but on the fictitious ambivalence of the fictitious gods who provided this consciousness to humankind, and what the human race has done with both this consciousness and with this ability to change the natural world.

Fabre practices tragedy in the satiric rather than the elegaic mode: the chorus of humans that surrounds the gods of Prometheus — Landscape II have wasted this consciousness and inventiveness in trivia and cliche. And they’ve done it among the natural elements of the planet: earth, air, fire and water are ultimately the companions of the human individual. Fabre populates his stage with familiar objects associated with fire (and most especially with fire prevention, like fire pails filled with sand, axes and fire extinguishers), and by the end of the evening the performers have littered the stage with all of these. However, each of these objects is more than just a means of putting out fires. Sand, poured at first from the hands of the performers, is also time, and as the stage opens with a bare floor, by the end of it the sand leaves a desert landscape of past time. Axes, of course, are associated with brute violence and force as well; the performers utilize them as the sting of the gadfly that chases Io through the known world. And the fire extinguisher not only puts out a fire, but also creates a cloud that hides every object within its blast: a blindness that blankets the body and the world in an opaque white veil.

Fabre’s version of the myth hews surprisingly close to the original Aeschylean text, and the play itself is unlike most extant Greek tragedies in that it is populated almost exclusively by gods and goddesses: Prometheus, Oceanos, and Hermes (with special guest appearances here by Athena, Dionysus and Pandora); and, as in the Aeschylean text, they bicker and argue with the silent Prometheus, some admiringly, some with considerable contempt. The sole human individual apart from the chorus is Io, the mortal chosen by Zeus as one of his innumerable mates; as punishment for her acceptance of Zeus’ amorous advances, Hera turns her into a cow and sets upon her a gadfly which, with constant stings, keeps her in constant motion across the lands of the known world. In “The Vertical Axis,” Jan Kott’s essay on the play in The Eating of the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy (New York: Random House, 1973), the critic interprets Io as a Schopenhauerian figure:

Io’s sufferings are unmerited. … Io “the cow-horned maiden” was thrust, as Camus would say, into the world in which the body desires and is desired. She cannot distinguish any more between herself and desire. God covets her cow-flesh, or her cow-flesh covets god. But not she herself. The human cow feels only disgust, revulsion, Sartrean nausée toward herself, her body and the world; she is terrified by the invisible gadfly. The defenseless Io, the stung heifer, is the perfect image of Schopenhauer’s blind cosmic will. Eros and Thanatos, procreation and death, are not our choices: they are thrust upon us. Chased by blind instinct through seas and continents, Io represents the black Eros of desire. “Wings, and no eyes, figure unheedy haste,” Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is stung by the same invisible gadfly. (33)

Kott, I think, has it just a bit wrong here; Io is not the perfect image of Schopenhauer’s will, but very much the perfect image of the human individual’s subservience to it. Her tragedy is not in her blindness, but indeed in her awareness of her situation, and her inability to combat the will that convulses her from both within and without. Fabre has it right: the Io in this production (and perhaps somebody from the company can provide the name of the performer) is, naked, very much the embodiment of this suffering, desire and desirousness — she is the end, fully-aware product of Prometheus’ so-called “gift.” She wears no make-up, mask or costume to indicate her physical appearance as a heifer, but instead is fetishistically rendered so: a pair of black pumps become her hooves, and she dons a saddle at the close of her long monologue (reminiscent most of all of some of Helmut Newton’s photography). The rest of the time, in contrast to Prometheus, she is in constant and terrified movement. She is the human always in motion, as opposed to the Promethean consciousness as subject, still at the center of the world. And even the fulfillment of her desires, and Zeus’, will not stanch the flow of suffering and pain that will accompany her to the end of her days.

To the four elements of the environment Fabre adds another: human flesh itself. The set design of Prometheus — Landscape II reifies Kott’s “vertical axis” cosmology of the mythological world, and there is nothing above Prometheus; he is suspended in front of a projection screen which presents images of the moon and the sun, the presences of the sky (the front projection technique superimposes the god’s shadow over these presences through the duration of the play). The rest of the characters are literally down to earth; the “muta persona” of Power and Violence at the start of the play are vicious schoolboys. Indeed, this suspension is between heaven and earth: a god who is an ambivalent friend to man, participating in both worlds. As in Fabre’s other productions over the past few years, the unadorned body is at the center of attention and performance. And because the bodies are unadorned (no tattoos or apparent piercings), the flesh speaks for itself. Most of the time the naked body is positioned in white shafts of light which emphasize the tremors of the flesh both at rest and in extremis. The human body, as the seat of the human consciousness that is Prometheus’ gift to the race, is then as elemental as the rest of the world. (The only other director I know who uses the human body as the central conscious element of his scenography is Howard Barker, with whom Fabre shares a surprisingly clean and sharp visual focus determined to place both the erotic and the lethal at center stage.)

And it is both sacred and profane, a condition of mankind itself; and because this is a satiric tragedy, the emphasis is on the profane. The penultimate sequence is a picture presented to Prometheus of the lowest, most juvenile uses to which his fire has been put  by the human race: the chorus eats it, pisses it (“firewater” indeed) and lights each other’s farts with it. Infantile humor, but both Power and Violence have themselves been portrayed, as I said above, as petulant mischievous schoolchildren; and at the close of the evening, Pandora chillingly appears to lay her box at the feet of the god for his contemplation.

Like Je Suis Sang, Prometheus — Landscape II is less a play than it is a spectacle or a pageant; like Orgy of Tolerance, it is rooted in a scatological vision of this present world. Psychological, philosophical or intellectual subtlety is not its strong point, but neither is it the strong point of any spectacle or pageant. Fabre, like the Northern Renaissance artists, constructs his pictures of common, even low objects and presents them for the examination and contemplation of the spectator. At a post-performance discussion after Orgy of Tolerance last year, an audience member pointed out that, after all, Fabre’s satire of materialism, greed and selfishness was not a particularly innovative intellectual experience. Unapologetically, Fabre replied to the effect that even though some things are said over and over again, these things can never be repeated enough. Fabre’s voice is the flesh of his performers. As far as I’m concerned, Fabre says things that all too few dramatists are willing to say on the stage these days, and he says them beautifully and ecstatically. It is also rare enough for an artist to knowingly and sensuously use this medium, and that Fabre portrays these qualities on the stage makes him one of the most remarkable theatre artists of the past few decades.

Upcoming: Jan Fabre’s Prometheus–Landscape II

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UPDATE (23 January): My response to the production is here: “Jan Fabre’s Olympian Götterdammerung.”

Prometheus--Landscape II, from Jan Fabre/Troublyn

Fabre’s work is essentially tragic — and modern tragedy borders of course on the grotesque, on satire, on the sinister. But whereas in traditional drama it used to matter what happened between bodies, in post-dramatic theater it matters what happens to the body itself. Fabre simply lets us feel and think the body as metaphysics. He himself conceives of the human body as the setting of a tragic conflict.
Hans-Thies Lehmann

Theatre is a filthy art. An art infected by death. Even as it comes to life it is dying. Theater has no duration, no form that can stand the test of time. The gold and plush can never conceal the rust that immediately replaces them. Corrosion taints every figure and pulverizes it to a thread of recollection. Theater is unarmed against death. Like a shadow, it hides behind the sun, the candles, the expensive spotlights. The shadow immediately catches up with the instantaneous nature of theater, the intoxication of a single moment. In theater, time plunges from the same high scaffolding into the void of memory.
Luk van den Dries
“Life, death, coincidence: Images of the body in the work of Jan Fabre”
Corpus Jan Fabre

Sometimes William Gaddis’ “unswerving punctuality of chance” works against you, sometimes it works with you. Earlier this month I re-read Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound; a few days later, quite unbidden, a friend sent along Derrick de Kerckhove’s fascinating 1981 essay on the play, “A Theory of Greek Tragedy”; and now I find, lo and behold, that the upcoming visit of Jan Fabre’s Troublyn company to Montclair State University’s Peak Performances series will feature Fabre’s Prometheus–Landscape II, which opens at the university’s Kasser Theatre next Thursday, 20 January, and runs through 30 January. More information on schedule and tickets here. (I should note that this production was commissioned by the Peak Performances series.)

Fabre’s new work returns to the tragic mode after last year’s collection of satiric sketches Orgy of Tolerance; although the comedy of this work was as sensual and physical as 2007′s Je Suis Sang, Fabre seemed to have less original things to say there; tragedy is his mode, as Lehmann suggested in his introduction to Corpus Jan Fabre. At the Troubleyn Web site, Luk Van den Dries describes Fabre’s general approach in the new production:

In his latest production, Jan Fabre once again goes in search of this tragic dimension. The adventures of Prometheus, as chronicled by the oldest tragic poet Aeschylus, represent the underlying current which flows through this work. Prometheus was a mythological rebel without a cause. He revolted against Zeus, the ruler of the gods, stole fire from heaven and gave it to the inhabitants of earth. The fire-bringer, Prometheus is, for Fabre, a standard bearer of proud independence. He turns his back on Olympic law and goes against the flow, acting on the basis of his own convictions. As a confederate of fire, he also has every weapon at his disposal with which to transform matter. At the same time an artist and an alchemist, he is a kind of lighthouse for mankind. With utter disregard for his own life, he shows man his true potential. In an effort to quash this proud outburst of violence, Zeus has Prometheus shackled to Mt. Caucasus. Left to the elements and an eagle who returns every day to pick a piece from his liver, he suffers a gruesome punishment. His liver, that organ of bile, of anger and fury, subsequently becomes a kind of open wound. Every night, the wound grows shut and every day it is ripped open anew. In a never-ending Sisyphus-like repetition. Prometheus cries with pain and anger. The fire-bringer is himself on fire, as it were. And his body projected into a state of ecstasy. His howling and roaring can be heard far into the Caucasus.

I’ve made no secret of my enthusiasm for Fabre’s work in the past; as a dramatist, director and visual artist Fabre brings perhaps the most necessary element to contemporary tragedy: a lush and sensuous visual grammar, drawing the most shamelessly sexual and sensual performances from his group of actors and actresses.

Obviously, that “unswerving punctuality of chance” aims to get me to the Kasser Theatre during the run of Prometheus–Landscape II. In the meantime, Frank Hentschker’s 2009 collection of Jan Fabre’s texts, I Am a Mistake: Seven Works for the Theatre, is available from the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.

Photos of Prometheus–Landscape II courtesy Miet Martens / Troubleyn.

Je suis sang

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Photo: Wonge Bergmann

Je Suis Sang (I Am Blood). A Troubleyn/Jan Fabre production. Text, scenography and choreography by Jan Fabre. Assistance and dramaturgy: Miet Martens. Assistance choreography: Renée Copraij. Actors, dancers, musicians: Linda Adami, Tawny Andersen, Vicente Arlandis, Dieter Bossu, Dimitri Brusselmans, Katrien Bruyneel, Sylvia Camarda, Cédric Charron, Anny Czupper, Stijn Dickel, Els Deceukelier, Brbara De Coninck, Olivier Dubois, Sung-Im Her, Ivana Jozic, Marina Kaptijn, Guillaume Marie, Apostolia Papadamaki, Maria Stamenkovic-Herranz, Geert Vaes, Helmut Van den Meersschaut. Peak Performances at the Kassel Theater, Montclair State University, 25-28 January 2007.

The title Je Suis Sang is followed by a coy subtitle: “A medieval fairy tale.” The performance may have its roots in the Middle Ages, but it’s really more of a carnival, a pageant, or a black mass, with one significant difference: the soul is defined and incarnated in the body, not the Catholic Church. “It is 2007 AD and we are still living in the Middle Ages. And we are still living with the same body that is wet on the inside and dry on the outside. We are still living with a body that is more colorful inside than outside,” a mock-priest (one of four) tells us at the beginning of the 90-minute performance. And of one color — red — we’ll be seeing quite a bit.

Fabre is well-known as a performance provocateur in Europe; along with his work with his own Belgium-based troupe Troubleyn (which he founded in 1986), he’s also directed a controversial Tannhauser. Both his performance and his plastic art have centered on the body as the beginning and end of sensation and existence; the bones, flesh and muscles as conscious existence, the blood coursing around, through and between the elements of the body, blood the unconscious pulse propelling life through the world. To release the blood — to let it from its prison, to bind and mix and become an ocean surrounding the world, unifying humanity in a state of unconscious, life-giving liquid — is the release, the catharsis, that Je Suis Sang seeks. The tragic irony in this work is that via war, self-inflicted violence and torture, this blood is let in the agonies of pain and suffering, instead of the commonality of the life fed by it: bloodletters and bloodsuckers, life always twinned with death that define experience and existence. Fabre and his company urge the audience of this black passion to dream of themselves as “universal donors” — life-givers, even in a state of death.

The body here is literally armor at the start of the evening: as soldiers in medieval metal gear tromp onto the stage, skin and bodies are visible between the edges of the armor, the flesh no match for the seeming overkill of the sword. (And this is a rhythmic, percussive evening, that armor does provide metallic pounding thunder in the choreography by Fabre and Coproij.) Scenes of torture and pain in blood-letting, but there’s finally joy in it. Several brides, wearing white, begin to menstruate together, and after a moment of fear, joy begins to emerge when the fecundity this represents is recognized. They begin to show pride, they become ecstatic, and (in that old 1960s-era consciousness-training trope) they reach their fingers down between their legs, raise them back to their lips, and taste it.

Men, in all this, tend to be idiots. They’re the ones rampaging around the Middle Ages lopping off heads and breasts and limbs, and this bloodthirsty idiocy is repeated in their mating rituals. The men, like bulls, stampede towards the women, drawn by their blood-stained wedding dresses, and like toreadors facing particularly dim bulls, the women easily fend off their approaches (at least, until the men’s ire becomes uncontrollable). But Fabre is fair; a few of his knights are women, a few of his brides are men.

In the most troubling tableau of the evening, the concentration camps are evoked: On a series of tables, each lit with an eerie shaded yellow light, bodies are tortured bloodlessly, blood trapped in the painful flesh, terror exacerbated by the torturer’s labor. In this, Fabre seems to reach an extreme of tragedy, a denial of life’s escape from the suffering flesh.

But this is a pageant, a mass, even if black and Dionysiac; the evening ends in a celebration of the dry body made wet, if not with its blood with wine, and water, and joy; if on some level this seems vaguely trite, then so is shameless ecstasy (and Fabre’s troupe is shameless in the best possible sense), at least in an age of unsubtle, adolescent irony. One of the chants of the production’s liturgy is that two things are certain: that we will die; and that we must transgress the limits of our existence, break and smash taboos, in the urge to transform suffering into pleasure; body and soul, pain and pleasure homoousian. Je Suis Sang admits both, and in doing so evokes a sensual richness in a production as blatantly celebratory and spectacular as any Broadway musical. In fact, were I a Broadway producer, I’d open this show right across the street from The Lion King. But then, that’s why I’m not likely to ever be a Broadway producer.

On the other hand, I’d at least try to get a week’s performances out of the production; after three performances, Troubleyn is back to Belgium. Readers interested in Fabre’s work can purchase the most-aptly-titled Corpus Jan Fabre, a gorgeously illustrated catalogue of his performance work, edited by Luk Van den Dries and available in English translation through Imschoot.