Jan Fabre is a sprawling creator. A visual artist, choreographer, director, and writer, Fabre transfers from one field of research to the other working methods and representations that broaden the areas of reflection and make them impossible to be labelled under a notion. Fabre blows up the limits of aesthetic genders and proposes installation performance on the theme of the turmoiled ending-state.
Jan Fabre was born in 1958 in Antwerp, in the neighbourhood where his company is located to the day - Troubleyn (in old Flemish - to remain faithful). He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Right from his debut- in the ‘80s - Fabre destabilized any attempt to place him in a coercive field of definitions and proposed artistic manifestos in which conventions and clichés were undermined, in order to dramatize a furious body-space of contemporary anguish. The undertaken aggression, the perfectly motivated nudity, the silence contained in muscle and fibres, the ceremony and anarchy atmosphere define an aesthetic of blown up order and dosing chaos, visible from his very first creations - Théậtre écrit avec un K est un matou or Le Pouvoir des folies théâtrales. In 2003, in Je suis sang, Fabre mixed medieval rituals and contemporary terrorist attacks, building a performative history of violence in its most radical forms. In 2005, he becomes artist-member of the Avignon Festival.
In all his performances, Fabre creates an extreme framework of emotionality and physicality.
Requiem for a Metamorphosis is a poetic and raw performance-anatomy of life or death.
Death, the supertheme of Fabre’ performances, is corporalized and becomes palpable in the dramaturgy of solos (Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day) or in deployment of forces (Requiem..., Je suis Sang, etc.).. The performances demonstrate the ability of a choreographer- visual artist to think the body in visual spaces working on the principle of communicating vessels. The object around which an image id built, the image which is never a cover for the body, but comes from the meaning and stake of the dance performance, naturally integrating all the actions on stage, and the body causing breaks in the images are in organic correlation in Fabre’s works. None of these elements can work alone.
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The choice of the Requiem is for Jan Fabre has personally motivated: “'When I was young, I was twice in a coma, once after a street fight and another time I lost consciousness in the water and I needed a few days to recover. These experiences changed my life radically. Everything has become more intense, I grabbed life with both hands. The third revealing experience for Requiem for a Metamorphosis was the death of my parents.” The performance is dedicated to all professionals of death, to those who exemplarily ensure the physiology of the passage into nonexistence, who dissect, wash and arrange the dead, who make sure that death looks good. There is in Requiem for a Metamorphosis a plea for an aesthetic of death, for a poem of the end, counterbalanced in the coldness of technical operations.
Live music by a band wearing mouth masks, images of a group that accompanies death in a sonic autopsy room, becomes throughout the play, more and more aggressive. A dancer moves insensibly, with eyes nearly closed, trying to find a point of equilibrium. He is like a child possessed by the music he attempts to exorcise, dancing as if someone would continuously punch him in the stomach. On a stage full of flowers, he moves from one hand to the other, organs taken out of body. A second body covering his real one. He yelles. A man in long coat takes out a gun and shoots him. Several heap-grave flowers begin to move. One by one, hands crop up. They rise and undulate. Bodies covered in flowers come to light. Death has ended. Life can begin. Bodies slide off the tables while flowers flowing on the dancers’ skin, in a vegetal shower. Upside down, the dancers find place among the flowerbeds. Completely naked, the bodies begin to swim vertically and move like sleepwalkers. Suddenly, the slowness that has something of a prolonged state of sleep turns into collective disturbance, the hallmark of the radical energy in all performances by Jan Fabre. The choreographer alternates violent stimuli that induce a robotics mechanics into the body and slow stimuli that give a tempo to hardly visible motion. You often feel that, in fact, the body does not move or that it moves imperceptibly.
The metamorphosis inside and outside the body, the transition from one age to the other, lies at the heart of Fabre’s performance, as a dissection of all organic dissections.
“Every time I see a corpse I am interested in the changes during life and the decomposition that occurs after we die'” says an anatomy-pathologist, who performs the symbolic ritual of dissection. Enormous guts come out of the bodies and are wrapped around the dancers’ necks. Organic scaffolds hold the bodies between life and their re-fall into death. Dancers suffocate, after which they fall on their knees, make desperate sounds and touch the beach of flowers. Guts and petals in a unity relation of the vegetal and the organic. One single body jerks spasmodically, prolonging its agony
Live statues, frozen groups stand next to a skeleton.
After being bathed in flowers, the dancers' bodies are aggressively hit with the stems. On the second they manage to rise, they are again lashed. It gives rise to an increasingly tough tension of the touch, in the in a maximum acceleration of tempo. Panels with writings such as Memento Mori, Ars Longa, vita brevis are brought on stage like pieces in a memory stick-museum; a museum of the anatomy of lives sticking their nails into death. Dissection and the ideal type of coffin are presented technically, sternly, thus stressing, in a counterpoint, the physiology of death, its disaggregation phases until total and final annihilation.
Fabre's play also highlights the ideological and death, the death of a system - communism - that suffocates in its own utopia.
The bodies are gradually mechanicized, become robot-puppets that build an artificial reality. With knee and armrests, some skeletons in human skin move robotically. Dehumanization and post-humanity: two forms of representation coexisting by removing of any trace of life in the body, and by identifying another possible life. A new species rises from death in the dawn of the new world. Bodies with skeletons hanging on their backs dance in an apocalyptic celebration.
Requiem for a Metamorphosis is a mortuary-vegetal performance, on the thin line between vitality and deadly.
