The immense walls are covered in red. Blood-red in a rutilant Cour d'Honneur. The walls of the Pope's Palace seem to ooze the organic liquid of those martyrized by History. In 1996, the visionary Jan Fabre discovered the Cour d'Honneur, and immediately registered the bloody history of the space and its' past barbarity. He saw the walls streaming with blood. The Avignon Festival and the Pope's Palace welcomed him back five years later in 2001. The emblematic heart of the Festival then became the site of extreme theatrical, choreographic and pictural experiments, the décor is disturbing to the human envelopes which are at last seen as what they are: liquid bodies, resembling each other and dancing. About twenty performers, dancers and musicians, grapple with taboos and customs born in blood. Menstruation, fear, stigmata,
effusions, social clichés of pure or bad blood, castration, mutilation. Two years after the piece was created, the artist has recomposed it, re-written it, and imagined a new version of \'Je Suis Sang' based on the original material. For Jan Fabre, the year 2003 after Jesus Christ is still in the heart of the Middle Ages. With a touch of irony, the artist sub-titles his work “A Mediaeval Fairy Tale”. His dramatic poem, Je Suis Sang, written in Dutch verse translated into French and into Latin verse, a language which for a long time allowed the Church to keep its followers in the darkness of incomprehension and blindly devoted. A knight, a torturer, a bloody surgeon, among other leading figures, appear one after the other in the convulsive universe of a constructor of images, and recall the immemorial hours of savagery.A choreographer, writer, film-maker and painter living in Antwerp with his company, Troubleyn, Jan Fabre says his work comes from subjects he describes as elegant provocation. The themes he broaches and the extremes he arrives at in the way he handles them often spark passionate reactions from his contemporaries. “Warriors of Beauty”, Jan Fabre and his dancers exceed all the body's limits and its prejudices to attain beauty via a new way of considering human anatomy. “The lips of my wounds will twist / to try to articulate something / of the pleasure beyond pain / and of the curiosity of what is yet to come.” In Je Suis Sang, Jan Fabre creates a hybrid body, simultaneously human and animal, liquid and impregnable.
Distribution
stage direction Jan Fabre
text, direction, scenography and choreographie :Jan Fabre
cast :Linda Adami, Katrien Bruyneel, Annabelle Chambon, Cédric Charron, Sebastien Cneude, Anny Czupper, Els Deceukelier, Barbara De Coninck, Heike Langsdorf, Dirk Roofthooft, Dag Taeldeman, Geert Vaes (distribution en cours)
assistant :Renée Copraij
costumes :Daphne Kitschen, Jan Fabre
lighting :Jan Dekeyser, Jan Fabre
dramaturg :Hendrik Tratsaert
Production
Production :Troubleyn (Anvers)
en coproduction avec :le Festival d'Estiu de Barcelona GREC' 2003, le Festival d'Avignon, le Melbourne Festival et deSingel (Anvers)
Avec le soutien :du programme Culture 2000 de l'Union européenne
Avec la participation :du ministère de la Communauté flamande
Jan Fabre :est “artiste en résidence” au deSingel
Texte publié par: l'Arche éditeur