Jan Fabre is known in the UK for his interpretation of ‘Swan Lake’ for the Royal Ballet of Flanders, which was presented at the Edinburgh Festival in 2002. But in his home country of Belgium, he is also renowned as a visual artist. The blood and insect obsessed Flemish artist recently premiered his latest performance work, the medieval fantasy I am Blood, or Je Suis Sang in Belgium and Barcelona.
The piece is a co-production with Festival d’Estiu de Barcelona GREC’ 2003 (Spain), Festival d’Avignon (France), Kunstencentrum deSingel (Belgium) and the Melbourne International Arts Festival, where it is set to premiere next month.
Fabre’s latest epic is being flagged as ‘not for the faint-hearted’, and looks to the Middle Ages to suggest humankind has not moved beyond medieval times, but still possesses brutal, primitive urges.
Twenty-one actors and dancers enact Fabre’s text, which is underscored by Latin chanting, depicting ‘dancing knights’ and ‘bleeding brides’ as it unravels the greatest of all taboos associated with the body – that of blood: menstrual blood, blood sprung from wounds, even the blood of the stigmata.
Information supplied by Fabre’s production company, Troubleyn Theatre, insists that the piece was written by Fabre as a ‘plea for the fluid body, free of guilt and pain’, a theme the artist himself reiterates over the phone from his base in Antwerp.
Fabre describes the theatrical piece – which was created at the invitation of the Festival d’Avignon in 2001, where it was staged outdoors – as a ‘quest for the liquid body’. For despite all our advances in technology, Fabre suggests that humankind is still haunted by ‘wounds that have been inflicted on us by religion, war and thinking’. But, he maintains an optimism that the human race can move beyond the aggressive behaviour that the past has impressed, which is depicted in I Am Blood by the transformation of the body into a body of the future – one that is comprised solely of liquid, of blood.
‘This future body is the liquid body, the body of blood,’ Fabre says, explaining the climax of the piece. ‘The body of blood mixes with other types of blood and the blood of animals. And at the moment this happens, that means we will leave behind Christ, and we will develop new kinds of emotions, and feelings, and a new way of thinking about the world.’
So who is Jan Fabre? And why has he created such a brutal, violent spectacle?
Fabre is renowned throughout Belgium – and more recently attracted the attention of the rest of Europe – as a visual artist, writer, filmmaker, director, and choreographer of theatre and opera, whose work spans the past 20 years. Fabre is also a prolific visual artist: since 1984, he has held over 100 solo exhibitions and taken part in more than 30 group exhibitions, including stints at the Venice, Istanbul and Florence biennials.
Born in 1958 in the Belgian city of Antwerp, Fabre began his artistic life playing with insects in a tent he constructed in his backyard – an interest he attributes to a great-grandfather who studied entomology. It is a fascination that has become the focus of many of his works. Most recently, he covered the ceiling of Belgium’s 19th century royal palace with the shells of 1.6 million jewel scarab beetles. Meanwhile, in his film installation, Een Ontmoeting/Vstrecha (An Encounter/Vstrecha) – which is currently touring Europe in an exhibition of Fabre’s works – Fabre, dressed as a beetle, chats with a fly, played by the Russian artist, Ilya Kabakov. Similarly, in A Consilience, a video artwork created at London’s Natural History Museum, Fabre had the museum’s entomologists don costumes related to the insects they studied.
While the insect influence is not immediately apparent in I Am Blood, Fabre’s exploration of the relationship between man and animal is. However, the focus on the body and blood is another recurring theme running through Fabre’s works, and is not an entirely new concept in Je Suis Sang.
Growing up, Fabre was surrounded by the works of 16th century Flemish painters like Heironymous Bosch and the Brueghel dynasty. Their influence, he says, was immediately evident in his first performance work in 1978. For My Body, My Blood, My Landscape, Fabre tells me, he created drawings and writing with his own blood – a practice he revisited in his solo performance Sanguis/Mantis in Lyon in 2001.
Fabre’s theatre works also number more than 30 – and include direction and choreography for Ballet Frankfurt and for The Royal Ballet of Flanders’ production of Swan Lake – complete with a cast unusually encumbered by medieval armour.
With Bosch’s apocalyptic scenes forming the historic backdrop to Fabre’s life and work, I Am Blood could appear to be not only reminiscent of the Flemish primitive painters, but of a moving visual artwork itself. And that was certainly Melbourne International Arts Festival director Robyn Archer’s feeling when she viewed the piece in Avignon two years ago, when scouting for performances to include in her 2003 festival programme.
‘I am getting an immense changing canvas for an hour and a half – which is like sitting in from of one of those Flemish masters,’ Archer says from Berlin. ‘These are the paintings the boy was growing up with..This [Antwerp] is the kind of town that a visual artist springs out of – which, for 500 years, has been destroyed by Catholics, and Calvinists, incredible religious persecution, thousands of people being tortured unbelievable ways. And the artists recording it all the time – writers, poets, painters.’
For Archer – who saw the monumental outdoor production of I Am Blood in Avignon two years ago – the piece struck a chord on two levels. Firstly, representing the fall of civilisation and the relationship of this with blood borne diseases, and secondly, the resonance the piece has today in light of the atmosphere of war.
‘I personally find it horrific that people have policies to kill people. The fact is that in the end, blood is shed.’ And when blood appears, Archer observes, it elicits horror.
‘It [blood] is the thing that holds us together, but because it is normally disguised – and the appropriate situation of a human being is that your blood is contained – anytime it appears, is a matter of horror.’
Jan Fabre’s exhibition ‘Gaude Succurrere Vitae’ is at the Joan Miro Foundation Barcelona until October 12. Ph: 0034 934 439 470. ‘I am Blood’ is at the Melbourne International Arts Festival, October 17-20.
