Bloody hell

Rather last minute on this announcement, but Saturday night I'll be leading a postshow discussion with Belgian director Jan Fabre, whose Je Suis Sang will be carving a bloody swath through Montclair State University, starting tonight. Fabre's show is being presented as part of the Peak Performance series, of which I am the Public Dramaturge. What on God's green earth is a Public Dramaturge, you ask? Well, he's the guy who conducts postshow talkbacks, maybe helps the audience digest the work it has just seen. He's also the guy who points at you when you raise your hand to ask the artist a question. Yes, that's my function. Anyway, this role is evolving. Naturally, I've been researching Fabre's work, biography and aesthetic and he's quite an interesting figure. An amalgam of formal austerity you see in Robert Wilson and the sort of primal animalism of Pina Bausch, with the theatrical excess of a dirty punk circus. Je Suis Sang is subtitled "A Medieval Fairy Tale," and sure enough, armor, swords and other Boschian imagery figure heavily into the violent, ecstatic, perverse mises-en-scènes. Expect lots of blood, nudity, twisted, agonized, "mutilated" bodies too. Cheery stuff. Over at TONY, we featured Fabre in a box here. And The New York Times did a piece last Sunday. For further reading, I highly recommend Professor Luk Van Den Dries' glossy book-length study. Anyway, call 973-655-5112 for tickets. On Saturday night at 6pm, there's a bus that leaves from Chelsea.

After this weekend, sometime in February, I'd like to post on authenticity, fraudulence and criteria for artistic integrity, since the last time I wrote about Fabre, charges of artistic hucksterism started flyin'.

Comments

[Chris Boyd]

"After this weekend, sometime in February, I'd like to post on authenticity, fraudulence and criteria for artistic integrity..."

Oh, goody. We'll hold you to that. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the sticky/icky Je Suis Sang too. :)

[Alison Croggon]

I missed it when it was in Melbourne - before my time - but it certainly caused a lot of fuss among the good burghers, including MPs calling for arts funding to be cut off ("Is This Art??!"). Which is kind of heartening, in a way, though more jaded arts types didn't think it particularly shocking. A friend who saw it in Europe thought it was a load of tosh. So v curious here too....