Blood Lettings:
Jan Fabre's Je Suis Sang (I Am Blood): A Medieval Fairy Tale
By Kathleen Dimmick
Je suis sang (I am blood)
By Jan Fabre
Kasser Theater
Montclair State University
(closed)
Perhaps it was the proximity to Giants Stadium
in the Meadowlands, but the scenes of combat and bloodletting, the precise,
disciplined ferocity of Jan Fabre's Je suis sang, oddly recalled
the choreographed brutality of professional football. At the Kasser
Theater at Montclair State University in New Jersey (where this production
played for 3 performances in January, 2007), audiences witnessed performers
hurling themselves around the stage for ninety minutes, subjecting themselves
to extreme physical challenges: hanging upside down while undergoing
a series of mimed cuttings and amputations; having heated glass vessels
attached to their bodies (once a medicinal remedy to purge unhealthy
humours); wielding swords and crashing to the floor in unending hand-to-hand
combat. Through it all, a medieval-looking Woman in Black, wearing a
book on her head and intoning Latin, functioned as a sort of referee
-- monitoring, commenting on, and somehow shaping our perception of
the proceedings.
Fabre, a Belgian artist currently living in Antwerp,
has been creating innovative performances for twenty-five years. Focusing
on the body as his essential subject, he often combines choreography,
visual tableaux, music, and text. Je suis sang (originally
from 2000) concerns itself with one overriding obsession -- blood: how
it both fills up and spills out of a bodies, which are, as we are told,
"wet on the inside and dry on the outside." Fabre's subtitle, "A Medieval
Fairy Tale," links this obsession with the Middle Ages, apparently to
reinforce the stated point that not much has changed since then in man's
attraction to the darker aspects of blood. The first line of text, projected
as a supertitle on the back wall of the stage, states it outright: "It
is 2007 and we're in the Middle Ages."
In Je suis sang, Fabre wastes no time
in fixing the attention on the body. As the audience enters the theater
it is confronted by a fleshy dancer in a red leather G-string, moving
lithely and seductively around the stage while smoking a cigar, his
blonde wig curled in courtly ringlets. This animated Lucian Freud model,
with his big naked belly and buttocks and pungent cigar, alert us to
what will be the piece's constant preoccupation: the fact and substance
of the human body and its potential for both extreme beauty and for
chaos and destruction. The dancer will continue to function throughout
the piece as a kind of medieval Fool figure, part Eros, part Pan, promoting
and/or framing the various scenes of blood-letting.
Next come the images of war. A chorus of warrior/dancers
clad in pieces of armor that leave areas of thigh and buttock provocatively
exposed executes a rhythmic, martial choreography. A Knight emerges
from amongst the chorus and engages in an epic combat with an unseen
opponent, propelling himself furiously around the stage while wielding
a heavy, two-handed sword with abandon. Between bouts with his phantom
foe, the Knight slumps, exhausted and literally bloody, as the Woman
in Black recites a Latin text.
According to a program note, Fabre uses Latin
to reinforce the link between ourselves and medieval society, when Latin
was the language of science and power, especially as represented by
the Church. Some of this text is translated into French by two actors
-- a kind of king and queen of the spectacle, dressed in green gowns,
and topped with large metal funnels not unlike the Tin Woodsman's cap
in the Wizard of Oz. They seem to be guides to the changing state of
scientific knowledge and medical experimentation through the ages. Their
text is translated into English as supertitles projected on the back
wall of the stage. Fabre calls his text a poem, and some phrases are
repeated again and again: "Two things are certain and they are nearly
the same: death and the exceeding of limits." Other phrases have to
do with the end of the world, referring both to medieval and contemporary
apocalyptic theologies.
Eventually, the battle armor is replaced with
beautiful white wedding gowns. In what may be Fabre's most striking
image, each dancer lifts her skirt, revealing white, blood-stained panties,
marking the onset of menstruation or the effects of torn hymens. Onstage,
this discovery is the occasion for delight and glee, as the dancers
jump and run, celebrating the evidence of their womanhood.
But this image is soon topped by another, as
a dancer, clad only in white panties, crosses the stage singing a popular
American song from the sixties, "Son of a Preacher Man." As the majority
of the text up to then has been spoken in French and Latin, this familiar
bit of Americana, freighted with a host of associations for an American
audience, hits us in several complicated, even contradictory, ways.
We bring to it our knowledge of the tradition of ministry in the rural
south -- both its strictures regarding sin and sexuality and its impassioned,
theatrical form of delivery. No doubt this song would have a different
impact on European audiences. But beyond the colloquial fact of the
song, the moment creates a delicious frisson as the dancer embodies
a provocative juxtaposition: the studied promenade of a topless Las
Vegas showgirl in the context of an avant-garde performance at a state
university in New Jersey. Is this some kind of strip club/sports bar
number masquerading as post-modern art, with all its enlightened, non-objectifying
assumptions?
The dancer's breathtakingly beautiful body may
elicit a concern for the fetishism of the female body on commercial
exhibit, but it occurs in the context of other, different exposures
to flesh -- the very un-beautiful Fool; the lumpen, middle-aged female
performer (clothed, to be sure) who moves gracelessly around the stage;
and a number of naked male dancers. The Vegas-like song and dance number
also serves as an introduction to what will become vast stretches of
nudity, male and female, during the remainder of the performance. We
are thus welcomed to that familiar phenomenon in the theater, when,
through repetition and over-exposure, one finds oneself accepting the
fact of nudity on stage as simply another sort of costume -- a costume
of skin. The potentially exploitative aspect of female nudity is de-nuded
by its very over-abundance. Finally, the song lyrics themselves lightly
link the display of female beauty to one thematic strand in the piece
-- the body's vulnerability to the power of religious coercion. The
sexual and spiritual heat from the son of the preacher "reaches" the
female singer, as the repressive spirit of the Inquisition "reaches"
the dancers' bodies in later scenes of torture and persecution.
As the green-clad figures place heated glass
vessels on two panty-clad dancers -- evoking the medieval medical practice
of drawing out the patients' humours -- the tempo of events escalates
into a growing rhythm of breakdown and chaos. Large metal tables, each
equipped with its own spotlight, are moved into various groupings around
the stage; naked dancers position themselves on the tables in postures
reminiscent of torture scenes from the Inquisition. In one memorable
sequence, a comic "Moustache Joe" character swigs drunkenly from his
(red) wine bottle, ineptly juggles with knives, and viciously tortures
a near-naked dancer, suspended upside down on an upraised table. He
mimes slicing her nipple, arm and stomach, and sucks the imaginary blood
from her wounds in a grotesque expression of obsessive need -- for her
blood.
The stage grows ever more slippery, as quantities
of liquid lubricate the floor. After slipping, sliding, rolling, and
hydroplaning across the stage, the dancers re-position the tables, standing
them on end and next to each other, forming a long metal wall, reminiscent
of a massive sculpture by Richard Serra. The satyr-like Fool returns,
now covered in a kind of avian fuzz, looking as if he'd been punished
-- literally "tarred and feathered"-- for his sins. The company, still
naked, enters tentatively around one end of the metal wall, freezes
in tableau, then exits, leaving the Fool alone on stage, a kind of absurd
yet haunting Chekhovian outcast, left behind.
Jan Fabre has cited influences from visual artists,
including the work of Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, and the performance
artist Marina Abramowitz. For Je suis sang, he turned to 15th-
and 16th-century Dutch and Flemish painting, in particular the work
of Hieronymus Bosch and Jan van Eyck. The visceral cacophony of the
tableaux, in movement, light, and sound, extends the influence of these
artists into theatrical dimensions. In addition, Fabre focuses on the
use of metal as both a thematic and theatrical motif, reinforcing another
link to the Middle Ages, when iron was the primary material of military
and domestic toolmaking -- hence the large metal tables, the armor,
the funnel crowns. He extends the conceit to the sound score, transposing
16th-century polyphonic music to electric guitar and creating a contemporary
"heavy metal" sonic parallel to the motif of metallurgy in the world
of the physical staging.
Fabre's single-minded focus on the body creates
a refreshing and disturbing combination of images and ideas. In this
era of increasingly sophisticated use of media in theater performance
-- video, film, manipulated voice production -- he continues to use
the basic elements of the human performer as the genesis for his ideas;
and apart from the use of an amplified score in this piece, Fabre's
means typically avoid the technological. His concern with defining and
transgressing boundaries and with exceeding limits is evident not only
in the ways in which he celebrates the expressive and performative capabilities
of the human body -- athleticism, risk, pain -- but also in his preoccupation
with its vulnerability and weakness -- decay, disease, and death.
This refreshing refusal of the high-tech trends
of much contemporary performance brings at one and the same time an
earthy, ancient feel to the enterprise and a potentially disturbing
focus on the human body, particularly the female body, as an object
of fetishistic attraction. Fabre calls himself a "servant of beauty"
and his performers "warriors of beauty." They are certainly that, and
much more as well. But at what point does the emphasis on the beauty
of the performer's body become a proto-fascist obsession with a repressive
aesthetic, a cult of beauty? While the celebration of the human body
in this sense may carry certain fascist connotations, particularly for
a European audience, Fabre's insistence on the very corporeal vitality
of all aspects of the body, including its essential corruption, sets
up a strong counter-force to this concern. Luk Van Den Dries, a Belgian
scholar who has written extensively on Fabre's work, cites Heiner Müller's
justification of the quest for beauty and pursuit of aesthetic categories:
"Because beauty may possibly be an end to terror."
Indeed, the very scale, complexity and precision
of Fabre's endeavor dispels a concern about a reductive aesthetic playground.
The disciplined company of 21 dancers, actors, and musicians provides
limitless ways in which to meditate on human possibility -- aesthetic,
to be sure, but also, in Fabre's hands, communal, social and political.
As he focuses on the most primal elements -- blood and flesh -- as well
as the primary colors -- blue, green and red -- he re-locates us in
a kind of naive, non-ironic spectacle, akin to sport. It is an impressive
physical accomplishment in service of a simple, bold message -- we are
blood, we worship blood, and, yes, we still need to spill blood.