Mount Olympus de Jan Fabre — Une performance unique durant 24 heures — La Villette — Performance — Slash Paris

Past: Friday, September 15, 2017

Jan Fabre, Mount Olympus — La Villette Ce 7 juillet ouvre la billetterie pour assister à la représentation de Mount Olympus de Jan Fabre à la Villette, un spectacle exceptionnel et hors-norme qui se tiendra le 15 et 16 septembre prochains.

Twenty-four hours is a clear unit of time: a day and a night. It is also a basic unit of action: all actions take place within this twentyfour hour cycle. It includes time for working, eating, relaxing and sleeping; for making love, arguing, debating, seducing, enjoying, fulfilling obligations, nurturing, hating and believing… everything that people do in every twenty-four hour period. And there is also a well-defined unit of space: the stage, that dark mirror of the world, that dark place where the imagination briefly flares and then fades away again.

Jan Fabre’s twenty-four hour project is an attack on time. Fabre stretches time, battles with the second hand, and makes time tick faster or miss a beat. He intensifies the moment, that eternal here and now of the theatre, in a maelstrom of images that carry the viewer off to a different experience of time, a labyrinth in time where one wanders, lost between forever and never, yesterday and tomorrow, sleeping and waking, dream and reality. There is no present in the twenty-four hour project. It is a labryrinth of lost time, frozen time, melting time. Fabre transports you to a temporal landscape that swells or shrinks as time can only on stage. He breaks time open so that you can slip into an altered state of consciousness, felt in the ticking of the second hand.

Mount Olympus de Jan Fabre © Wonge Bergmann

A time without telos.

With four generations on stage, this monumental project is an exceptional one for Fabre, who showcases every dimension of his theatrical work after more than thirty years of experience. The actors include old hands from his very first productions, but also a clutch of young talents. In times of crisis it is useful and essential to think big. The twenty-four hour project is conceived on a grand scale and takes a fresh look at the boundaries of what can be said and shown on stage. It is a theatrical experience in the strictest sense of the word, a life spent in the theatre, twentyfour hours long, without interruption, one long current, one uninterrupted scream. The actors wake and sleep on stage; the stagehands wake and sleep on stage; the dramaturges wake and sleep on stage. For twenty-four hours, Fabre constructs his images out of their stolen dreams.

Telos without time.

Time is a free fall, from the present into the past and vice versa. The production is inspired mainly by Greek mythology. But the Greeks are stripped of their explanatory mode, of their excess of sympathetic humanism, and reduced to the primal substance of their stories, cruel and shocking. Fabre’s interest is in indecipherable Greek heroes such as Antigone, Prometheus, Oedipus and Elektra, before they were neutralized by by the psychoanalytic tradition. They perform acts that are impenetrable, speak language that trails off into hesitations, silences, death rattles, vomiting or wordless screams. The moment of anagnorisis, of recognition, never comes: this world of Greek myth is dominated by darkness, the incomprehensible, pure violence, insane love. Fabre shows us the battlefields where his heroes fight out their wrath, their revolt and their passion.

Twenty four hours long. The Trojan War never ends.

This twenty-four hour project cannibalizes theatre. For an entire day and night the scraps are digested and then ejected through the passage where everything ends up. In the process, Fabre metamorphoses theatre. As he has all his life.

Luk Van den Dries

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