Linda Adami, Christian Bakalov, Katarina Bistrovic-Darvas, Annabelle Chambon, Cdric Charron, Ivana Jozic, Goran Navojec, Antony Rizzi, Kasper Vandenberghe
concept, direction, choreography, scenography
Jan Fabre
Jan Fabre earned his household name status in Europe for combining controversial, uncompromising content with meticulously delivered, polished form.
Fabre the producer doesn’t disappoint here, bombarding the audience with a series of scenes by turns sleek and shocking.
It’s his message of Western decay that after we’ve been relentlessly pounded with it for nearly two hours begins to sound rather old.
With his notoriety preceding him, the audience can guess that Fabre’s up to no good right at the beginning, when gymnasts, looking not unlike the men from the 118 118 adverts in their white briefs, warm up on stage while they’re taking their seats.
Indeed, the moment the lights go down they start frantically masturbating in what appears to be an endurance race for the number of orgasms achieved.
The rest of the show is filled with similarly grotesquely humorous episodes: a fashion photographer turns a witless Jesus into a supermodel, pregnant women painfully give birth to groceries that drop into their shopping trolleys, penis-nosed freaks get tortured Abu Ghraib-style and are later forced to shop.
Masturbation and sexual humiliation are the red threads linking up these otherwise disjointed scenes. Fabre’s message is clear: sexual perversion equals consumerism, equals the culture of fear, equals militaristic excesses of the Bush administration. We’re all drones captured in the capitalist machine, dehumanised in a meaningless quest for gratification, oblivious to the political reality around us. Despite the sexual explicitness of it all, there are no couples in Fabre’s universe; everyone’s reduced to mere masturbation.
It’s a cynical picture with considerable artistic potential, but in the end Fabre’s take on it turns out to be rather simplistic. He’s anti-everything and thinks everything is a sell-out, but there’s not much he’s got to say apart from that.
It’s all summed up rather neatly in the final scene where the performers vent their anger, screaming fuck you the audience who came to see us naked, fuck you performance artists who piss on the stage and think you’re saving the world, fuck you Americans with your fast food, and so on. But after he’s told everyone to fuck off, Fabre seems to have little else to tell us.
That is not to say that we’re not told to fuck off in a very compelling and stylish way. The actors are all physical performers par excellence, and the staging is all sleek chrome, naked bodies and high-energy choreography. It’s like Stomp with a message, and when he’s not resorting to puns with come there’s even some quite funny dialogue.
But compelling as all of this may be, ultimately the show is intended to be a satire and as such it fails. Despite his explicit imagery, Fabre’s likable presentation and simple message ultimately seek to flatter his audience rather than make them question their values. Fabre’s short scenes invite us to mock empty-headed wasabi-beans-eating nouveau riche, shake our heads as Abu Ghraib excesses are compared with the daily shopping frenzy, laugh scornfully at a white trash couple who spout racist nonsense on their trip to McDonald’s. But the laughs come all too easily. I strongly suspect that the Queen Elizabeth Hall audience don’t think of themselves as tasteless or racist. If the production is meant to make its public face up to its own perversions (as the programme notes promise) it misses by a mile, as was confirmed by a rather euphoric ovation at the end.
Yes strangely enough, apart from a handful that left by the time one of the performers started shoving a rifle up his rear, the audience seem to have loved the show. Maybe I’m missing something. Or maybe that was Fabre succeeding in his flattering game: if you think of yourself as anti-everything enough to identify with his anti-everything message, then you can feel truly gratified in feeling yourself superior to the ugly, sold-out world he’s depicting. And then eat your wasabi beans.
