1
Tragic theatre is a rare phenomenon, in our time as well as in the past. All in all, it was only in a few decades that the greatest works of the tragic tradition have come to be born: during a few decades in classical Athens; a few decades of English Renaissance; a few decades of the French classic tragedy. This is not as surprising as it may seem at first glance. Tragedy is essentially about transgression, it is the theatre par excellence where we experience how social norms, laws of behavior and rules of morality are profoundly violated. Therefor it always took a certain courage for a civilization to endure the spectacle of overstepping exactly the norms and laws of the “cultural intelligibility” (Judith Butler) which are necessary for the functioning of society. And exactly this impulse of acting against the norms of measure, restraint and morality is key in tragic theatre and provides it with a power that often was named “catharsis”. We seem to need tragedy (as we need, say, the image of the criminals and outlaws, extreme behavior of many kinds and catastrophe) in order to make it possible that our unconscious and half-conscious desire for these transgression takes shape in images and can be “worked through” as Freud would have said. It is a little like with rituals: we need them to give a form to strong affects in ordeer to endure them better.
That tragedy epitomizes a culture of violating boundaries is true already for the ancient Greeks who presented in their tragedies exactly the opposite of what was taught by their philosophers day by day: restraint and keeping the measure. In this sense we must meticuloulsly distinguish the real tragic theatre of today from a theatre which often happens to be a mere museum of tragedy. No tragic theatre is possible wich like a well-behaved child stays in the gutter of established practice. Tragic theatre must somehow remain an exception from routine, also from the routine of theatre: by a controlled transgression of limits – limitations of physcial endurance, of moral rules, of theatrical norms.
Aristotle already understood tragedy as a kind of attack on the spectactor: as a means of achieving healing, catharsis, through a passing fever of affect that makes the subject lose composure. But today this basic gesture of the tragic is under double and triple threat: by the inflation of mere sensations which only fake and parody transgressions; by the imperious demand to observe the laws of harmless, more or less commercial entertainment; and by an all-pervading superficial political “correctness” and a wide-spread moralism also in matters of art.
Nietzsche was one of the first to acknowledge the cental truth that on the contrary the core of the tragic is beyond all moral conceptuality; while it manifests at the same time a radical affirmation, a passionate “yes” to life, notwithstanding death and all the sufferings, that this life may hold in store for us. It was, he argued, precisely because Greek culture took such a deep, “pessimistic,“ look into unavoidable pain, constant strife, and defeat, that it had to invent tragedy as a way to endow the destructive experience of the Dionysian abyss with a shape: the Apollonian. Only artistic form makes it possible to face such experience at all, to endure its terror. by aestheticization. And on the other hand it was the “aestheticization” of terror by tragedy that made it possible to celebrate and glorify the intensity of the tragic.
2
This is a helpful formula for understanding the theatre of Jan Fabre. Since decades, Fabre has advanced with impressive consequence a theatrical discourse exploring the forms that tragedy may assume in the present day. Long before planning Mount Olympus, he often explicitly connected his work which occupies a fascinating space between performance and dance to the “Gesamtkunstwerk” that ancient tragedy was. In so doing, he stands in a tradition initiated by Artaud, who spoke with respect to the actors in his “Theater of Cruelty” of “athlets of the heart”. At the same time, Fabre’s theater proves very contemporary: he is able to “quote” the tragic tradition in a “postmodern” manner: self-reflective and meta-theatrical. He gives up the strict traditional separation between satirical and tragic mood. Tragedy is present here beyond the dramatic rules. In Mount Olympus the stories are not told, but the fundamental gestures of tragedy are evoked: gestures of the human being which are understandable for our feeling even without the context of dramatic story telling: the tension between the individual hero and the collective of the chorus; the dance; the ritual aspect. More than being witness of dramatic dialogues we find ourselves adressed by the monologic human voice: the solo-voice of prophecy, the lone voice uttering sadness, terror and protest, the voice imploring, begging for mercy.
Fabre’s theater touches on themes like salvation, the soul’s revolt against its embodiment, the body’s eternal refusal to be enchained by the mind. Thereby it takes on a spiritual dimension – and more than anywhere in those moments when it seems to make only the phsical, the erotic, the body object of a ritual celebration. In the last instance it is about nothing less than a prayer, a yearning for redemption. Fabre knows: since we live in a world that has been abandoned by the gods, we encounter ourselves only where we share our loneliness, the experience of being lost, emptiness, and mortality. For example, in the theater.
Fabre likes to call his actors “warriors of beauty,” and views their acts of laying themselves bare and risking self-humiliation as a kind of sacrifice. In his theatre the performer is essentially naked, even when wearing clothes. We experience with our senses again and again the endangered body, bound in the strictest, choreographic discipline, then again presented in a chaotic collapse,. One may ridicule it, turn away in disgust, or voice “moral” protest. However, it is also possible to experience deep mourning and shed “tears of the body” for its similariry with the animal being — a state we may long for, yet remain closed off from, like by the gates of paradise. Fabre revives something of the experience of the kinship between humans and animals. He thinks of tragedy as a tragedy of the body. Like very few other artists of our time he crosses the border between theater, installation, visual art, and performance in this spirit of tragedy.His art reminds us, that the flipside of our civilization of images of the “perfect” commercial body is precisely the denial of the “real” body, which is made up of sweat, smells, urine, shit, trembling, weakness, fearful desires, illness, defects, sexual drive and deviation from the norm.
3
Without some violation of taboo, no tragic art can exist. If it would not risk injury or insult, it woild amount to no more than mere entertainment. Theater that dedicates itself to the tragedy of overstepping must risk touching something in us — painfully, embarrassingly, frighteningly, and disturbingly — which has been forgotten, repressed, and no longer reaches the surface of consciousness. Therefor we must say: not the theatre work and the art of Jan Fabre is morally reprehensible, although it contains what is deemed by many as morally unjustifiable. Truly detestable morally is on the contrary theatre that remains – harmless, theater that does not hurt, but lets us contentedly remain secure in our culture. It is such “culture” that continuously forgets — and wants to forget — the catastrophe objectively befalling almost all the bodies of this world. But time and again, “moral” reproach — which, in fact, is deeply amoral — takes aim at precisely those artists who stir up trouble below the surface in the forbidden recesses of culture.
Fabre’s theater demands of viewers that they open themselves to this repressed reality — to what is otherwise not allowed onto the stage, what is supposed to remain behind the scenes, obscene (ob-scaena). But it is at the same time impossible for the specator of Mount Olympus to miss the complemenatry artistic dimension of this work which again and again rewards the spectaor for the patince he needs for this singular long time performance of 24 hours: we may call it Fabre’s so to say classical quest for – Beauty. This theater is space for shared and reflected affectivity, and the especially “Fabrian” juxtaposition of bodily excess and highly formalized structure allows even in the extremes of physical stress a powerful formal beauty. The human body, the body of erotic attraction, the body of energy and full of life – here we can find it. The body is glorified, and it is put severely to test – but with not the slightest hint of the aggressive sports-ideology with its violence, which here finds on the contrary sarcastic critique.
Beauty thus remains an essential feature of this tragic theatre. It is visible particularly in the incredibly energetic and dedicated performers: all of them radiating a power about which I can say, judging from my experience of watching the rehearsals, that I have witnessed it rarely if ever before in a group of actors. The spirit of the chorus as a collective is there, while individually all of them are fascinating and attractive appearances, endowed with a beauty as a man or a woman close to perfection. But the beauty connects to the dreamlike aspect of the piece (which comes to the fore in the explicite dream texts of the director) and to the durational quality of its set up which invites the viewers to dive down and share the passage into the mythical dream-time of the theater of tragedy.
Hans-Thies Lehmann, June 2015