In December of 1982, an uninformative and roughly photo-copied invitation
arrived on my desk at the ICA Theatre in London. It requested my presence at
a tiny theatre in Brussels on Boxing Day. The performance, directed by a
twentyfour year old artist from Antwerp, would be eight hours long.
Now I received a lot of invitations. Somehow I knew that this one demanded
proper and immediate attention. Perhaps it was because of the image on the
leaflet: a naked baby thrown between outstretched arms. Perhaps it was
because my curiosity was aroused by the lack of supporting documentation.
Perhaps it was because there was a lot of good new rock music coming out of
Belgium at that time, always an accurate sensor for potentially interesting
cultural developments. Perhaps it was because the performance was eight
hours long: the ICA had already presented the longest play in the world at
twenty four hours - but that had intervals, this had no intervals.
Perhaps it was all these things; but mostly it was the naiveté which assumed the director of a London venue would be interested enough in his work to travel to the reputedly most boring city in Europe on a sacrosanct public
holiday to spend a working day in the darkness of an unknown theatre. It was
innocent flattery. It worked.
In the event, there was no suitable public transport on Boxing Day, so I had
to go later. I sat transfixed, immobile, for the promised eight hours. The
performance carried the most cumbersome and yet the most accurate title I
had encountered: "This is theatre like it was to be expected and
foreseen". It looked better in Flemish. But it was right. It was what I
had been hoping for in vain, a new young generation who had re-invented the
idea of theatre. Perverse, obstinate, systemic, monochromatic, rejecting all
conventional entertainment values, narrative and character, it pointed to a
kind of theatre which was already as genuinely and fundamentally innovative
as developments in other contemporary art forms.
I booked it. Subsequently, it played all over Europe and in the States; but
not as extensively as Fabre's third major project The Power of
Theatrical Madness. This performance was devised for the elaborately
decorated interior of a nineteenth century proscenium arch theatre. Again,
though, Fabre worked with an exact economy of means. Stripped bare black
stage. White screen the length of the back wall. Some slide projections of
classically inspired painting. No theatre lighting, just a grid of bare
bulbs. Uniform black and white suits for the fifteen performers. Some
surprises: four glitter suits, two naked princes with orbs and crowns, a lot
of live frongs, a couple of parrots. And a mere four hours and forty minutes
long. Even the possibility of a conventionally placed interval, indicated by
all of the performers doing nothing but simultaneously smoking cigarettes on
the stage after the completion of a grueling on the spot running race
through theatre history.
At the core, for me, there was an episode worth recording, for it gives
something of the flavour of the work. In the midst of other actions a
dancer, her back to the audience, stage centre, executes the slow movements
of a ballet exercise. And repeats it exactly, and again, and again. Its
precision has a formal, classical beauty. But through extended repetition,
the precision begins to decay. Balance is lots, the muscles begin to move
involuntarily. Sweat on the back soaks through the white shirt. The sequence
is now uncontrolled, painful to watch, painful to execute, the product of a
mad, crippling self-determination. This is not acting. This is real. On and
on, the once smooth and elegant sequence now a parody of almost autonomous
jerking, the bravery of persistence modifying the ugliness of the action.
Eventually she stops, still and upright. The relief shared by the audience
is tangible. She walks to the back of the stage, scoops up a naked dead
prince, complete with orb and crown, turns triumphant to the audience with
the man in her arms - and smiles, a dazzling, radiant smile.
The power of theatrical madness.
And the music? The music as it is heard in the theatre? It is never used
symmetrically, literally, or as illustration. At times, it provokes the
action, as when the urgent pulse of Maximizing the audience forces
the men to dance against all restraint. They wrestle with their
opponents to win this freedom, turning their clothes inside-out to reveal
glitter suits. Only when the music is abruptly cut off are their heads
jerked back by the hair, a surprised cry ringing through the sudden silence
of the theatre, their celebration of the music brought to a violent halt. At
times the music does battle with the action and augments it, as when the
rising crescendos of Circles drown the cries for attention from the
performers whilst they extol their wares - invisible clothes - to the two
naked but crowned princes. At times, the music endows the action with an
emotional force as when, in the final sequence, the elegiece Whisper
me is heard gently whilst the four princes struggle to carry their
sleeping princesses from the back of the stage to the front. As they are
laid down each princess miraculously awakes and flounces back to her
original position, and the action is repeated. The men grow tired, the task
becomes more difficult, the distances shorten. The beautiful, slow cadences
of the music bring a compassion to this obsessive action, and the apparently
irreconcilable relationships finally resolve themselves in stillness and
silence. The congruence of sound and image is materly.
What does it all mean? Referential, modish, fin de siècle, explication would take a book. What is the achievement? Let me simply quote the ironic coda. Two parrots are brought onto the stage. In an image which pays simultaneous homage to the artists Max Ernst and Marcel Broodthaers, Fabre - with justification - sanctifies himself within the canon of the "Avant-garde". The announcement of his accession is made, with all possible eloquence by the voice of a parrot.
Actually, Brussels is not a boring city at all; Antwerp, I'm told, is even
better... and I'd give anything to spend next Boxing Day watching The
Power of Theatrical Madness.
John Ashford, December 1984