23/9/2018 Traductor de DeepL

Ode to the status quo

In his most recent performance Belgian Rules / Belgium Rules Jan Fabre quotes extensively from
Belgian visual culture. For example, the image in this article is inspired by René Magritte. A man in
a black suit and with a black umbrella stands next to a naked woman whose upper body is painted
air blue - just like Magritte's. The difference is that the woman urinates on stage. She becomes a
being of flesh and blood. Or better, of flesh and urine.

No, there is nothing wrong with the image of the peeing cloud woman ('It rains!'). Historically, you
could even say that it is a positive evolution that all this 'can' be done on stage. But shouldn't we be
more ambitious than that? For why exactly this attempt to relativize or even ridicule the Belgian
arts? Would there really still be people today who experience this as subversive or critical?

Moreover, the framework that Fabre knits around the performance makes the eyebrows frown. As
is often the case in his productions, the director has text declaimed that legitimises his own artistic
practice. The audience is told that the theatre is a place of ecstasy, beauty and transgression and
that the director must be able to show what he wants. When a nodding black face appears on stage
within that framework, it becomes really clear how problematic this poetics is. The performance is
presented as an ode to the so-called 'Belgian imperfections', but above all it creates a visual
language that does not allow itself to be questioned. Existing power relations are not only
perpetuated, they are even condoned.

It is therefore not surprising that Fabre sometimes seems blind in his oeuvre to the way in which he
simply approves prevailing clichés about masculinity and femininity in his work. Even when he
leaves the heteronormative framework and stages homosexuality in Mount Olympus, for example,
this is reduced to a confrontation between two aggressive, sexual bodies that take each other in a
controlled and powerful way. The image of sex between two men here is merely stereotypically
crude against crude.

The carnal, almost demonstrative nudity that Fabre has patented, may have broken down in pre-
internet times. Today this is more like a repetition of the inventive porn that can be streamed for
free everywhere. The result is above all a status quo. The director reduces physicality and sexuality
at best to spectacle and cliché. Or as in the case of the pissing cloud woman: if nudity does not
yield much more than flat pipi-kaka-humor, while it is presented as the beautiful, true art, that is at
best rather gratuitous. Or how an outdated view of man and the world can lead to an outdated and
uncritical artistic language.

https://www.deepl.com/translator 1/1