Fabre (E) - depot voor het VTi

JAN FABRE 

BY 

ADRI DE BRABANDERE 

KRITISCH THEATER LEXICON 

VLAAMS THEATER INSTITUUT 

1998

the critical theatre lexicon is a series of portraits of 

major dramatic artists of the twentieth century. these 

portraits are commissioned by the flemish theatre 

institute and the four universities: u.i.antwerp, 

university of ghent, k.u.leuven & v.u.brussels. this 

publication forms part of an all-embracing historical 

project on the performing arts in flanders in the 

twentieth century. the editorial board comprises theatre 

academics from the four universities and people from the 

theatre world. publication started in september 1996. 

BIOGRAPHY 

AND ARTISTIC VIEWS 

Jan Fabre was born in Antwerp on 14th December 1958. He 

studied there at the Municipal Institute of Decorative Arts and 

Crafts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He still lives and 

works in Antwerp. He is an artist, a dramatic artist, a playwright, 

an opera director, stage designer and choreographer. His 

work does not so much spring from a single discipline as from 

ideas, symbols and concepts. It is therefore no coincidence that 

in his early years he emerged chiefly as a performance artist, to 

whom the concept and the event itself were more important than 

specific skills. 

Performance artists often use their own life as the subject of 

their artistic story. In 1977 Fabre renamed the Lange Beeldekenstraat 

in Antwerp as Jan Fabrestraat. There’s a plaque in the street 

saying that Vincent van Gogh lived and worked there. In 1978 

Fabre hung up a similar plaque about himself. While still young, 

Fabre was determined to be recognised as an artist. He wanted to 

take his place among the greats. It is typical of him that he does 

not want to leave the comparisons to the art reviewer or critic, 

but wishes to appropriate his own place in art history. 

He created his first stage performance at the age of 22. His first 

full-length ballet opened in 1987, and his first opera in 1990. His 

visual work will only be touched upon indirectly in this monograph. 

In carrying out his projects, Fabre works with a fairly 

consistent group of staff under the name Troubleyn (called 

Projekt 3 up to 1986). 

‘It is not only what the audience sees on the stage that’s important, 

but what is above the stage too, and much more. The heavens 

above the stage. It is the excitement of the unknown. The 

absence.’ 1 This is how Fabre expresses the transcendent dimension 

he is aiming for in his work for the stage. We can see this 

fascination for what is not immediately present in his visual work 

too. For example, in his ‘mental model’ De man die de wolken 

meet (The man who measures the clouds) or in the model De 

andere kant is interessant omdat het de andere kant is (The other 

side is interesting because it is the other side). The absent and the 

5/ Kritisch Theater Lexicon - 10 e - December 1998

jan fabre 

present are woven into a game of appearance and disappearance, 

and of changes. Metamorphosis is perhaps the most significant 

theme in Fabre’s work. It is a theme that manifested itself very 

early on. He was already doing drawings of changes and mutations 

in his Project voor nachtelijk grondgebied (Project for the 

nocturnal domain) in the garden of his parents’ house. Insects, 

and especially beetles, which seemed to rise from the dead after 

their lives as larvae, became his symbols. The blue ink of the ballpoint 

pen was also symbolic of metamorphosis. By covering 

objects entirely in blue ballpoint they were transformed into irrational 

hallucinations. They were covered over with a veil of blue 

scribbles so that they disappeared as much as they appeared. In 

his Grondgebied, Fabre made an enclosed space with old tent 

canvas (De Neus) (The Nose). The enclosed space appears frequently 

in his work. It is the place to which one can withdraw. 

Also the place where the metamorphosis can occur. He considers 

the theatrical space as one such enclosed space. It has its own 

laws of vision. It leads to stillness and silence. A half-light prevails 

there in which forms dissolve into one another and where 

the eye and the ear have to fill in for each other. And yet sound 

may ring out there too. Fabre himself sees two trends in his theatrical 

work: ‘on the one hand there is the withdrawal, the 

notion of retreat, and on the other losing oneself, the medium 

that kills itself. Kills out of respect for things, not out of disrespect. 

Just as the night transforms into day, the two tendencies 

complement each other.’ 

The theatre, as an enclosed space, implies that the spectator 

remains an outsider. He can look into the space as if into a peepshow, 

but he cannot enter it. This closedness means that much of 

Fabre’s theatrical work appears to loom up out of nothing, without 

context. It is a personal world in which things are easily 

given an absolute gravity. In Fabre’s work the context is one of 

the hidden or problematic elements. And yet his work does not 

abide in a vacuum, but is situated within the Flemish and international 

theatre landscapes. And in several places it enters into 

an interaction with the reality outside the theatre. 

Particularly in his early period, Fabre clearly had a preference for 

untrained actors. He maintains that his performances should 

look like those he sees when he shuts his eyes, but even so his 

working method is largely based on the dancers and actors them- 

6/ Kritisch Theater Lexicon - 10 e - December 1998 

biography and artistic views 

selves. He understands the art of guiding their contributions to 

the point he is aiming for. He calls his actors and dancers ‘warriors 

of beauty’. Fabre likes using military metaphors. ‘One has 

to prepare for theatre, ballet or opera as if for a war,’ he says. But 

according to him his work must also bear traces of the heart. 

This does not mean a direct expression of emotion, but the honesty 

and commitment he demands from his performers. Fabre 

wants to recapture a refuge for beauty together with his warriors. 

According to Bart Verschaffel this means his art is neither modern 

nor avant-garde. 2 

The aestheticising of his work can at least in part be put down 

to the spectator. The spectator’s perception is never entirely original 

and pristine. There is always a degree of prior knowledge. 

One’s view is directed by writings on Fabre, his work and on theatre 

in general. Fabre himself realises this only too well and also 

makes use of it. Sometimes it seems he wants to direct the discourse 

regarding his work too. 

This monograph mainly takes the point of view of the spectator. 

This leads to several limitations. It is difficult to get the context 

into the field of vision. After all, the gaze is held by the peepshow. 

And that cannot be viewed from the inside out. In addition 

to this there is also the realisation that the authentic spectator 

does not exist. This is why the report of what has been seen is 

interwoven, implicitly and explicitly, with existing writings on 

Fabre. But even so, it is to be hoped that, with the gaze of an 

attentive spectator and in the confrontation between looking and 

reading, something will appear of what may easily remain hidden 

behind a veil of myth. 


PERFORMANCE, THEATRE, 

DANCE AND OPERA 

Is Jan Fabre the street urchin from the working-class area of 

Antwerp who suddenly, from a no man’s land, emerged with 

impressive performances like De macht der theaterlijke dwaasheden 

(The Power of Theatrical Madness)? In this monograph the 

origin of Fabre’s theatrical world is traced to his performances as 

an artist. In fact we find there quite a few characteristics and elements 

that were to recur in his later work. During the performance 

period (1976-1981), Fabre also wrote a number of plays 

and was working as a set and costume designer for the Nieuw 

Vlaams Theater. In terms of both recognition and development 

of the content of Fabre’s work, the performances were more 

important than both the other activities. 

But the performances did not arise out of nowhere either. Fabre 

and his performances were linked to the wave of happenings of 

the sixties and seventies. Among other things, his performances 

display a great similarity to the activities of the Fluxus group and 

Joseph Beuys in particular. In 1974 Beuys had himself shut up for 

several days together with a coyote. He had wrapped himself in 

a felt blanket for protection. Fabre took up such topics as the 

conflict between culture and nature, the translation of concepts 

that put art up for debate, into acts in which the artist himself 

becomes the main issue, imprisonment and the restriction of freedom 

of movement, etc. During this period of performances, ‘the 

beautiful’ was in any case not yet the self-evident category that 

had to be fought for. Conceptual artists had a great influence on 

Fabre. For example, Art as cultivated boredom (Fabre, 1981) 

was reminiscent of Ben’s Art is useless from 1967. 

Conceptual art does not keep to the firm division between the 

various artistic disciplines. Fabre was also to work in a variety of 

fields. There is no point in asking him whether there was a school, 

institution or theatre company where he learnt his trade and 

where his roots might lie. Lacking an immediate learning environment, 

he took his examples mainly from abroad. He also looked 

to the past to find his masters: the Dadaists and the Surrealists. 

Fabre moved from one art form to another: from art to performance, 

theatre, ballet and opera. In modern times there has been 

8/ Kritisch Theater Lexicon - 10 e - December 1998 

performance, theatre, dance and opera 

an increasingly far-reaching differentiation between art forms, a 

growing independence of the disciplines. Some people see Fabre 

as a pre-modern artist, others as post-modern. But he has left the 

boundaries between the artistic disciplines intact, even though, as 

an artist, he himself crosses them with ease. 

Performances 

Performances: real bodies in real time in real actions. Fabre was 

17 when he first went into action on the streets of Antwerp. A 

few years later, in 1980, he gave the performance entitled Money 

(art) in culture as part of a symposium on art and culture at the 

University of Ghent. He was noticed there by Curtis L. Carter, 

the chairman of the Marquette University Committee on the Fine 

Arts in Milwaukee, who invited him to the United States. 3 While 

there he performed After-art, Sea-salt of the fields and Creative 

Hitler act. 

Money (art) in culture was preceded in 1979 by Money performance 

and in 1980 by The rea(dy)make of the performance 

money. In all three performances money was destroyed and 

burnt. It is self-evident that these performances contain a critical 

reflection on the work of art as a commodity. And yet the role of 

money is ambiguous. The performances would miss their target 

if fake money was used. This provocative negation of the value 

of money (whether out of purely artistic considerations or not) 

had its effect precisely because the performances posit this monetary 

value and in a certain sense confirm it. 

In the Money performance, Fabre wrote words like ‘money’ 

and ‘honey’ on the floor using bank notes. This evoked the same 

confusion as in La trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas un pipe) 

by René Magritte. The distance cannot be bridged between the 

bank notes with which he made the words, and the same notes 

as an embodiment of value. Fabre then violently widened the gap 

between the money as paper and as value. He folded the notes 

into paper darts, tore them up, ate them and finally burnt them. 

According to economists, since the dollar was uncoupled from 

the gold standard in 1978, the value of money has ultimately 

become a question of trust, of belief. Fabre considers the notes in 

their purely material capacity, as paper. Whereas the stage is usually 

considered the setting for illusion, Fabre turns the relation- 


jan fabre 

ship back to front. The performances and Fabre’s later work too 

challenge the illusions of reality by showing the fictitious as literally 

and physically as possible. But the context remains the 

stage, and therefore by definition the illusion. This game between 

being and semblance and the probing of the boundaries between 

the two is incorporated into the whole of Fabre’s work. At the 

end of the Money performance, the word money is written in the 

pile of ash from the burnt bank notes. The thing itself has vanished, 

the word remains as a space between the remnants. 

In Fabre’s early work, the presence of Marcel Duchamp is even 

stronger than that of Magritte. Once can already see this in the 

titles of the performances The rea(dy)make of the performance 

money and Sea-salt of the fields. The latter title is a literal translation 

of the name Marcel Duchamp. In that performance Fabre 

wrote the word ‘art’ on the floor in salt. He then scattered the 

salt over the heads of the audience as the materialisation of the 

spirit of Duchamp. In Fabre’s performance, Duchamp the artist 

himself became a sort of ready-made. Duchamp was present as a 

concept, and at the same time he was represented by salt. All 

Fabre’s work is extremely conceptual, but this is always combined 

with a powerful visual language. 

Fabre arrived at his performances chiefly out of a confrontation 

with the history of art, which he in fact explicitly incorporated 

into them. In Ilad of the Bic-Art (Ilad is an anagram of 

Dali), Fabre looked in a book of reproductions of the old masters. 

He hung some of them on the wall. He daubed on others, 

or tore them up. He handled these masterpieces the same way as 

the bank notes in the Money performances. With the same irreverence 

as Duchamp when he said ‘use a Rembrandt as an ironing 

board’. Art is stripped of its traditional aura. But the same ambiguity 

prevails as in the Money performances. Just as the value of 

money remains upheld so that the performances will work, in the 

same way art maintains its charisma. The search for a place of 

one’s own in art history, the struggle against its terror, also 

exposes a great respect for it. 

In Ilad of the Bic-Art and Ilad of the Bic-Art, the Bic-Art room, 

Fabre introduced his ballpen art as an alternative to Big art. ‘Bicart 

is pseudo art’, is what he wrote on the walls of the bic-art 

room in which he shut himself up for 72 hours. During these 

three days he drew and wrote on just about everything in the 

room. Just as in the other performances, word-play and self-ref- 

10 / Kritisch Theater Lexicon - 10 e - December 1998 


erences occur frequently. He laid out a number of ballpens to 

form the words ‘bic-art’. According to Duchamp, what ultimately 

makes a work of art is the artist’s signature. Fabre’s ballpen 

scribbles function as signatures, whereby the objects are registered 

as artistic. Fabre also writes and draws on his own body. 

One performance was all about the artist’s body. In Window performance 

(1977) Fabre sat in a display window and let snails 

crawl over his body. In My body, my blood, my landscape (1978) 

he drew with his own blood. In The rea(dy)make of the performance 

money Fabre appeared as a bird, clad in bank notes. In 

Ilad of the Bic-Art he stood naked amongst the reproductions. At 

this point the duplication appeared that was to recur frequently 

later on. Fabre stood amongst the reproductions as if he were a 

work of art himself. He then walked away from his place as if his 

likeness remained hanging on the wall. He repeated the same 

thing on the other side of the room. There was also a duplication 

in After art (1980) in which he put on the clothes lying inside an 

outline drawn using shaving cream. A little later he spread the 

shaving cream on his face and looked in a mirror. 

He gave these performances with a serious and boyish conviction, 

as if he had to follow instructions. This implied a certain 

rhythm and created an emotional distance with regard to his 

actions. Although the commitment of the artist was central to the 

performances, one cannot imagine Fabre’s work without this distance 

or discipline, and it continued to be a feature of his stage 

work. This distance was accompanied by an almost mathematical 

timing and, more especially, by a highly pronounced sensitivity 

to the geometric division of space. Fabre says that he discovered 

performance when he was working as a window-dresser and 

was confronted with the passers-by. In addition to his need for 

direct confrontation and the urge to show and experience artistic 

actions as an event, the arrangement of objects and the search 

for the right place for things were to remain characteristic of his 

work. 

The first stage trilogy 

Between 1980 and 1984 Fabre created his first three stage plays, 

by which means he introduced performance art into the theatre. 

Theater geschreven met een K is een Kater explored the possibil- 

11 / Kritisch Theater Lexicon - 10 e - December 1998

jan fabre 

ities of a written text on stage. The play deals with sex, violence 

and frustration. The text was brought to the stage in a variety of 

ways: as a graphic element, as spoken words and in the action of 

writing itself, by typing the text on the spot. The things that took 

place under the writer’s gaze were horrific and brutal: humiliations, 

torture and rape. Fabre called it ‘the theatre of personal 

cruelty’, referring to Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Both the 

actors and the text were put under pressure and assaulted. But 

however genuine the action might be for the actors (at the risk of 

prosecution for indecency), it remains theatre. 

In Het is theater zoals het te verwachten en voorzien was, the 

physical presence of the actors was subjected to further investigation. 

The play was as long as a working day. It seemed as if the 

twenty or more scenes were in no particular order and lasted for 

ages. There was no story, no characters, nor any emotional 

empathy. The actors hardly acted, but just carried out instructions. 

Two actors endlessly dressed and undressed. In another 

scene two actors ran on the spot, while describing a day in keywords 

and half-sentences. Sand trickled slowly onto the floor out 

of plastic bags hung up on hooks while actors jumped, fell, leapt 

up, jumped, fell, and so on. This endless repetition enabled reality 

to creep into what were originally acted scenes. The actors’ 

bodies reacted genuinely: they were exhausted, sweaty, and 

sometimes upset. The dramaturgy and the course of the performance 

was based on these physical reactions. The spectator was 

also overcome by real time: by boredom, hunger, fatigue, as well 

as involvement. Just as in the performances, this is (in Fabre’s 

words) ‘about the intensity of the physical and mental transfer of 

energy’. Its duration and repetition enables the real to seep into 

the theatre. But this does not mean it abandons the theatrical 

form. According to Emil Hrvatin, all theatre functions on the 

basis of repetition and the play Het is theater zoals het te 

verwachten en voorzien was was in fact a play about the basic 

principles of theatre. 4 But precisely because the repetition introduces 

reality, it is also faced with its own impossibility. Not a single 

action is carried out in the same way twice. The actors 

become so tired that they can no longer maintain the original 

form. The repetition does not just make the form of the action 

abstract, it makes the form disappear. As endless as the repetitions 

seem, they do have a limit. Fabre said: ‘Theatre is an exercise 

in disappearance’. 



Apart from these repetitions, Het is theater zoals het te 

verwachten en voorzien was also includes visual scenes in which 

the actors form tableaux vivants that make art historical references. 

In De macht der theaterlijke Dwaasheden, the link 

between theatre and painting is made more explicit. Highly 

enlarged paintings by Michelangelo, Ingres, David, Fragonard 

and others are projected onto the back-cloth. In most cases they 

depict frozen action which has its counterpart in the action on 

stage. The paintings themselves are more reminiscent of theatre 

than of real life. Most of them portray an heroic or mythological 

story. In one of the scenes four of the actors carried four actresses 

from upstage to downstage and lay them on the floor. Picot’s 

Amor and Psyche was projected onto the back-cloth. The continued 

repetition of the action makes it become dogged – it 

almost turns into a dragging – and the form disappears (though 

it can still be seen in the background). We then see Victory by the 

Le Nain brothers on the back-cloth, in which a woman stands 

triumphantly next to the body of a man. 

In another scene the actors run on the spot as in Het is theater 

zoals het te verwachten en voorzien was. Once again they 

become exhausted. In the meantime they shout out dates, cities 

and names: Peter Brook, Heiner Müller, Robert Wilson, etc. A 

theme is made not only of the relationship with the history of 

painting but also with that of theatre. At the start of the play all 

the actors are pushed off the stage. They all clamber back on 

again, except for Els Deceukelier. Every time she tries to climb 

back onto the stage, she is roughly prevented from doing so by 

one of the other actors. The date 1876 is repeatedly shouted at 

her. Worn out and desperate, she finally screams out the password: 

‘Richard Wagner, Ring des Nibelungen, Festspielhaus 

Bayreuth’. This reference to the beginning of modern theatre and 

the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk turns out to be the right password 

to be allowed onto the stage. At the end of De macht der 

theaterlijke Dwaasheden an actress lies over the knees of an actor 

sitting on a chair. He hits her until she shouts ‘Het is theater zoals 

het te verwachten en voorzien was, Jan Fabre, Stalker Theater’. 

The link between the beginning and the end of the play, between 

Wagner and Fabre, has been made. Fabre himself introduces into 

the theatre the discourse on the position of his own plays. 

Curtis Carter also invited Theater geschreven met een K is een 

Kater to the United States as well as several performance pieces. 


jan fabre 

Het is theater zoals het te verwachten en voorzien was also toured 

abroad. A year after it opened it was performed in Flanders again 

(at Klapstuk 83 in Leuven). As a reaction to the play’s negative 

reception the year before, after the first scene Fabre had the 

actors read out fragments of theatre reviews throughout the performance, 

which lasted more than seven hours, which did not satisfy 

the audience’s expectations of theatre (which was after all the 

subject of the play). Fabre was ranked among the vanguard of the 

day. Together with play-makers like Jan Joris Lamers, Gerardjan 

Rijnders and Jan Decorte he was responsible for a breach. As Luk 

Van den Dries put it, their plays contained a feeling of both 

despair and expectation, and audiences old and new grappled 

with each other, leading to a tornado that swept the theatre 

squares completely clean. 5 

Arnd Wesemann argues that Fabre has succeeded in abandoning 

realism and liberating theatre from the obligation to imitate, to 

illustrate, to represent and to summon up meanings. 6 Just as 

Kandinsky talked not of abstract but of concrete art, in Fabre’s 

case one can speak of concrete theatre. 7 The action does not refer 

to a story that has to be told and that takes place within the space 

of the theatre. Running represents nothing other than running. 

The question of where the runner is going and where he has come 

from are pointless here. Even the words spoken on stage have to 

be understood within the immediate theatrical context. In this 

sense the use of several languages is no hindrance to comprehension. 

After all, a genuine dialogue never occurs, nor is any 

lengthy train of thought presented. Fabre was to keep on using 

various languages in his later pieces too: English, Dutch, German, 

French, Italian, Japanese, etc. 

One scene in De macht der theaterlijke dwaasheden shows 

frogs, which have jumped out of a dish, being caught. A crown 

is put on the floor. There are kisses. Everything points to Grimm’s 

fairytale, in which a frog turns into a prince. But the dream is 

stamped into the ground, literally: the frogs are squashed. 

Nevertheless, in the meantime a prince has appeared on the stage, 

and a little later his double. They are naked. They dance a tango 

to the death march from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. A scene in 

which the other actors dress and undress recalls Het is theater 

zoals het te verwachten en voorzien was. We are no longer in the 

fairytale of the frog-prince, but in the one about the Emperor’s 



new clothes. According to Fabre the essence of theatre is that the 

audience wants to be deceived. This makes the whole exposition 

of what is real in Fabre’s plays rather dubious. It’s true that running 

on the spot really does exhaust the actor, but the running is 

acted. Fabre himself says it’s ‘doing and acting’. There is a scene 

in which two actors walk towards each other blindfold, one of 

them singing Isolde’s Liebestod and waving a knife right in front 

of the other’s face. Its genuine danger makes this a breathtaking 

scene. And yet it is still perceived as theatre. The tension and the 

song create an endearing beauty to match that of the naked 

dancing emperors. To Jan Hoet’s question of whether he is in 

search of the absolute beauty, Fabre replied: ‘Does the pure or 

the absolute exist? Isn’t everything representation, isn’t everything 

illusion?’ Fabre presses hard on the dichotomy between fiction 

and reality. Despite the injection of reality, Fabre’s theatre 

always remains theatre, thanks to the complicitous trust of the 

audience. 

While the actor with the knife was singing Isolde’s Liebestod, the 

others moved piles of plates and walk over them. When the scene 

with the knife ended, all the plates were smashed to smithereens. 

On the back-cloth appears Bernardino Luini’s Salome receiving 

the head of John the Baptist (on a plate). The beauty Fabre creates 

evokes pain, lost illusions and death. 

The choreographic works 

In the eighties Fabre regularly expressed his thoughts about contemporary 

dance. He had doubts about the freedom with which 

the human body was treated and about the possibilities for free 

expression. He criticised dance. And yet he was at that time 

already working with dancers like Wim Vandekeybus, Marc 

Vanrunxt, Annamirl van der Pluijm and Eric Raeves. The possibilities 

offered by dance and ballet were already investigated in 

the first theatre trilogy. Dance scenes were integrated into Het is 

theater zoals het te verwachten en voorzien was, choreographed 

by Fabre and Marc Vanrunxt. In De macht der theaterlijke 

dwaasheden Annamirl van der Pluijm repeated the same ballet 

movement for a very long time, with her back to the audience. 

This scene turned out to foreshadow Fabre’s first full-length 


jan fabre 

choreographic work, De danssecties (The Dance Sections), which 

were a preliminary study for his opera trilogy and were presented 

at Kassel in 1987. In 1993, at the invitation of William 

Forsythe, Fabre created The sound of one hand clapping for 

Ballet Frankfurt. In 1993 he also made Da un’altra faccia del 

tempo, and in 1995, on commission to the National Ballet of the 

Netherlands, his fourth choreographic work Quando la terra si 

rimette in movimento. In 1995 he reworked solos from these 

choreographic works into Drie solo’s (Three Solos). Dance and 

ballet also occupy a substantial position in his theatre trilogy of 

the body and in De Vier Temperamenten (The Four Temperaments) 

made in 1997. 

In De danssecties, elementary movements from classical ballet 

were executed with excruciating slowness. But this near stillness 

was deceptive. Classical ballet demands great discipline in terms 

of energy and movement. Emil Hrvatin pointed out the resemblance 

to Michel Foucault’s concept of discipline: ‘The historical 

moment for discipline is the birth of an art of the human body 

which is not directed solely towards increasing skills, nor confirming 

its subordination, but towards the creation of a relationship 

which, with a single mechanism, makes the body more usable 

by making it more obedient, and vice versa.’ Fabre demonstrates 

the discipline: the dancers appear slow and immobile, but their 

energy is bubbling inside. His intention is not to liberate dance 

like Isadora Duncan, who spoke of dance as the language of the 

soul. It is that he wants to show the truth of ballet precisely by 

radicalising the discipline. But by magnifying the essence of ballet 

like this, by having slowness and precision combine, he comes up 

against the limits of dance. It is no longer about movement but 

about posing. Rudi Laermans sees a connection here with the origins 

of the ballet tradition. 8 During the Quattrocento, the art of 

dance was in a certain sense synonymous with the art of standing 

still, the posata or posa. But the discipline comes up against 

another boundary too. Complete standstill proves to be impossible. 

Every disruptive vibration of the muscles is visible, especially 

when the dancers are in lingerie. The radicalisation of the discipline 

magnifies the visibility of that which evades the disciplining. 

The back-cloth for De danssecties was completely covered in 

blue ballpoint scribbles. When the piece opened in 1987, a series 

of drawings entitled Het uur blauw (The Hour Blue) was exhibited. 

9 In this title Fabre was making reference to a distant rela- 



tive, the entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915), who called 

the moment between night and day ‘the blue hour’. Jan Fabre 

adopted this idea: ‘When the nocturnal animals go to sleep and 

the diurnal animals awake, there is in nature a moment of sublime 

silence during which everything splits, bursts open and 

changes. I went in search of that moment, to ingest it. It is a space 

between day and night, between life and death, in which undefinable 

things take place.’ It is not so much the bursting open that 

interests Fabre as the moment just before it. The blue of the 

ballpen drawing is calming, but is still brimming with tension 

and energy. Seen from a distance, the lines cannot, or only barely, 

be distinguished. And yet the blue is not even. It vibrates. Each 

ballpen line is an event. The whole thing draws you into an insidious 

depth. The dancers radiate a similar apparent calm. But 

behind the silence lies tumult, and every slow movement is an 

occurrence. When the dancers are wearing blue, ball-penned costumes 

it looks as if they are freeing themselves from the backcloth. 

At a certain moment in De danssecties their hands are tied 

together with the ribbons of their ballet shoes. Standing on the 

balls of their feet, with their freedom of movement literally 

bound, the dancers vibrate along with the lines of the drawing. 

According to Jan Fabre, choreography is drawing in space. He 

compares the positioning of the dancers (in geometric patterns 

such as the V-form in De danssecties) with a ball-pen line that 

intersects and divides a plane and thereby creates a new space. 

Hrvatin calls Fabre’s choreographic method topographical and 

thereby once again makes the link with Foucault’s concept of discipline. 

According to Foucault, the prison discipline leads to a 

division of space and to the formation of tableaux vivants that 

transform the unordered, pointless and dangerous mass into an 

organised whole. In De danssecties the actress Els Deceukelier 

stands with her back to the audience in the middle of the blue 

back-cloth. Seen from the ideal position in the audience, she is at 

the vanishing point of the perspective. De danssecties were 

designed from the point of view of the spectator and unfold as an 

organised and symmetrical whole. Although the scenic image 

appears static, the patterns are constantly changing. A permanent 

process of transformation takes place. Or as Fabre likes to 

express it, ‘the movement is generated in the spaces between’. 

The immediate space the dancers and their movements occupy, 

the ‘kinesphere’ as Rudolf von Laban described it, is also cleft by 


jan fabre 

the movements. These movements are just as sharp and angular 

as the scissors suspended above the stage, just as symmetrical and 

just as frightful. However, it seems that the cutting open of space 

is a failure. The dancers lose the struggle they join with their own 

kinespheres. Precisely because their movements are so severe and 

rigid. When they dance in suits of armour their imprisonment in 

their own kinesphere is also emphasised. It makes the articulation 

of the movement clearer, but also the deliberate restriction 

of the vocabulary of movement. 

Hrvatin calls the physical topography of De danssecties homotopic: 

they are dominated by a principle to which everything is 

subordinate. However much Fabre is oriented towards a homotopic 

structure, there always remains a heterotopic residue. In the 

dark middle section of The sound of one hand clapping the heterotopy 

is clearly deliberate. The dancers shriek, sing, count, run 

on the spot, jump, repeat the scissor movements from De danssecties 

and come on in headless suits of armour. Even so, this 

impenetrable chaos does have a certain structure. Several levels 

can be distinguished and the chaos alternates with sharply delineated 

movements carried out synchronously. The joints of the 

armour recall the joints of insects. The dancers lie on their backs 

like beetles and move their arms and legs in the air. One appears 

to be removing the fleas from another. Other dancers sit furiously 

scratching to rid themselves of the vermin. Impulsive movements 

are deployed against academic ballet. In this way the 

insects fulfill a double purpose: on the one hand they stand for 

strictly structured mechanical movements, and on the other they 

evoke the image of uncontrolled, chaotic wriggling. The dancers’ 

bodies are heterotopic: they are of two orders: one of discipline 

and one of impulse. 

In Da un’altra faccia del tempo the chaos is occasionally so 

immense that Hrvatin no longer mentions topography. Angels 

and devils appear. The movements sometimes become convulsive, 

although the alternation with codified academic movements 

remains. The dancer who plays the part of a devil exhibits his 

naked body in a horny and obscene manner, with a fly-swatter in 

his hand. All the chaotic sections summon up plagues of vermin. 

Els Deceukelier and Marc Van Overmeir are smeared with jam 

and then covered in down from a pillow. They run towards each 

other like two bizarre angels and burst out laughing as if they 

wish to ironise the whole play. 



It appears from all his choreographic work that Fabre (still 

largely from the point of view of a performance artist) is interested 

in the human body: the way the body reacts to discipline 

and how the disciplined body reacts to chaos. But in contrast to 

the earlier performances, Fabre’s choreographic work is expressly 

intended to create beauty. And in Fabre’s work beauty has to 

do with gloss, with transparency, with calm and quiet, with seriousness 

and loftiness, and also with a childlike fairytale atmosphere. 

The beauty which is in danger of being lost in our hectic 

society has to be recaptured and guarded. De danssecties and 

The sound of one hand clapping have two guards in armour. 

They watch over an unknown realm that seems to shine out of 

the glint emitted by the hallucinatory play of blue lines, ‘a field 

of expectations’. At the end of Da un’altra faccia del tempo hundreds 

of broken plates fall to the floor. Three dancers in white 

lingerie appear in the cloud of white dust from the rubble. The 

whole stage setting gleams. The dancers slowly go through the 

familiar strict movements amongst the fragments. After the dark, 

redly glowing hell this scene has a breathtakingly sublime beauty. 

A glimpse of the other side of time. 

But it is not Fabre’s intention to create gracious, elegant or virtuoso 

dance. He reduces the language of ballet to an elementary 

vocabulary, especially in the sections in which order prevails. 

This is in essence very different from the way William Forsythe 

is renewing, or at least deconstructing, classical ballet, and leads 

to a highly complex language of dance in which the mid-point or 

centre of gravity of the movements wanders around the dancers’ 

bodies to such an extent that the kinesphere is broken open. The 

connection between the two lies rather in the basic principle of 

dismantling classical ballet from the inside out than in any similarity 

of content. For that matter, in Fabre’s work this ‘from the 

inside out’ is relative in meaning. Since in Fabre’s work the stage 

space is a peepshow, his own position as a choreographer is that 

of an outsider, a spectator. He does not choreograph from the 

point of view of the dancers, although they contribute the movements 

themselves. In a certain sense he sees the dancers as imprisoned 

in the peepshow. And that is also the way he looks at them: 

fixing and reducing them. He imposes a strict framework on 

them. And sometimes it does seem as if the dancers are yearning 

for freedom. Even in the most chaotic sections, with figures and 


jan fabre 

scenes reminiscent of Bosch and Ensor, imprisonment weighs on 

them. The dancers cannot break out of their bizarre world, a 

world which spectators can only look at from the outside and 

which therefore remains largely foreign to them. Each choreographic 

work articulates in a different way the tension between 

the restrictions imposed and the dancers’ own idiom of movement. 

In Glowing Icons, Antony Rizzi, Forsythe’s assistant, 

dances Neil Armstrong’s steps on the Moon. The lower gravity, 

the gulps of oxygen the astronaut takes, and the heaves and 

surges of the movement make this solo an extremely fluent, 

dance-like and, in a certain sense, un-Fabresque dance. It even 

seems as if Rizzi, out there in space, has been able to escape the 

restrictions. 

The opera trilogy: The Minds of Helena Troubleyn 

After his first three pieces for theatre Fabre decided to devote 

himself to opera. He considered the institution of opera as a bastion 

that had to be conquered. De danssecties were a preliminary 

study for his first opera Das Glas im Kopf wird vom Glas, which 

opened at the Flanders Opera in Antwerp in 1990, and which 

was the first part of his planned trilogy. The sound of one hand 

clapping was a preparation for the second part, Silent screams, 

difficult dreams, whose opening closed Documenta in Kassel in 

1992. At the present time there exist only preliminary studies for 

the third part (La liberta chiama la liberta): Da un’altra faccia del 

tempo and Quando la terra si rimette in movimento. Fabre was 

both the librettist and the director of these operas. He was also 

responsible for the lighting, the costumes and the set design. The 

music was composed by Eugeniusz Knapik, a student of Gorecki, 

whose music was used for De danssecties. It was Knapik’s first 

opera, written at Fabre’s request. Knapik had never previously 

shown interest in opera. He considered a sung dialogue absurd. 

But the two parts of The Minds of Helena Troubleyn are not traditional 

operas with dramatic action or a mythological narrative. 

The language Fabre uses is primarily symbolic, although there is 

a narrative element. The whole trilogy is about Helena 

Troubleyn, a character based on a woman Fabre had known 

since his childhood and who had died in 1984. A woman who 

lived in a world of fantasy. Fabre was attracted by her personal- 



ity and her stories (her ‘lies of the imagination’). Despite her urge 

to self-destruction, Fabre saw her as the embodiment of the 

strength of beauty. At the end of her life she sang constantly as if 

she could thereby cast out her fear of death. She looked like an 

eagle, the creature which, in the opera, is struck by an arrow 

made from its own feathers. This woman dreamt of meeting herself 

as a child. She talked out loud to an imaginary child. In the 

opera this child, who never replied, is called Fressia, from the 

Italian word for arrow. 

Fabre created a new mythology, linked to his own symbolism. 

It united recurring elements from earlier work. They acquired a 

familiarity and at the same time a new layer of meaning was 

added. Das Glas im Kopf wird vom Glas was set entirely on a 

stage coloured blue with ballpen: the blue hour. The twilight 

zone between reality and dream which Helena Troubleyn inhabits. 

Blue is also the colour of fidelity (Troubleyn: stay true). In the 

first scene of Das Glas im Kopf wird vom Glas, the character 

called Il Ragazzo con la luna e le stelle sulla testa (the boy with 

the moon and the stars on his head) is introduced. He throws 

scissors up in the air, which then stay suspended in the heavens 

like stars. He gives Helena advice and comments on her fantasies. 

The people close to Helena react dismissively to her imagination. 

She combs her long blonde hair, sunk deep in her own thoughts. 

Or else she lights candles which are then repeatedly put out by 

her women friends. The situation changes when her fantasies 

become reality in the form of the silent Fressia, who, when she 

first appears, floats horizontally high up against the back-cloth. 

Armoured guards protect her world. She combs and cuts 

Helena’s hair. They tickle each other. But Helena has a vision in 

which she sees herself falling and dying. Hairs float downward. 

The opera ends with the flight of the eagle, which lands on the 

stage. 

The second opera, Silent screams, difficult dreams, starts where 

the first ended: with the eagle’s flight from the balcony to the 

stage. The second part of the trilogy is about Helena’s power (the 

third part is about the decline of her power). In Silent screams, 

difficult dreams, Helena guides her three women friends into her 

world. Fressia cuts her hair with her scissors, or pretends to, just 

like Helena. The two of them pile up plates and clamber on top 

of them. They turn round on top of these tall stacks. Fressia lets 

out a stifled scream. In the next scene, in front of a curtain of 


jan fabre 

black beads, the dancers move about like insects. The chorus 

creeps along the floor. Fressia and Helena’s identical costumes 

are pulled upwards. Helena sings about the end of the past and 

history. An enlarged silent scream is projected on the back-cloth. 

Il Ragazzo descends from heaven. Fressia stands naked on a pile 

of plates, holding an arrow. Locks of hair drop to the floor. 

Helena looks at herself in a plate and the chorus smashes a pile 

of plates. 

The symmetry of the choreographic works is developed even 

more forcefully in the operas. The members of the chorus are 

dressed in historical operatic costumes (like the dancers’ costumes, 

made from material coloured blue by hours of patient 

ballpen work). The singers’ actions are kept to a minimum. And 

very slow. Most of the time they take up positions in symmetrically 

arranged tableaux vivants. Each member of the chorus has 

a double. According to Fabre, symmetry is a sign of the destructive, 

a challenge to an all-embracing devastation. Fressia is ‘the 

personal ego as an Other’. She is Helena’s double, the embodiment 

of Helena’s yearning for communication, the incarnation of 

the absent, which is expressed most emphatically in the silence of 

the scream. But she is also her downfall, the arrow that will fatally 

wound her. 

There is not only the eagle. There is also an owl on Il Ragazzo’s 

shoulder. Stefan Hertmans points out that the creature is indeed 

real, but that it is only allowed into the theatre as a symbol. The 

owl and the eagle always have to remain still, acting the platonic 

idea of themselves. Hertmans compares them to the dancers. 

After all, the dancers, who have become immobile, have also 

been reduced to a concept of themselves. Just as the entomologist 

Jean-Henri Fabre pinned his insects under glass, Jan Fabre pins 

the dancers, who seem to lapse into a form of botany, to the 

stage, to remind us of their species, of the idea of what ballet 

used to be. 10 In this sense the operas seem to appeal to something 

that belongs to a distant past, or at least to a twilight zone 

between knowing and imagining, in the same way as a nineteenth-century 

taxonomy of insects appears to belong in the twilight 

zone of science. The disappearance of a species, insects as 

heralds of death: they have in the meantime become familiar 

ingredients in Jan Fabre’s art work. Het graf van de onbekende 

computer (The grave of the unknown computer) is a bizarre 

insect graveyard. Passage III is a cross made out of beetles, just 


[1] De macht der theaterlijke dwaasheden. Choreography and directing: 

Jan Fabre. Project 3, June 1986. Imperial dance, with Wim Vandekeybus.

[2] Das Glas im Kopf wird vom Glas. The Dance Sections. 

Choreography and directing: Jan Fabre. Troubleyn, March 1990. 

[3] The sound of one hand clapping. Choreography and directing: Jan Fabre. 

Troubleyn / Ballett Frankfurt, December 1990. With William Forsythe’s 

dancers, including Stephen Galloway (middle). 

[4] Een doodnormale vrouw (Jan Fabre). 

Director: Jan Fabre. Troubleyn, September 1995. With Els Deceukelier.

[5] Glowing Icons. Director: Jan Fabre. Troubleyn, May 1997. 

With Renée Copraij and Elsemieke Scholte. 

[6] De keizer van het verlies (Jan Fabre). Director: Jan Fabre. 

Troubleyn, May 1996. With Dirk Roofthooft. 


as the dress Mur de la montée des anges is made out of tens of 

thousands of beetles, and in which one can recognise the empty 

form of a body. 

In Fabre’s work the stage space is built up from the middle, from 

the central point of view of the Royal Box. From here the stage 

is given perspective and depth, which are enhanced by the 

ballpen blue. But, as Bart Verschaffel noted, it is a false depth. 11 

The figures on stage are empty, they have no psychology, no history. 

The operas do not put forward any truth or moral values. 

The depth is artificial. The characters and qualities are imprisoned 

in a spell that vanishes as soon as the meaning is questioned. 

This both infinite and oppressive magic world, peopled 

with figures and elements that seem to originate from the Middle 

Ages and the Baroque period, is a glorification of pure and serious 

beauty. Without irony. So why is this art not kitsch? 

According to Verschaffel, Fabre’s art is like the art from before 

kitsch was thought of, before sentimentality, before the modern 

belief that the emotions can lead to understanding and deliverance. 

And therefore from the time before Romanticism. 

Fabre’s work can be described as an anachronism. But by typifying 

it this way one might lose sight of the topicality and the 

genuine historicity of the work. It is precisely its relationship 

with Romanticism that could be even more clearly delineated. 

The palpable tension in Fabre’s operas between the sublime or 

transcendent and the tangible or earthly was a major theme at 

the beginning of the last century. It has had an influence on ideas 

about art and artists up to the present day. The impasse and the 

leaning towards self-destruction bound up with this tension can 

also be found in Fabre’s operas. Related Romantic notions of the 

contrast between purity and impurity and of the artist as a genius 

are not unfamiliar to Fabre either. 

Monologues and other stage performances 

Fabre likes to make reference to existing work. This is very 

explicit in De keizer van het verlies (The Emperor of Loss) 

(1994), for example. One can hardly keep count of the implicit 

references to other plays, such as the literal repetition of a stage 

setting. De keizer van het verlies is dedicated to Marc (Moon) 


jan fabre 

Van Overmeir, who was already working for Fabre in 1982. 

Fabre has often written plays for particular actors. Vervalsing 

zoals ze is, onvervalst was written for Els Deceukelier in 1992. 

Both actors have also performed earlier plays: Marc Van 

Overmeir the monologue Wie spreekt mijn gedachte... written in 

1980, and Deceukelier Zij was en zij is, zelfs from 1975. 1995 

saw the opening of Een doodnormale vrouw (A Dead Normal 

Woman), the third solo for Els Deceukelier. The four solos in De 

vier temperamenten (The Four Temperaments) were also created 

specially for actors and dancers who have worked with Fabre 

recently or in the past: Renée Copraij, Wim Vandekeybus, Marc 

Vanrunxt and Annamirl van der Pluijm. 

In 1989 in Frankfurt, Fabre staged for the first time three plays 

he had written between 1975 and 1980: Het interview dat 

sterft... (The Interview that Dies), Het paleis om vier uur ‘smorgens... 

A.G. (The palace at four o’clock in the morning) and De 

reïncarnatie van God (The Reincarnation of God). In Het interview 

dat sterft... four actors speak their lines extremely slowly: 

they leave an interval of five seconds after every word. Every 

word becomes an event, but the meaning of the sentences is in 

danger of eluding the listener. The silence is more expressive than 

the words. The conversation itself seems to die. An extremely 

constraining setting reduces the acting to a minimum, just as the 

suit of armour hampered the movements of the dancers. This is 

also the case in other plays. In Wie spreekt mijn gedachte... 

(1992), Marc Van Overmeir wears a rabbit costume and is given 

electric shocks. In De reïncarnatie van God two actresses stand 

immobile behind overturned pianos for almost the entire performance. 

The consequence of this fixation is the abstraction and 

even the disappearance of the actor. This is reduced to a purely 

physical appearance. And the body is also often reduced to a 

mere object, as if it were being viewed through Sartre-esque eyes. 

The same thing happens with the language. Its disintegration in 

Het interview dat sterft... results in an abstraction of the meaning, 

leaving only a voice that is extremely precisely timed but 

almost entirely reduced to sound. But sometimes acting does get 

a chance. For example, the way Dirk Roofthooft acts De keizer 

van het verlies is comparable to the non-Fabrian dance by 

Antony Rizzi in Glowing Icons. It is often intriguing to see how 

the actors and dancers react in different ways to fixation or literal 

imprisonment. Sometimes it seems as if that’s why Fabre 



does it. Fabre himself is driven off the stage to the place of the 

spectator by this ‘imprisonment’ in his directing. By contrast 

with many directors and choreographers he leaves no trace of his 

own motor system or physicality on the stage. 

For that matter, it is not only the actors who resist fixation. 

The cats, mice, spiders and birds Fabre puts on stage want to 

escape. Or else they thrash about like the fish in Het interview 

dat sterft... for their lives. As Hertmans noted, the animals on 

stage are indeed reduced to the platonic concept of themselves, 

but this reduction is not painless. Even the owl’s indifference to 

what is happening on stage summons up the sorrow of banished 

and vanished life. 

De reïncarnation van God is about Emile, a character based on 

Jan Fabre’s brother, who died at an early age. In this play the 

other characters are Emile’s brother Jean and the twin sisters Vera 

and Velsa. The same twin-sister actresses play the duplicated 

interviewer in Het interview dat sterft... There are also twin figures, 

in the form of Karl May and Effi Briest in Het paleis om vier 

uur ’s morgens... A.G. And De keizer van het verlies has a dummy 

as twin brother. And in Vervalsing zoals ze is, onvervalst the 

duplication is made expressly into a theme in the model and the 

copy. Strangely enough, symmetry and the double also signify a 

deficiency or a lack. This lack becomes tangible in silence: the 

silence between the words in Het interview dat sterft..., the long 

silence in the first scene of Het paleis om vier uur ’s morgens... 

A.G., in which the two brothers, without speaking a single word, 

protractedly interview the sphinx pictured on the back-cloth (a 

scene that ends with the explosion of the microphones); the 

silence surrounding the portrait of Emile in De reïncarnatie van 

God; the silence in which the character in Wie spreekt mijn 

gedachte... lives, which hypersensitively picks up the slightest 

sound. Silence is the sound of what is absent, of loss. Sigrid 

Bousset calls it the silence behind glass. 12 Glass filters and 

removes the sound, reflects and deludes. Bousset points to Marcel 

Duchamp’s Large Glass. Duchamp called this work a deceleration 

in glass. Zij was en zij is, zelfs refers explicitly to Duchamp’s 

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even (The Large 

Glass). As a bride, Els Deceukelier is the reincarnation of 

Duchamp’s erotic machine, whose only function is making love, 

‘again, and again, and again...’ The repetition is the mechanical, 


jan fabre 

built-in lack: eternally travelling from desire to fulfilment. For 

that matter, ‘and again, and again, and again’ is prototypical of 

Fabre’s plays. The literary is reduced to an invocative incantation. 

The trilogy of the body: Sweet Temptations, 

Universal Copyrights 1 and 9 and Glowing Icons 

Fabre fixes and reduces dance to poses, language to isolated 

words, drawing to a line of ball-pen. He then repeats the poses 

countless times or holds them unbearably long, lengthens the 

enervating silence between the words, and infinitely multiplies 

the ball-pen lines. When he thereby creates what is usually a symmetrical 

order, it is almost amazingly meticulous. But the chaos 

produced by the explosion of what has been ordered is correspondingly 

great. This chaos was already present in Theater met 

een ‘K’ is een kater. There is a striking resemblance between the 

way this chaos is organised in Het paleis om vier uur ’s morgens... 

A.G. and The sound of one hand clapping, in which both 

actors and dancers stand in position at microphones. The chaos 

in Sweet Temptations is reminiscent of both these plays. This latter 

piece, which opened in 1991, is part of a wave of ‘assembled 

productions’ (as Luk Van den Dries calls them) in which chaos 

and madness are brought to the stage like a collage and with an 

‘open form of dramaturgy’. Others include Count your blessings 

by Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Wilde Lea by Blauwe Maandag 

Compagnie and Stella by Rosas. 13 

Sweet Temptations is the first part of the theatre trilogy about 

the body. The second part, Universal Copyrights 1 and 9, 

appeared in 1995, and the third, Glowing Icons, in 1997. The 

three pieces differ in their approach, colour and dynamics. The 

first is about the physical body, the second the spiritual and the 

third the erotic. 

In Sweet Temptations, Gerald and Elias (played by the twins 

Albert and Jacques de Groot) are presented as the duplication of 

the mental body. They are elderly, sit in wheelchairs and, 

prompted by an owl, muse on life. They are the image of spiritualised 

man, modelled on the physicist Stephen Hawking. They 

are humiliated, undressed and abused by the masses, which leads 

to frantic scenes of saturnalian feasting on stage: ‘Is this the 

decade at the end of the world or just another excuse for a 



party?’ In the final scene of Sweet Temptations the actors stand 

at the front, each at a microphone. They speak, shout and 

scream, run upstage, where they pick a few items of clothing 

from a whole pile and put them on, run back to the front, shout 

a few sentences again, run upstage, etc. The chaos is forced to a 

peak. The physical ecstasy switches over to the language register. 

As Fabre has observed, some actors and dancers succeed in using 

the word as a part of their body. The roles or characters the 

actors play lose their individual significance as a consequence of 

the excess and chaos. All that remains is physical bodies: the 

bearers of the characters. Or not even that? Sweet Temptations is 

just as much about the absence of the physical body. The bodies 

are empty, indefinable. Only the costume can be seen. The 

numerous changes of costume at the end make the body vanish. 

Universal Copyrights 1 and 9 is also about the absence of the 

body, in this case of the spiritual body. What is left of this body? 

Something clown-like, which torments rather than amuses. Or 

scary ghosts: a sheet under which nothing is hiding. Finally, 

Glowing Icons takes us to a picture gallery of famous and fairytale 

figures we know from film and TV. Here we see the disappearance 

of the erotic body. It is nothing other than a narcissistic 

reflection, an illusion. 

The body is first and foremost an image. An image that the 

media have given a life of its own and about which one may 

wonder to what it refers. The theme of duplication in image and 

referent is linked to Fabre’s motif of twins or doubles. The twins 

from Sweet Temptations play two tormentors in Universal 

Copyrights 1 and 9. A double image may create confusion 

regarding the referent. This also puts the relationship between 

the actor and the character up for discussion. Who is acting 

what? Are they acting the same character? In the final scene of 

Sweet Temptations, the chaotic dressing scene, the character is 

made questionable by the frequent changes. According to Fabre, 

the dancers’ and actors’ own ‘self’ regularly becomes palpable 

and visible. Glowing Icons has a similar closing scene. The actors 

stand at the front of the stage, again each at a microphone. One 

can hear fragments from the live reporting of man’s first steps on 

the Moon on 20th July 1969: ‘one small step for a man, one 

giant leap for mankind’. The magnification of ordinary human 

qualities to mythical proportions is the subject of the whole performance. 

In the final scene this spreads to the actors themselves. 


jan fabre 

In the actors’ chaotic discourse in amongst the fragments of news 

reports, the actors identify with the grandiloquence of their characters. 

And yet the actors do not coincide with their characters. 

Their bodies are the bearers of various roles. They reflect several 

images. But whatever is concealed behind these mirror images 

slips away into the unknown. The actors’ bodies were the main 

issue in such plays as Het is theater zoals het te verwachten en 

voorzien was. It was a guarantee of authenticity and reality. Now 

it fades away in a hall of mirrors. It appears as a void, like the 

marks in the ash spelling the word ‘money’. 

Fabre’s performances can be read as an indictment of mediatisation. 

And theatre provides a sanctuary for the authenticity 

hoped for from the body. But his pieces can also be seen as an 

extension of media culture instead of being in opposition to it. 

The disappearance of the body then seems like an inflation of 

reality to a simulacrum and hyper-reality (in Baudrillard’s 

words). The body vanishes by over-illumination. It becomes 

obscene. The theatre itself can also be called obscene because the 

insane profusion of the signs it uses makes them into pure 

objects, empty forms. Yet in this way the signs once more become 

fascinating and magical. Because they link up to form dream 

images: stripped of inner meaning, their exterior, purely material 

resemblances make them stick together. But this is also why this 

theatre seems strange to us, just as strange as our own dreams. A 

few remnants of which we are able to recognise, but which still 

appear to originate from another world. 

Most of the many publications on Jan Fabre describe his work as 

an independent world. There are more causes underlying this 

than just the theoretical point of departure, articulated or not, on 

the independence of works of art. Fabre’s views of the theatre 

space and his fantastic autonomous world urge upon us the perspective 

of isolation. From the very first plays in the early eighties, 

external factors have reinforced the impression that this fantastic 

world, and Fabre himself, appeared out of nothing. For 

example, his early international recognition, when people in his 

own country did not yet know of him or did not yet want to 

know about him. Or his recognition as an artist, which quickened 

his recognition as a play-maker (both his theatre work and 

artistic work were present at the 1984 Venice Biennale and the 

1992 Documenta in Kassel). 



As a play-maker, Fabre assumes the position of the spectator 

and thereby banishes himself from the stage. All his performances 

focus on the body, but his own physicality remains invisible. 

In this light, the autobiographical elements he introduces 

into his work from outside appear to have ended up on stage 

rather by chance, as if they were anecdotes that form no essential 

part of the work itself. In so doing, Fabre (not only as an 

individual, but also as a play-maker) makes himself disappear 

behind a mythical veil. 


jan fabre 

1. De Greef, Hugo and Hoet, Jan. Gesprekken met Jan Fabre, De Bezige Bij, 

Amsterdam; Kritak, Leuven, 1995, p. 132. Most of the quotations of Jan Fabre 

are taken from this book. 

2. Verschaffel, Bart. ‘Leven en werken van Jan Fabre (1958-1991)’ in Archis, July 

1992. 

3. Carter reports on this in Jan Fabre. Texts on his theatre work, Kaaitheater, 

Brussels, 1993, pp. 13-26. 

4. Hrvatin, Emil. Herhaling, waanzin, discipline. Het theaterwerk van Jan Fabre, 

International Theatre & Film Books, Amsterdam, Galerie Ronny Van De velde, 

Antwerp, Kritak, Leuven, 1994, p. 182. 

5. Van den Dries, Luk, in Van schommelzang tot licht. Tien jaar Theaterfestival 

1987-1996, Ekspress, 1997, p. 50. 

6. Wesemann, Arnd. Jan Fabre, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 

1994, p. 18. 

7. Lehmann, Hans-Thies, in Jan Fabre. Texts on his theatre work, p. 131. 

Lehmann refers to Renate Lorenz’ dissertation in which De macht der theaterlijke 

dwaasheden is described as concrete theatre. This classification particularly 

applies to Fabre’s first plays. 

8. Laermans, Rudi, ‘In de herhaling toont zich de meester. De “Danse Macabre” 

van Jan Fabre’, in Dans in Vlaanderen, Stichting Kunstboek, Bruges, 1996, pp. 

168-189. 

9. Het Uur Blauw, Galerie De Selby, Amsterdam, 1987. 

Het Uur Blauw is also the title of a wall-sized ball-pen drawing on artificial silk 

which is in the collection of the SMAK in Ghent. In 1988 Fabre covered a whole 

room in blue ballpoint: Der Blaue Raum, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. 

Prometheus Landschaft was performed in this room at sunrise. Even more monumental 

in scale was the Tivoli mansion near Mechelen, which was wrapped 

entirely in paper covered in ball-pen blue in 1990. 

10. Hertmans, Stefan, ‘De uil, Pseudo-Roberte, denkend blad en Heraclitus’, in 

Dietsche Warande & belfort, October 1994, pp. 611-619. 

11. Verschaffel, Bart, op cit. 

12. Bousset, Sigrid, ‘In stilte achter glas’, in Mestkever van de verbeelding. Over 

Jan Fabre, De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 1994, pp. 17-30. 

13. Van den Dries, Luk, op cit., p. 28. 


THEATRICAL HISTORY 

You will find here, arranged by year, the title of the production, the name 

of the author (between brackets), the name of the director, the choreographer, 

the dramaturge, the music, the costume designer, actors and/or 

dancers, the date of opening, the company, the venue of the opening. 

Nieuw Vlaams Theater 

1978 

7 manieren om aan de kant te blijven (René Verheezen). Director: Loet 

Hanekroot. Set & costume design: Jan Fabre. 19 May, Ankerruitheater, 

Antwerp. / In naam van Oranje (Paul Koeck). Director: Loet Hanekroot. 

Set design: Jan Fabre. 21 November, Ankerruitheater, Antwerp. 

1979 

Het souper (Rudy Geldhof). Director: Jacky Tummers. Set & costume 

design: Jan Fabre. 9 January, Ankerruitheater, Antwerp. / De oorringen 

van de knotse prins (Luk van Brussel). Director: Leo Haelterman. Set & 

costume design: Jan Fabre. 22 May, Ankerruitheater, Antwerp. / Café 

glacé (Pieter de Prins). Director: Wil Beckers. Set & costume design: Jan 

Fabre. 27 November, Ankerruitheater, Antwerp. 

1980 

Karel ende Elegast (Rafael Vandermeerschen). Director: Wil Beckers. Set 

& costume design: Jan Fabre. 25 November, Ankerruitheater, Antwerp. 

Performances 

1976 

Avondmaal. Antwerp docks. / Ik neem alles serieus maar niet tragisch. 

Antwerp Cultural Centre. / Hier leeft mijn... Offerandestraat, Antwerp. / 

Red lines performances. Performance with the poet Albert Hagenaars. 

Antwerp. 

1977 

Lange beeldekens – Jan Fabrestraat. Lange Beeldekensstraat 240, 

Antwerp. / Window performance. Offerandestraat, Antwerp. 


jan fabre 

1978 

My body, my blood, my landscape. Lange Beeldekensstraat 240, 

Antwerp. / Vincent van Gogh – Jan Fabrehuis. Lange Beeldekensstraat 

240, Antwerp. / Buy by Jan Fabre. Gallery Van Eck, Antwerp. 

1979 

Money performance. Ankerruitheater, Antwerp. / Creativity. Heilig 

Hart, Turnhout. / Wets-world project (Wetskamer). Stedelijk Museum, 

Amsterdam, Centre Beaubourg, Paris, Middelheimpark, Antwerp. / 

Wetspotten fossielen. Ommeganckstraat, Antwerp. / Bill us later. Mott 

Street Gallery, New York. 

1980 

Will doctor Fabre cure you? Galerij Workshop, Antwerp. / The rea(dy)make 

of the performance ‘Money’. Ankerruitheater, Antwerp. / Ilad of 

the Bic-Art. Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam. / Money (art) in culture. 

Communicatie en Wetenschap, University of Ghent. / Creative Hitler 

act. Saint-Louis University, Milwaukee. / American works and window 

performance, Galerij Blanco, Antwerp. / Sea-salt of the fields. Marquette 

University, Milwaukee. / After art. Helfaer Theatre, Milwaukee. 

1981 

Ilad of the Bic-Art, the Bic-Art room. Salon Odessa, Leiden. / This ain’t 

work, this is evolution. CC Ter Dilft, Antwerp. / Art as a gamble, gamble 

as an art. School of Visual Arts, New York. / T.Art. Washington 

University, Saint Louis. / The interim-art works of Jan Fabre. Peperstraat 

37, Groningen. / Performance X... l’ Art est ennui cultivé. CAIRN, Paris. / 

It’s kill or cure (work in progress). Franklin Furnace, New York. 

Theatre, opera and dance: director & choreographer 

1980 

Theater geschreven met een K is een kater (Jan Fabre). Director: Jan 

Fabre. Assistant: Alex van Haecke. Set design: Jan Fabre. Actors: Jan 

Fabre, Els Overmeire, Stef Goosen, K. Mertens, Wil Beckers, Harry 

Beckers. 16 November, Ankerruitheater, Antwerp. (Tour performances 

in Milwaukee en Chicago). 

1982 

Het is theater zoals te verwachten en te voorzien was (Jan Fabre). 

Director: Jan Fabre. Choreography: Jan Fabre, Marc Vanrunxt. 

Assistant: Christ Mahy. Set design & lighting: Jan Fabre. Costumes: Pol 

Engels. Actors: Els Deceukelier, Dominique Krut, Eric Raeves, Marc van 


theatrical history 

Overmeir, Paul Vervoort, Philippe Vansweevelt, Rena Vets, Danny Kenis. 

Music: Guy Drieghe. 16 October, Stalker, Antwerp. 

1984 

De macht der theaterlijke dwaasheden (Jan Fabre). Director & choreographer: 

Jan Fabre. Assistant: Maart Veldman. Set design & lighting: 

Jan Fabre. Costumes: Pol Engels. Actors: Ingrid Dalmeyer, Els 

Deceukelier, Marion Delforge, Marc Hallemeersch, Roberto de Jonge, 

Erwin Kokkelkoren, Katinka Maes, Annamirl van der Pluijm, David 

Riley, Werner Strouven, Wim Vandekeybus, Marc van Overmeir, 

Philippe Vansweevelt, Paul Vervoort. Music: Wim Mertens, Soft Verdict. 

11 June, Projekt 3. Goldoni Theater, Venice. 

1987 

Das Glas im Kopf wird vom Glas (de danssecties). Director & choreographer: 

Jan Fabre. Assistant: Miet Martens. Set design: Jan Fabre. 

Dramaturge: Maart Veldman. Costumes: Jan Fabre, Pol Engels. 

Lighting: Jan Fabre, Jan Dekeyser. Actors: Els Deceukelier, Maarten 

Koningsberger, Paul Vervoort, Peter Vervoort. Dancers: Erika 

Barbagallo, Tamara Beudeker, Hadewych van Bommel, Renée Copraij, 

Jemina Dury, Susanna Gozetti, Phil Griffin, Claudia Hartman, Marina 

Kaptijn, Annamirl van der Pluijm, Angélique Schippers, Maria 

Voortman. Music: Henryck Mikolai Gorecki. 18 June, Troubleyn. 

Staatstheater, Kassel. 

1988 

Prometheus Landschaft (Jan Fabre). Director: Jan Fabre. Assistant: 

Maart Veldman, Felix Schnieder-Henninger. Set design: Jan Fabre. 

Actors: Marcel Bogers, Ditmar Giradelli, Robert Rosso, Herbert Lange, 

Joachim von der Heiden, Anna Lisa Nathan, Achim Rakel, Suzanne 

Husemann. 1 July, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. 

1989 

Das Interview das stirbt... (Jan Fabre). Director & choreographer: Jan 

Fabre. Assistant: Miet Martens, Felix Schnieder-Henninger. Set design: 

Jan Fabre. Lighting: Jan Fabre, Jan Dekeyser. Actors: Sigurd Rachman, 

Ulrike Maier, Els Deceukelier, Suzanne Schäher. Dancers: Marina 

Kaptijn, Renée Copraij, Kim Adamski. Muziek: Karl Böhm. 17 June, 

Theater am Turm, Frankfurt. / Der Palast um vier Uhr morgens...,A.G 

(Jan Fabre). Director & choreographer: Jan Fabre. Assistant: Miet 

Martens, Felix Schnieder-Henninger. Set design: Jan Fabre. Lighting: Jan 

Dekeyser. Actors: Jacques de Groot, Albert de Groot, Els Deceukelier, 

Sophia Ryssèl, Kim Adamski, Tobias Lange, Sigurd Rachman, Philippe 

Vansweevelt. Dancers: Marina Kaptijn, Renée Copraij, Tamara 

Beudeker. Music: The Doors. 21 June, Troubleyn. Theater am Turm, 


jan fabre 

Frankfurt. / Die Reinkarnation Gottes (Jan Fabre). Director & choreographer: 

Jan Fabre. Assistant: Miet Martens, Felix Schnieder-Henninger. 

Set design: Jan Fabre. Lighting: Jan Dekeyser. Actors: Suzanne Schäfer, 

Ulrike Maier, Tobias Lange, Els Deceukelier. 25 June, Troubleyn. 

Theater am Turm, Frankfurt. 

1990 

Das Glas im Kopf wird vom Glas (Jan Fabre). Director & choreographer: 


Dramaturge: Maart Veldman. Costumes: Jan Fabre, Pol Engels. Lighting: 

Jan Fabre, Jan Dekeyser. Actors: Els Deceukelier, Paul Vervoort, Peter 

Vervoort. Singers: Torgun Birkeland, Lionel Peintre, Linda Watson, 

Bernadette ter Heyne, Pia Raanoja, Chorus of Flanders Opera. Dancers: 

Kim Adamski, Tamara Beudeker, Renée Copraij, Jacqueline Hopman, 

Marina Kaptijn, Anett Page, Francesca Rijken, Maria Voortman. Music: 

Eugeniusz Knapik. Musical Director: Philippe Cambreling. 7 March, 

Troubleyn, Flanders Opera. Flanders Opera, Antwerp. / The sound of 

one hand clapping (Jan Fabre). Director & choreographer: Jan Fabre. 

Assistant: Miet Martens. Set design: Jan Fabre. Lighting: Jan Dekeyser, 

Jan Fabre, Jürgen Koss. Actress: Els Deceukelier. Dancers: Kim Adamski, 

Tamara Beudeker, Renée Copraij, Marina Kaptijn, Ballet Frankfurt (+ 30 

dancers). Music: Eugeniusz Knapik, Bernd Alois Zimmerman, The 

Doors. 22 December, Troubleyn. Ballet Frankfurt. 

1991 

Sweet Temptations (Jan Fabre). Director & choreographer: Jan Fabre. 

Set design: Jan Fabre. Costumes: Pol Engels, Jan Fabre. Lighting: Jan 

Dekeyser, Jan Fabre. Actors: Kim Adamski, Els Deceukelier, Renée 

Copraij, Tamara Beudeker, Francesca Caroti, Marina Kaptijn, Tobias 

Lange, Jacques de Groot, Albert de Groot, Sophia Ryssèl, Jens 

Reichardt, Charlotte Ulrich, Philipp Danzeisen, Markus Danzeisen, 

Marc van Overmeir. Music: Iggy Pop. 17 May, Troubleyn et al. 

Messepalast, Vienna (Wiener Festwochen). / Zij was en zij is, zelfs (Jan 

Fabre). Director: Jan Fabre. Actress: Els Deceukelier. 5 September, 

Troubleyn et al. Felix Meritis, Amsterdam. 

1992 

Wie spreekt mijn gedachte... (Jan Fabre). Director & set design: Jan 

Fabre. Actor: Marc van Overmeir. 12 March, Troubleyn et al. 

Kaaitheater, Brussels. / Silent screams, difficult dreams (Jan Fabre). 

Director & choreographer: Jan Fabre. Assistant: Miet Martens. Set 

design: Jan Fabre. Dramaturge: Sigrid Bousset. Costumes: Pol Engels, 

Jan Fabre. Lighting: Jan Dekeyser. Jan Fabre. Actors: Els Deceukelier, 

Peter Vervoort, Paul Vervoort. Singers: Torgun Birkeland, Mark 

Oldfield, Christine Schweitzer, Catherine Dagois, Anne Pareuil, Chorus 


theatrical history 

of the Théâtre des Arts, Rouen. Dancers: Donatella Aglietti, Tamara 

Beudeker, Francesca Caroti, Renée Copraij, Géraldine Demange, 

Elizabeth Leigh Fleming, Magalie Glaize, Marina Kaptijn, Elisa Lenzi, 

Angélique Schippers, Magali Tissier, Françoise Wilson. Music: 

Eugeniusz Knapik. Musical director: Koen Kessels. 18 September, 

Troubleyn et al. Staatstheater, Kassel. / Vervalsing zoals ze is, onvervalst 

(Jan Fabre). Director: Jan Fabre. Assistant: Miet Martens. Dramaturge: 

Sigrid Bousset, Maart Veldman. Lighting: Jan Dekeyser. Actress: Els 

Deceukelier. 17 December, Troubleyn et al. Théâtre National, Brussels. 

1993 

Da un’altra faccia del tempo (Jan Fabre). Director & choreographer: Jan 

Fabre. Assistant: Miet Martens. Set design: Jan Fabre. Dramaturge: 

Sigrid Bousset. Costumes: Pol Engels, Jan Fabre. Lighting: Jan Dekeyser, 

Jan Fabre. Actors: Els Deceukelier, Marc van Overmeir. Dancers: 

William Artaud, Renée Copraij, Tamara Beudeker, Francesca Caroti, 

Gregor Dreykluft, Yellie Emmerink, Emio Greco, Marina Kaptijn, Elisa 

Lenzi, Thomas Moritz, Daire O’Dunlaing, Anthony Rizzi, Magali 

Tissier, Jacqueline van den Ham, Marc Vanrunxt. Music: Eugeniusz 

Knapik, Sofia Gubaidulina, Elvis Presley. 29 September, Troubleyn et al. 

Lunatheater, Brussels. 

1995 

Quando la terra si remette in movimento (Jan Fabre). Director & choreographer: 


Dramaturge: Miet Martens, Costumes: Pol Engels. Lighting: Bert 

Dalhuyzen. Actrice: Els Deceukelier. Dancers: Bruno Barat, Renée 

Copraij, Tamara Beudeker, Alfredo Fernandez, Emio Greco, Marina 

Kaptijn, Marc Vanrunxt, Valerie Valentine, Marijke Simons, Ensemble of 

the National Ballet. Music: Eugeniusz Knapik, Collage (Zimmerman, 

Dury, Beatles, Whittington Clock). 10 Februari, Nationaal Ballet. 

Muziektheater, Amsterdam. / Drie danssolo’s (Jan Fabre). Director & 

choreographer: Jan Fabre. Set design: Jan Fabre. Costumes: Pol Engels, 

Jan Fabre. Lighting: Jan Fabre, Harry Cole. Dancers: Renée Copraij, 

Tamara Beudeker, Emio Greco, Valerie Valentine. Music: Eugeniusz 

Knapik. 11 May, Troubleyn et al. KunstenFestivaldesArts, Brussels. / Een 

doodnormale vrouw (Jan Fabre). Director: Jan Fabre. Dramaturge: Miet 

Martens. Actress: Els Deceukelier. 21 September, Troubleyn et al. deSingel 

Antwerp. / Universal Copyrights 1 and 9 (Jan Fabre, Michel 

Nostradamus). Director & choreographer: Jan Fabre. Assistant: Miet 

Martens. Set design: Jan Fabre. Dramaturge: Miet Martens. Costumes: 

Pol Engels. Lighting: Harry Cole, Jan Fabre. Actors: Sebo Bakker, Els 

Deceukelier, Renée Copraij, Tamara Beudeker, Albert de Groot, Jacques 

de Groot, Emio Greco, Marina Kaptijn, Elsemieke Scholte, Jan van 

Hecke. Music: Beatles. 24 October, Troubleyn et al. Lunatheater, Brussels. 


jan fabre 

1996 

De keizer van het verlies (Jan Fabre). Director: Jan Fabre. Assistant: 

Miet Martens. Set design: Jan Fabre. Actor: Dirk Roofthooft. 10 May, 

Troubleyn et al. Koninklijke Vlaamse Schouwburg, Brussels. 

1997 

The very seat of honour. Choreographer: Jan Fabre. Assistant: John 

Wisman. Dramaturge: Miet Martens. Dancer: Renée Copraij. Music: 

Iannis Xenakis, Robert Fripp. 1 February, Troubleyn et al. Kaaitheater, 

Brussels. / Lichaampje, lichaampje aan de wand (Jan Fabre). Director & 

choreographer: Jan Fabre. Assistant & dramaturge: Miet Martens. 

Music: Frank Zappa. Actor(s): Wim Vandekeybus, (Sachiyo Takahashi). 

22 April, Troubleyn et al. Kaaitheater, Brussels. / Glowing Icons (Jan 

Fabre). Director & set design: Jan Fabre. Assistant & dramaturge: Miet 

Martens. Costumes: Lies van Assche, Claudine Leliaert. Lighting: Jan 

Fabre. Actors: Tiny Bertels, Renée Copraij, Els Deceukelier, Albert de 

Groot, Anthony Rizzi, Elsemieke Scholte, Sachiyo Takahashi, Jan van 

Hecke, José Verheire. Music: Charo Calvo. 13 May, Troubleyn et al. 

deSingel, Antwerp. / The Pickwick Man. Choreographer & set design: 

Jan Fabre. Assistant & dramaturge: Miet Martens. Dancer: Marc 

Vanrunxt. 7 October, Troubleyn et al. Klapstuk 97, Leuven. / Ik ben 

jaloers op elke zee. Choreographer: Jan Fabre. Assistant & dramaturge: 

Miet Martens. Dancer: Annamirl van der Pluijm. 13 October, Troubleyn 

et al. Klapstuk 97, Leuven. 

1998 

The fin comes a little bit earlier this siècle (BUT BUSINESS AS 

USUAL). Director, designer & choreographer: Jan Fabre. Actors: Els 

Deceukelier, Jan Decorte, Renée Copraij, Katia Noelmans, Sandra 

Noelmans, Jurgen Verheyen, Sigrid Vinks + the Spiegel String Quartet - 

Guido De Neve, Nico Baltussen, Leo De Neve, Jan Sciffer. DeSingel, Red 

Hall, Antwerp, 5 November 1998. 

1999 

Het nut van de nacht. Director & designer: Jan Fabre. Actors: Els 

Deceukelier, Jan Decleir. Bourla Theatre, Antwerp, 11 March 1999. 


SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Archive material 

AMVC, Antwerp. Troubleyn archives. Flemish Theatre Institute, Brussels. 

Dutch Theatre Institute. 

Individual works 

Baeijaert, L. De macht der theaterlijke dwaasheden van Jan Fabre. 

Beschrijving van ontstaansproces, opvoeringsanalyse en semiotische 

benadering (diss.). Leuven: KUL, 1986. 

Beckers, W. Nieuw Vlaams Theater. Voor een eigen dramaturgie. 

Antwerp: NVT, 1983. 

Bousset, S. (ed.) Jan Fabre. Texts on his theatrework (Texts by Sigrid 

Bousset, Johan de Boose, Gert Mattenklott, Stefan Hertmans, Rudi 

Laermans, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Arnd Wesemann, Heidi Gilpin, 

Janny Donker) Brussels: Kaaitheater, 1993. 

Bousset, S. (ed.) Mestkever van de verbeelding. Over Jan Fabre. 

Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1994. 

De Greef, H. and Jan Hoet. Gesprekken met Jan Fabre. Leuven: Kritak; 

Antwerp: Galerij Ronny van de Velde, 1993. 

Erenstein, R.L. (ed.) Een theatergeschiedenis der Nederlanden. Tien 

eeuwen drama en theater in Nederland en Vlaanderen. Amsterdam: 

Amsterdam University Press, 1996. 

Das Glas im Kopf wird vom Glas: the Dance sections: Jan Fabre. 

(Photos by Helmut Newton. Text by Emil Hrvatin, Miguel Romero). 

Ghent: Imschoot, 1990. 

Hrvatin, E. Herhaling, waanzin, discipline. Het theaterwerk van Jan 

Fabre. Amsterdam: International Theatre & Film Books, 1994 (see 

also Slovenian and French versions). 

Jan Fabre: Texte zum Werk. (Texts by Bart Verschaffel, Gert 

Mattenklott, Donald Kuspit, Antje von Graevenitz, Jo Coucke, Emil 

Hrvatin, Dietmar Kamper, Michel Baudson). Hannover: Kunstverein, 

1992 (see also Finnish translation). 

The power of theatrical madness. (Photos by Robert Mapplethorpe. 

Texts by Kathy Acker, Germano Celant). London: Institute of 

Contemporary Art, 1986. 

Wesemann, A. (ed.). Jan Fabre. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch 

Verlag, 1994 (Reihe: Director im Theater). 


jan fabre 

Articles on Jan Fabre’s work (selection) 

Blum, Johannes. ‘Konstruiertes Risiko’, in: Theater Heute, 10, 1984. 

Carter, Curtis L. ‘Jan Fabre: Art kept me out of jail’, in: Etcetera, June 

1983, pp. 26-28. 

Dosogne, Ludo. ‘De ultieme metamorfose van Jan Fabre’, in: Kunst & 

Cultuur, March 1990. 

De Jonge, Stefanie. ‘Hij is wreed’, in: Humo, 12 December 1995, pp. 

154-57. 

De Keyzer, Laurens. ‘De terreur van mijn eigen geest’, in: De Standaard 

Magazine, 23 April 1993, pp. 2-5. 

De Vuyst, Hildegard. ‘Ik wil iets goddelijks maken’, in: Etcetera, 

September 1987, pp. 41-44. 

Donker, Janny. ‘Sisyphus als arrogante held’, in: Toneel Teatraal, 


Hertmans, Stefan. ‘Jeuk aan de ziel’, in: De Gids, October-November 

1992. 

Hrvatin, Emil. ‘Jan Fabres zoete verlokkingen’, in: Etcetera, March 

1992, pp. 46-49. 

Hrvatin, Emil. ‘Risse in Erhabenen Körper’, in: Bij Open Doek. Liber 

Amicorum Carlos Tindemans. Kapellen: Pelckmans, UIA, VTI, 1995, 

pp. 39-55. 

Korteweg, Ariejan. ‘In mijn hoofd kan ik fantastisch dansen’, in: De 

Volkskrant, 10 February 1995, pp. 53-55. 

Laermans, Rudi. ‘Niets dan schone schrijn en ijdel spektakel’, in: 

Etcetera, February 1994, pp. 13-17. 

Lehmann, H.T. ‘Spiel mit Grenzen’, in: Hausblatt des TAT, Frankfurt, 

January 1992. 

Mallems, Alex. ‘Wilson en Fabre op de praatstoel’, in: Etcetera, April 

1986, p. 53. 

Mallems, Alex. ‘I want to create something divine’, in: Articles, 2, 1987. 

Melders, Robert. ‘Jan Fabre gefascineerd door Amerika. Veelzijdig en 

internationaal bedrijvig’, in: De Standaard, 18 December 1980. 

Middendorp, Jan. ‘Bloed, zweet en yoghurt: de nieuwe golf’, in: Toneel 

Teatraal, April 1983, pp. 22-26. 

Middendorp, Jan. ‘Real is real. Jan Fabre en de theatraliteit’, in: Toneel 

Teatraal, 5/6, May/June 1984, pp. 11-12. 

Müry, Andres. ‘Die Junggesellenmaschine’, in: Theater Heute, February 

1994, pp. 13-18. 

Odenthal, Johannes. ‘Split Space’, in: Ballet International / Tanz Aktuell, 

March 1995, pp. 41-43. 

Opsomer, Geert. ‘Herhaling, waanzin, discipline’, in: Etcetera, April 

1996, pp. 12-16. 

Penxten, Stéphane. ‘Le bleu “Bic” de Fabre, le plasticien’, in: La Libre 

Belgique, 9 December 1992. 


selected bibliography 

Reyniers, Johan. ‘De dans van het harnas. Jan Fabre als choreograaf 

(1)’, in: Etcetera, May 1993, pp. 8-9. 

Reyniers, Johan. ‘De kunst van de accumulatie. Jan Fabre als choreograaf 

(2)’, in: Etcetera, June 1993, pp. 10-12. 

Ruyters, Marc. ‘Interview met Jan Fabre’, in: De Morgen, 30 April 1989. 

Sergooris, Gunther. ‘De macht van het uur blauw’, in: Etcetera, 


Steijn, Robert. ‘Ontmaskering van de schoonheid’, in: Toneel Teatraal, 

May 1990. 

Steijn, Robert. ‘Hoofd en hart op leven en dood. Theater als modern ritueel’, 

in: Toneel Teatraal, May 1985, pp. 4-8. 

T’Jonck, Pieter. ‘Jan Fabre vat zichzelf samen in jongste choreografie’, 

in: De Standaard, 26 April 1993. 

T’Jonck, Pieter. ‘Fabre toont sadistisch universum’, in: De Standaard, 1 

October 1993. 

Tindemans, Klaas. ‘Van op een afstand indrukken bij Das Glas im Kopf 

wird vom Glas’, in: Etcetera, September 1990, pp. 21-23. 

Urs, Jenny. ‘Der Mann der blauen Wunder’, in: Der Spiegel, 26, 1991. 

Van den Dries, Luk. ‘Minimal Music en Gesamtkunstwerk’, in: Etcetera, 


Van der Jagt, Marijn. ‘De betekenis van adelaar, pijl, schaar, ridders en 

prinsesjes’, in: Toneel Teatraal, October 1988, pp. 41-46. 

Van der Jagt, Marijn. ‘De macht van Fabres actors’, in: Toneel Teatraal, 

April 1986, pp. 25-28. 

Van der Jagt, Marijn. ‘De vissenmoord van Jan Fabre’, in: Toneel 

Teatraal, November 1989, pp. 46-47. 

Van der Jagt, Marijn. ‘Fabre goes Forsythe: The sound of one hand clapping’, 

in: Etcetera, March 1991, pp. 6-9. 

Van der Jagt, Marijn. ‘Ik ben geïnteresseerd in de wolk die boven het 

toneel hangt’, in: Toneel Teatraal, December 1987, pp. 36-41. 

Van der Jagt, Marijn. ‘It’s complicated: de inwisselbaarheid van emoties. 

Wilson versus Fabre’, in: Toneel Teatraal, November 1985, pp. 32-33. 

Van Kerkhoven, Marianne. ‘Die Grenzen verschwinden’, in: Ballett 

International, 1, 1989. 

Van Rompay, Theo. ‘Een badje water, een washandje en zeep’, in: 

Etcetera, June 1983, pp. 29-31. 

Van Rompay, Theo. ‘Iemand roept: “Jan Fabre, waar zit je, ik kom op 

je gezicht slaan”’, in: Etcetera, January 1984, pp. 48-50. 

Van Toorn, Willem. ‘Uiteindelijk ben ik maar een bescheiden dienaar 

van de schoonheid’, in: Vrij Nederland, 3 November 1984. 

Verduyckt, Paul. ‘Een theatervoorstelling omtrent acteren waarin enkele 

personen verenigd zijn die mogelijk het acteren in twijfel trekken’, in: 

Etcetera, September 1984, pp. 27-28. 

Verduyckt, Paul. ‘Greatest Flemish Orgasms: de nieuwe eenduidigheid’, 

in: Toneel Teatraal, July 1985, pp. 16-17. 


jan fabre 

Verduyckt, Paul. ‘Hoe meer ik weet, des te minder ik kan’, in: De 

Morgen, 23 August 1994. 

Verschaffel, Bart. ‘Jan Fabre in Tivoli’, in: Archis, 11, 1990. 

Verschaffel, Bart. ‘Leven en werken van Jan Fabre’, in: Archis, July 1992. 

Verstockt, Dirk. ‘Jan Fabre. Die Reinkarnation Gottes”, in: Etcetera, 


Verstockt, Katie. ‘Dans/Tijd’, in: Etcetera, June 1997, pp. 24-26. 

Weiler, Christel. ‘Das Schöne is nicht alles’, in: Theater Heute, 8, 1989. 

Wesemann, Arnd. ‘Jan Fabre’, in: Daidalos, 44, 1992, pp. 88-91. 

Wesemann, Arnd. ‘Weisse Muse im Theater des Stilstands’, in: Weser 

Kurier, 10 March 1992. 

Plays by Fabre 

Fabre, Jan. Het is theater zoals te verwachten en te voorzien was. in: 

Etcetera, 3, 1983, pp. 32-39. 

Fabre, Jan. Het interview dat sterft..., Het paleis om vier uur ’s morgens...A.G., 

De reïncarnatie van God. Brussels: Kaaitheater, 1989. 

Fabre, Jan. Een familietragedie... een theatertekst, Sweet temptations. 

Brussels: Kaaitheater, 1991. 

Fabre, Jan. Zij was en zij is, zelfs. Brussels: Kaaitheater, 1991. 

Fabre, Jan. Wie spreekt mijn gedachte... Brussels: Kaaitheater, 1992. 

Fabre, Jan. Vervalsing zoals ze is, onvervalst. Brussels: Kaaitheater, 1992. 

Fabre, Jan. De keizer van het verlies en andere theaterteksten. Amsterdam: 

De Bezige Bij, 1994. 

Fabre, Jan. Een doodnormale vrouw en andere theaterteksten. Amsterdam: 

De Bezige Bij, 1995. 


This is a Flemish Theatre Institute publication, in association with the Theatre 

Studies departments at the four Flemish universities: U.I.Antwerp, University of 

Ghent, K.U.Leuven, V.U.Brussels. 

Editor in chief 

Geert Opsomer 

Editorial board 

Pol Arias, Annie Declerck, Ronald Geerts, Erwin Jans, Rudi Laermans, 

Ann Olaerts, Frank Peeters, Luk van den Dries, Marianne van Kerkhoven, 

Jaak van Schoor 

Design 

Inge Ketelers 

Photogravure and printing 

Cultura, Wetteren 

Print run 

600 copies. 

Kritisch Theater Lexicon 10 e, a portrait of Jan Fabre 

Author 

Adri de Brabandere 

Research 

Adri de Brabandere 

Theatre history / Bibliography 

Bruno van Moer, Geert Opsomer 

Final editing 

Geert Opsomer 

Translation 

Gregory Ball 

Proof-reading 

Jill Wyatt 

Photographic portrait of Jan Fabre 

Jérôme De Perlinghi, from the ‘Kunstenaarsportretten – Kaaitheater ’77-’97’ series. 

Photos 

p. 23: P. Sellito / p. 24: Flip Gils / p. 25: Dominik Mentzos, Jean-Pierre Stoop / 

p. 26: Leo van Velzen, Annick Geenen. 

Vlaams Theater Instituut v.z.w., Sainctelettesquare 19, 1000 Brussel, 

tel: +32.2/201.09.06, fax: +32.2/203.02.05 

e-mail: info@vti.be website: http://www.vti.be 

ISBN 90-74351-16-6 D/1998/4610/04 

No part of this book may be reproduced and/or published without the prior permission 

of the publisher. 

The Flemish Theatre Institute is a centre for research, documentation, advice and 

promotion of the performing arts. It is subsidised by the Arts Department of the 

Ministry of the Flemish Community and is sponsored by the national Lottery and 

Océ Belgium. 

A translation of: Jan Fabre, Vlaams Theater Instituut, Brussels, 1997 

© 1998 / Registered publisher: Klaas Tindemans

Fabre (E) - depot voor het VTi

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