Avignon: Jan Martens choreographs the urgency of "freeing oneself and resisting"
Jan Martens, choreographer of the piece Any attempt will end in crushed bodies and shatterd bones, presented at the Festival d'Avignon 2021. © Siegfried Forster / RFI
Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow
9 mins
“
I wanted to guide the dancers into their own language.
The new choreography by Belgian prodigy Jan Martens, 37, is precise, meticulous, grueling and liberating.
Seventeen dancers aged 16 to 69 and of all origins put their movements at the service of the resistance.
Publicity
Read more
A long sentence in English serves as the title:
Any attempt will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones
.
Behind this obvious title which could be translated as:
Any attempt will end with crushed bodies and broken bones
, Jan Martens questions the rebellion and the moment when everything changes.
RFI
: Why did you choose such a long title in English
:
Any attempt will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones
?
Jan Martens
:
It's not a phrase from me, but it's the words of Chinese President Xi Jinping in October 2019 to protesters in Hong Kong who demanded more independence.
When I discovered these words on the CNN site, I was very surprised that no one reacted, neither the European Union nor the United States.
It showed how used to very violent words we are.
Part of the show is about how the language is disintegrating and becoming more and more violent.
First, I wanted to integrate this phrase into the show, but eventually I made it the title to make it really visible.
What happens at the start of the show when a young dancer takes the stage and begins to take ownership of the space
?
He is the first to start dancing.
Then there is the music of Gorecki [
the Polish composer Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki, 1933-2010, editor's note
], a very important music for the piece and which comes back five times.
During the show, the movements do not change, but they transform.
There is a very rigid rigor and formality at the start of the show which gradually begins to free itself, to insist, to resist and to make changes.
The young dancer brings a human presence on stage, but also movements, rhythm, music, and also a color code through the costumes. What is the significance of this very intense blue gray
?
At first it's gray, the grayest in the world, but the color changes and transforms during the show.
At the end there is a very bright red.
The show is about protest, demonstrators.
We start off very impulsively.
Afterwards, it is very important to insist, to organize ourselves to transform and change things.
Afterwards, the color changes and it becomes a party, an ode to moving bodies that move and transform to anticipate changes.
Jan Martens, “Any attempt will end in crushed bodies and shatterd bones”, presented at the Festival d'Avignon 2021. © Jan Fedinger
There is an impressive diversity of movements
: movements of individuals, groups, sets that form, divide, reform differently ... The aesthetics of resistance and the analysis of mass movements are subjects regularly analyzed by thinkers, from Sigmund Freud to Peter Weiss, from Elias Canetti to Georges Didi-Hubermann. Who are the intellectuals from whom you drew inspiration for the show
?
There are several, for example Rosa Luxemburg who said: “
The most rebellious you can do is talk about the now.
There is Hannah Arendt, Édouard Louis, the very young French writer who also talks about the now, about things that are not going well.
There is the Turkish writer Ahmet Altan who was in prison and who wrote a very beautiful book on the present.
Above all, with this troupe, the notion of the corps de ballet was very important.
A corps de ballet that is not uniform ...
All body types, all ages are present on stage.
All cultural origins too.
It's already changed a bit on the smaller stages and a little more experimental networks, but on the big stages and the big dance companies, it's still very consistent.
You really need to see different bodies on the stage.
The movements on stage are both individual and collective, very rhythmic, but at the same time not obeying any rule. How did you describe the nature of these movements
?
It's very simple.
We had this Orecki music and I asked the dancers to transcribe it as clearly as possible.
I told them, “
When people see you dancing, I want them to understand the structure of the music
”.
I asked them to draw on their own past.
To find a language very close to themselves.
For me, it was important to guide them to their own language.
On stage, the languages remain multiple.
For me, this is a metaphor for a society where all languages have the same value and can coexist.
Why at some point do all changes of direction occur after 8 or 16 steps
?
Indeed, it is 8 and 16. It is a very boring number of steps.
On the other hand, these walking scenes give a lot of possibilities to change from one atmosphere to another.
We see Nazism, Communism, things that some at the time found very attractive, as was the case with Nazism.
This rhythm becomes something boring, but at the same time threatening.
Jan Martens, “Any attempt will end in crushed bodies and shatterd bones”, presented at the Festival d'Avignon 2021. © Jan Fedinger
The music is both catchy, but also gets on the nerves of the spectators. To amplify this effect, you even created fake endings.
It is not to irritate the public.
It's the dramaturgy that demands that.
During a rebellion, when you want things to change, it is necessary to insist.
For that, I also chose the music of the 1960s of Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach who were very involved in the civil rights movement in the United States.
Then we come to Black Lives Matter.
It's a way of saying that you always have to start over to free yourself.
Many social movements are linked to a bodily gesture: from the Night Standing in Paris through the knee on the ground of Black Lives Matter or the women in Iran who go out without a veil in the street. Was there a gesture of protest that influenced you for the show
?
For example the
kiss-in
inspired me a lot, these demonstrations against homophobia where queer people meet in a square and kiss each other, even if, in the end, we did not integrate this gesture into the show.
In the play, there is a
die-in [where the demonstrators fake death, editor's note]
, often used to protest against the fur industry.
I have also looked at very obscure sites showing how to avoid being evacuated by the police during a
sit-in
.
It's a piece about resistance. For you, is being a dancer and choreographer a form of resistance
?
Yes of course. There is still a lot of work to be done in the world of dance and theater. In Belgium, there is often a very great lack of respect towards artists. There is a great deal of violence in the way of working. For example, the very small dancer was very moved to find herself on a very large stage with sixteen other dancers, because all the auditions she had for large companies, she was not taken, because 'she was too small. They all wanted to have dancers between 1.70 m and 1.75 m. I think we should use dance to talk about that, but also to talk about Xi Jinping's words or what is happening and being said on the websites. We know it, at the same time, we do not know the violence that exists today.And verbal abuse can turn into physical abuse very quickly.
►
Any attempt will end in crushed bodies and shatterd bones
, choreography by Jan Martens, until July 25 at the Festival d'Avignon 2021.
Newsletter
Receive all international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
google-play-badge_FR
Avignon 2021
Dance
Belgium
Culture
our selection