Avignon Festival: "Near future", the coronation of Jan Martens in the Court of Honor

FUTUR CLOSE, choreography by Jan Martens at the Cour d'honneur of the Palais des Papes at the Festival d'Avignon 2022. © Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d'Avignon

Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow

5 mins

Jans Martens' choreography, oscillating between nonchalance and supernatural, is an encouragement to transcend challenges with creativity, without hesitating to get wet, in the literal and figurative sense.

A world premiere that will go down in the history of the Festival d'Avignon.

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The Belgian choreographer, 38, loves to think from the margins to create and reinvent the worlds of tomorrow.

Defined by Jan Martens as “ 

 ”, his new play

is no exception.

Last year, his show on resistance,

, had a strong impression on us.

This year,

blew us away from start to finish.

He himself sets the bar very, very high:

 Near future

Obstacles to overcome

A harpsichord placed in the center, facing the audience, fills with its sound coming from elsewhere the Cour d'honneur with a beauty and a strange radicalism, almost unrecognizable.

A giant dark wooden bench, 18 meters long, installed in the middle to obstruct as much as possible, occupies almost the entire width of the huge stage of the Palace of the Popes to show us the obstacles to overcome.

The 15 dancers of the Opera Ballet Blaanderen, accompanied by a child and a teenager, all of very different ages, sizes and origins, are endowed with an overwhelming natural grace.

They draw the spectator into a whirlwind oscillating between dream and reality, and paradoxically well rooted in the ground.

A choreographic storm of minute precision and incredible delicacy.

► 

Everything starts in absolute banality.

The oversized bench gives off a waiting room atmosphere, a few dancers are already sitting there before the official start of the show, chatting among themselves, laughing, dressed casually: jeans, t-shirt, shirt, jogging… That's when the incredible Goska Isphording lands on the harpsichord, plays the first note of the six contemporary works that will follow, that the piece truly begins its

.

FUTUR CLOSE, choreography by Jan Martens at the Cour d'honneur of the Palais des Papes at the Festival d'Avignon 2022. Christophe Raynaud de Lage - Christophe Raynaud de Lage

The harpsichord rumbles, rebels, plunges into madness

At first, the dancers taunt us by only moving their upper body, as if connected to invisible threads.

To begin with, one transmits its movement to the other, then they come together in fluctuating formations, of two, four, six… with breathing times, where each expresses itself differently, according to its character, its size, his past, his physical and psychic constitution.

And then, they respond to the thundering repetitions of the harpsichord in aligned formation or with leaps, big throws, alternating between tumbles and unbridled turns, floating like dervishes.

Micro-movements are transformed into mass movements, in a group photo, before breaking down immediately.

The bench is there, like a barrier, a border, an obstacle to cross, but they don't face it.

They do not dance against it, but with it, enthrall it, subjugate it, undermine it from within.

With their insatiable steps and movements, lifted and supported by the music, they seem to transcribe and elucidate the structure and nature of obstacles, in order to subvert them even better.

The harpsichord rumbles, rebels, plunges into madness, stops several times for a second in order to be able to resume even more powerfully with musical spasms and the tremors of a world to come.

FUTUR CLOSE, choreography by Jan Martens at the Cour d'honneur of the Palais des Papes at the Festival d'Avignon 2022. © Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d'Avignon

The lesson of images

And then there is the lesson of images.

Projected onto the majestic wall of the Cour d'honneur, they reveal the strength and grandeur of each micro-movement.

A small camera is lightly placed on the ground by the first dancer who seizes the device like God creating the world.

Dressed in black pants like the universe and a yellow top straight out of an egg, he inhabits the stage and the wall.

When he moves his body on the stage ten centimeters, he moves his image, enlarged to ten meters high, on the wall, swinging his head from window to window.

Before our incredulous eyes, Jan Martens succeeds in making cinema in live video, transforming four of his dancers into giant actors in a very short film.

Drama ?

Polar?

Tragedy?

Revelation?

We don't know what our

will look like .

In the meantime, the harpsichord continues to hammer and the bench finds itself burst and overthrown.

The protagonists of this story then begin to fetch water.

Everyone will bring a bucket to collectively fill a giant basin of water placed in the middle of the stage.

The atmosphere has radically changed, but we do not yet know whether it is a sacrifice or a resurrection that awaits us.

The dancers are not afraid to get wet.

They take off their clothes, enter in small groups into the giant bucket to immerse themselves in it together and come out, a few moments later, transformed forever.

Our near future has just begun.

FUTUR CLOSE, choreography by Jan Martens at the Cour d'honneur of the Palais des Papes at the Festival d'Avignon 2022. © Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d'Avignon

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