Jan Fabre's Orgy of Tolerance
Festival d'Avignon
Since we have too much of everything, too much comfort, too many images, sounds, too much food, sex, as well as too much misery, too many emotions or good feelings, Jan Fabre wanted to be situated exactly where this spills over, gathering the excesses to turn them into forms that are themselves excessive. And since everything is recycled faster and faster, including pleasure, ideas, revolution or subversion, his new piece is at the heart of everything that moves, that communicates, to make the signs circulate even faster, with a phenomenal destructive energy that goes as far as farce, as far as nonsense. The orgy of the title is the ecstasy, the orgasm of consumption: giving yourself pleasure, sometimes literally, by keeping your place in licentiousness, excess and spending, preferably with a lot of zeroes. Tolerance? It means wondering if something, today, can still shock: are we ready to accept anything? Our society is both extremely precautious in certain fields but in the end, enormously tolerant about most others. This allows Jan Fabre and his nine performers, to roll out on stage violent laughter which contaminates everything and respects nothing. Orgy of Tolerance proposes a series of rituals that run down our freshly hatched century. There, the bodies are regularly seized by animal reflexes, but animals that are buyers, put in competition before the products they need, as though subject to an uncontrollable addiction. And when, on the contrary, they languish and rest, it is to better sink into the ceremony of the sofas, those comfortable tokens of intimate well-being, on which we delicately set ourselves down to watch television – and let violence and barbarism enter –, on which we endlessly talk among friends in a weary and sententious tone, often to escape boredom, sometimes to speak about horrors in all good conscience. There is absurdity in this show that oscillates between farce and Monty Pythonesque humour, between the Brechtian cabaret and the devastating happening. As if an absurd, but nonetheless rigorous plot could make it possible to press even harder on the accelerator and joyously crash the world into the wall.
