Owl movement
He wanted parrots, but the dancers rebelled. So Jan Fabre settled for an owl. It’s just one reason his stunning SWAN LAKE is the most radical in years. Words: Jackie McGIone
he swans are having hissy fits backstage at
Amsterdam’s Muziektheater. Their feathers have been
ruffled by the choreographer and designer Jan Fabre. We are here to see the controversial Flemish artist’s production of Swan Lake for the Royal Ballet of Flanders. but it looks as if the birds might take flight.
Fabre wants his dancers back on stage for another run- through. but their fouettes are killing them. They have been rehearsing all day and want to put their feet up. The air is heavy with the clash of artistic temperaments. Egos inflate with every passing minute.
Notoriously perfectionist. Fabre is a Renaissance man. He’s 43. he writes plays. directs operas and ballets. makes sculptures. creates installations and once covered the Tivoli Castle in Belgium in paper. then scribbled all over it in blue ballpoint ink. So he’s a wrap artist too.
Today. though. it’s a different sort of rap. The dancers have risen up en pointe and said: ‘Enough!’
With only a couple of hours to go before curtain up. Fabre wanted to run through Act Three to check lighting cues. Which would have meant the 55-strong company that brings Fabre’s dark and idiosyncratic version of the classical ballet to the Edinburgh International Festival going on stage without having had their tea or. more importantly. a rest (they have been up since dawn after being bussed here from their Antwerp base and will be driven back after the post-show patty).
Fortunately. the devastatingly charming artistic director Robert Denvers pours oil on the lake’s troubled waters. Soon. all is sweetness and light. Everyone kisses and makes up.
But not in the auditorium. The well-groomed woman next to me starts tut-tutting once the opening spotlight hits Fabre’s emblematic sculptural skeleton of a swan — an image that
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dominates the production. When the owl appears. my neighbour flies into a monumental rage. Ah yes. the owl. For when this wise old bird is not staring unnervineg back at us from a vast video screen. he is strapped to the head of the wicked magician Rothbart (Giuseppe Nocera).
Think yourself lucky, madam. If Fabre had got his way this ballet might have more closely resembled Hitchcock’s The Birds in tights than Petipa’s fairytale of anthropomorphism. For this is definitely the most radical re-thinking of Swan Lake since Matthew Boume’s all-male version with the divine Adam Cooper.
According to Denvers, Fabre wanted to have the corps de ballet pirouette around with live parrots strapped to their shoulders. Again. feathers flew. ‘The dancers rebelled.’ admits Denvers. Finally. Fabre agreed to make do with the owl. who many think is the star of the
‘I think I am an owl - I always work at night - so I started watching owls,
show . . . after the poison dwarf who scuttles between dancers’ legs culling swans left. right the way and centre. move and
The owl is still troubling the woman in the behave!
stalls. Every time we hear him too-whit. too— wooing in the wings. she sighs heavily and mutters. Nocturnal birds of prey are a recurring motif in Fabre’s work. One Rudi Laermans has even written ‘Silence Till Eternity": 0n the Themes of the Owl and the Carnivalesque in the work of Jan Fabre. He reckons: ‘Fabre’s owl is the symbol of the absolute outsider. the unthinkable human being who only thinks. without ever communicating.’ Thanks, Rudi.
So what is it with you and owls. Jan. I ask the man himself over brunch the following morning.
‘I started using owls in my work in the late 70s.’ he replies.
An owl, e polson dwarf and sundry skeletons brlng out the themes of death, love and sex