PREPARATIO MORTIS

The body is like an incredible paint box, a laboratory, a battlefield.

- JAN FABRE

"Thanks to Bernard Foccroulle, Jan Fabre has assumed an aura of sainthood." Such was the conclusion of the French newspaper Le Figaro's enthusiastic review of the dance solo Preparatio Mortis, which Jan Fabre created for the 2005 Festival d'Avignon in France, with organ music by composer and organist Bernard Foccroulle, former opera director at De Munt/La Monnaie (Brussels) and current director of the French Festival d'Aix-en-Provence.

Preparatio Mortis is devoted to the human body, transformation and the utopian ideal. As can be expected, Fabre expresses this devotion in his own characteristic way by tackling the taboos of contemporary society, above all the taboo of death which our society is quick to hide from view. In Preparatio Mortis, however, Fabre assigns pride of place to life for "it is precisely through death that we learn to look at life differently."

In Preparatio Mortis, a hand, then an arm, a head and two bare feet emerge rhythmically from a tomb overgrown with a gigantic blanket of yellow, red, purple and white flowers. The dancer, Annabelle Chambon appears to rise from the dead. Every movement, breath and gaze become an intense event, a resurrection expressing a lust for life. Death becomes a motor for new dreams and desires. This life-giving breathing defines the rhythm of Preparatio Mortis, the slow breathing of the blanket of flowers that comes to life, the breathing of Annabelle Chambon's catlike dance and the breathing of the organ that pumps air in its production of sound.

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