Lisbeth Gruwez / Voetvolk
| Concept and choreography: | Lisbeth Gruwez |
| Composition and sound design: | Maarten Van Cauwenberghe |
| With: | Lisbeth Gruwez & Nicolas Vladyslav |
| Dramaturgy: | Bart Van den Eynde |
| Translator: | Lucius Fromm |
| Lighting design: | Harry Cole |
| Lighting assistant: | Caroline Mathieu |
| Scenography: | Marie Szernovisz |
| Styling: | Veronique Branquinho |
| Production manager: | Liesbeth Stas |
| Production: | Voetvolk vzw |
| Coproduced by: | Festival d’Avignon, La Bâtie-Festival de Genève, KVS, Le Phare, Centre Choregraphique National du Havre Normandie, Theater Im Pumpenhaus, Les Brigittines, Tandem Arras-Douai, Weimar Kunstfest, Julidans, MA Scène Nationale – Pays de Montbéliard and Troubleyn | Jan Fabre. |
| Residencies: | Troubleyn|Jan Fabre, Buda Kunstencentrum, STUK, Les Brigittines |
| With the support of: | NONA, the Flemish Government and the Flemish Community Commission |
| The piece will premiere in Spain in April 2017 thanks to the collaboration between Seville’s Teatro Central and Madrid’s Festival de Otoño a Primavera. | |
Jan Fabre's star dancer returns to Spain to present her latest creation, We’re pretty fuckin’ far from okay, a show about our fears that takes Hitchcock as a point of departure. Fear is the human body at its most instinctive; it is the body in trance, something deeply rooted in our genetic structure. Even before we can consciously deal with it, our body gets ready to make a vital decision: fight, flight or freeze?
We're pretty fuckin' far from okay explores our fears and anxieties. By choosing to have the audience face two dancers caught in a simple tableau –a man, a woman, two chairs, corridors of light– Lisbeth Gruwez’s choreography does not intend to talk about couples but about the individual, about emotional, psychological, and physical reactions when one experiences fear. Through a language of gestures formed by our natural and everyday reflexes, the choreographer invites each one of us to see ourselves in and identify with the dancers. The show’s point of departure: Alfred Hitchcock's horror films, in particular The Birds, because “it is about irrational fear. It is a phobia, a paranoia. It resonates strongly with what's happening in our world”.
The show offers an immersive experience through a progressive rise in the intensity of the movements, through the well-known feeling of needing the other increasingly more, through layers of sound that are adjusted in real time, and through the shared act that is breathing. Fear has the power to put the body in a state of trance, to obstruct the mind, and to disconnect it from will and action, which makes it a fertile playground for the dancers. The third part of a study of the body in a state of ecstasy, We're pretty fuckin' far from okay echoes Gruwez’s It's going to get worse and worse and worse, my friend (2012) and AH/HA (2014). When it comes to controlling the uncontrollable, is it true that if thought is lost, so is the body?
Show after show, Lisbeth continues to make a name for herself as an artist specialised in studying the body down to its smallest details, turning it into a sounding board for our most primitive emotions. In We're pretty fuckin 'far from okay, co-produced in part by Troubleyn I Jan Fabre and the Festival d’Avignon, Lisbeth explores the irrationality of fear. The audience becomes fully immerged in the piece with a progressive rise in the intensity of the movements, through the well-known feeling of needing the other increasingly more, through layers of sound that are adjusted in real time. The piece first premiered in the summer of 2016 at the Festival d’Avignon and takes the stage in Spain for the first time at the Teatro Pradillo in April thanks to the collaboration between Seville’s Teatro Central and Madrid’s Festival de Otoño a Primavera.