Je Suis Sang

Set in the Middle Ages and mounted on a mammoth scale, Jan Fabre wrote and staged this epic poem about our most essential and elemental life force. Knights in shining armor, brides, surgeons, seers and a cherubic satyr are just a few of the characters portrayed by 18 performers on Fabre’s sprawling canvas. Through his continuing exploration and celebration of the human body, Fabre examines our fascination with blood. No other element has its power in our consciousness despite the advances and setbacks of history. Action and horror films pour it at us in buckets yet news cameras demurely give us only the slightest hint of it.

The turbulent, action-packed staging is grounded by the text, spoken in French, Latin and English. It develops like a hypnotic mantra and echoes the psalms of the bible and the polyphonic chants of the Middle Ages. In Je Suis Sang Fabre depicts the warring impulses at work then (and still with us today) — the mysticism, natural wisdom and transcendent vision of the body as represented by the 12th century’s Abbess Hildegard Von Bingen versus the guilt-ridden repression of religious thinking.