Sweat Baby Sweat

Flemish-Dutch choreographer Jan Martens’ conceptually rigorous and dynamically engaging work has been captivating audiences across Europe since 2009. In Sweat Baby Sweat, he focuses on the all-consuming love affair between a man and a woman, a couple who can’t or won’t let each other go. Played out over an hour, in which a lifetime is passing, we are drawn into this modern mating ritual of two profoundly entwined lives, naive and at the same time comforting and confrontational. Dance, music, song, and video imagery are combined to produce this arresting, poignant study of desire, love, and loss.

Martens’ works explore the possibility of a perfect balance and symbiosis between storytelling and conceptualism. He doesn’t try to create a new movement language, but instead he molds and recycles existing idioms and places them in a different setting, so a new idea emerges. In his work the beauty of the incomplete human being is front and center.