Jan Fabre . Troubleyn

The performance 'Angel of Death' takes the shape of four monumental video-walls, which have been symmetrically set in a square on the deSingel stage. The audience is seated within these confinements, together with saxophonist Eric Sleichim and a performer, as they enter into a musical and textual dialogue with the projected images. The choreographer William Forsythe, to whom this work is dedicated, plays the angel of death. He dances and recites on screen, half-naked in a scene which is located in the oldest anatomical museum of Europe at the medical school of Montpellier where human remains are stored in formalin next to endless rows of piled skulls and skeletons. These images of the sufferings of humankind, accentuated by colours reminiscent of the paintings of the Flemish primitives, change from screen to screen as they dissolve and open up to different camera angles and perspectives. In 1996, Jan Fabre wrote 'The Angel of death' inspired by the American artist Andy Warhol. This monologue contains many of Fabre's personal fascinations: double identity, the androgynous, but also the contradictions of being an artist balancing an existence of public life, fame and the desire for anonymity.