Orgy of Tolerance

Hilariously absurd sketches

To round off an extremely successful tour, Jan Fabre’s latest stage production will be on for two nights in Brussels. Orgy of Tolerance shows the decline of the human species, which means us too. Fabre grotesquely paints a portrait of the human consumer in our late-capitalist society, where everything is tolerated and everything is for sale. He shows that our purchasing behaviour is almost impulsive. We do not actually buy products, but above all consume them, like a digestive mechanism that has a hold on us and in which production, commodity and consumption are the alimentary canals in an unceasing blow-out. We eat commodities, shit commodities, give birth to commodities. Those who cannot keep up with the rat-race of the economy are vomited out. Those who still have any creditworthiness have to prove their worth by investing in yet newer commodities.

On stage stand lots of Chesterfield sofas in which the performers set to wanking and fingering with a will. The sofa is a sort of extension of the libido, and also the place where we can uninhibitedly be our xenophobic selves. But wanking and fingering degenerate into an Olympic discipline. The sofa turns out to be just as empty as the safe at the bank.

The nine fantastic musicians, dancers and actors paint the panorama of tolerance as a cartoon and lampoon of our early twenty-first century. Jan Fabre meets Monty Python: hilariously absurd sketches expose the mechanisms of our collective delusion and undermine them with plenty of humour.

'A hugely charismatic ensemble of five men and four women delivers a good deal of challenging wit. There is some excellent music by Dag Taeldeman (...) and there are moments of bizarre beauty. (...) Fabre may invite us to focus on things in different and unexpected ways and those ways may not be palatable to anyone's individual taste. But that's what proper artists do.'  The Times

‘Fabre succeeds in making the insatiable void tangible.’
Karlien Van Hoonacker (deredactie.be)

‘It is refreshing that Fabre subjects himself, his audience and the era in which they are caught up together, to questions that strike one as sincere.’
Danielle de Regt (De Standaard)

« Le chef de bande s'appelle Jan Fabre. Evidemment. Il n'y a que le metteur en scène et plasticien flamand qui puisse chausser des sabots aussi gros et oser une telle surchauffe au démarrage. ” Le Monde