The performance Body, body on the wall... – in which this video is projected – is part of Jan Fabre's series of solo performances entitled The Four Temperaments: four evening-long solos made for and with dancers with whom Fabre has collaborated artistically in the past: Wim Vandekeybus, Renée Copraij, Marc Vanrunxt and Annamirl Van der Pluijm.
The theatre monologue that Jan Fabre wrote for Wim Vandekeybus is about the relation between a male dancer and a photographer: a methaphor for the relation between a performer and the public. The photographer manipulates the body of the dancer for an exhibition full of phantasmic images of the body. The strangest anatomical constellations are grouped according to the body systems (nerves, skeleton, muscles,…).
Body, body on the wall… is a monologue about the body and movement: the body that is registered by manipulating it in different ways, by adjusting it and by modeling it. The central idea is that we only become aware of our body from the looks that other people give it.
For this monologue Fabre was inspired by the Dutch painter Rob Scholte, the French performance artist Orlan and Wim Vandekeybus himself.