Jan Martens & GRIP
2025– World premiere: 18, 19, 20 september 2025, Biennale de la Danse 2025, Les Grands Loceaux, FR –
THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER 2.0 departs from the 2014 production THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER. That production marked the absolute breakthrough for Jan Martens, with an extensive international tour of more than 100 performances. Over the past few years, various dance academies took up this choreographic material: for large groups, amateurs or professionals – the work continued to capture the imagination because of its physical challenge and choreographic ingenuity.
The American photographer Philippe Halsman once said: “When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears.” Jan Martens took this statement as a starting point for THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER and exposed through the jump the person behind the dancer.
In THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER, the dancer is defined as a pure performer, striving after perfection. Subjected to a complex, mathematical, vigorous and exhausting choreography executed in forced uniformity, the eight dancers ultimately slip up. And then their masks fall.
Thanks to its radical choreographic form, THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER revealed the audience’s perception of dancers, choreographers, spectators and the cultural policy at the time. Ten years on, these questions are still very much relevant due to current political and social trends: Where does the thin line between art and entertainment lie? Who are we as an audience when we contemplate the suffering of dancers from the theatre like a bullfight in an arena? What do we want to get as audience? Do we want to experience an intensity that we do not feel in our everyday life? Do we want to experience beauty that is perhaps not visible in our everyday life? Is contemporary dance striptease for the elite? THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER makes the viewer shift in his position: from being merely subjected to the experience to actively reflecting on it.
With the reinterpretation by a new generation of dancers, other questions also become part of the work: From which point does a project become part of the canon? How do you deal with dance heritage? Can we bring sustainability to the performing arts by giving new life to an existing work? What can we convey to a new generation while the original cast is still there? Can the original cast collaborate in the transfer before the essence of the work is gone?
THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER is the most critical performance by Martens up until today. It reveals the mechanism of looking in the theatre and our longing for entertainment, by demanding the stage to be a place for an encounter between one man and another.
- **** Charlotte De Somviele, De Standaard, 08 April 2014
A literally breathtaking dance that makes the specator an embarassed voyeur, witness of so much willingly suffering. Yet at the same time all that jumping makes up a clear statement about the raging chaos with which we rush through a more and more superficial life.
- **** Els Van Steenberghe, Knack Focus, 09 April 2014
Jan Martens conjures a mesmerizing choreography of nothing but jump strength and geometry.
- **** Annette Embrechts, De Volkskrant, 24 March 2014
CHOREOGRAPHY: Jan Martens
ARTISTIC ASSISTANCE: Naomi Gibson
ARTISTIC ASSISTANCE / COACHING: Steven Michel, Piet Defrancq
PERFORMERS: new cast (names to be confirmed)
ORIGINAL CAST: Piet Defrancq, Naomi Gibson, Nelle Hens, Julien Josse, Kimmy Ligtvoet, Cherish Menzo, Steven Michel, Laura Vanborm and/or en/of Morgane Ribbens, Ilse Ghekiere, Victor Dumont, Connor Schumacher, Caspar Knops, Amerigo Delli Bove, Daniel Barkan
COSTUME DESIGN: to be confirmed
LIGHTING DESIGN: Jan Fedinger
LIGHTS: to be confirmed
GRAPHIC DESIGN: Nick Mattan
PRODUCTION: GRIP (Hanne Doms, Anneleen Hermans, Rudi Meulemans, Klaartje Oerlemans, Jennifer Piasecki, Sylvie Svanberg, Nele Verreyken)
INTERNATIONAL DISTRIBUTION: A Propic / Line Rousseau, Marion Gauvent
DOG DAYS 2014 COPRODUCTION: Frascati Producties, SPRING performing arts festival, DansBrabant, La Briqueterie CDC du Val-de-Marne, tanzhaus nrw and TAKT Dommelhof
DOG DAYS 2014 WITH THE FINANCIAL SUPPORT OF: The Government of Flanders and Performing Arts Fund NL
WITH THE SUPPORT OF Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels