THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER 2.0

– 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?