PEAK MYTIKAS

An 8 hour - performance
 

The highest peak of Mount Olympus is called Mytikas. A Greek word for Nose. As the gods live on that mountain, the Nose is the nose of all the gods. They enjoy the smells that come from the humans, who live in the valley, on the earth. The humans sacrifice herbs, animals and other humans. They forge weapons and make war. War smells, death smells, love smells. The gods enjoy the fragrance of the world.

Our host is the lovely gender-fluid god: Dionysus. They introduce us to the world of raves. They celebrate all human things: love, peace, unity and respect, briefly p.l.u.r., but the opposite as well: hatred, struggle, disharmony and contempt. In this spectacle, everything is possible: the fulfillment of enchanting dreams and vicious grief, of cheerful love and horrible pain. The spectacle is a catharsis, a purification: face the worst, and be cleansed.

Life and death are interchangeable. Old, dead heroes appear and revive their lives. Oedipus, for example, the tragic king who killed his father and married his mother, he who tried to escape from his fate and on the contrary embraced it, he who poked out his eyes because he didn’t want to see the world anymore. But is he really blind? Or is he just a coward like all of us? And his daughter, Antigone, the first woman who dared to say ‘no’ to the power of politics and war, the first anarchist in history, how does she look at our world?

They are not dead, they live amongst us, and they ask the same old questions.

From ancient times another anarchist appears Prometheus, the man who dared to climb the Mytikas and insulted the gods by stealing the arrows of the lightning and giving them to the mortals. He who wanted to liberate mankind and paid a terrible price for it. What is his message to us, after all those centuries of torments?

Peak Mytikas (On the top of Mount Olympus) is a spectacle full of color and odor, full of death and desire, a feast on the edge of the grave, a celebration of beauty and passion, while the world is heading to its end. But at the same time, it is a ritual game, that forces us to think about the future. 

The texts are written by Johan De Boose, writer of Belgian rules/Belgium Rules. The music is composed and performed live on stage by Alma Auer. 11 multi-talented performers (actors, dancers, and musicians) will join Jan Fabre in  this 8- hour-long mythological rave.
 

IN THE INTERNATIONAL PRESS

"Do Greek myths still mean anything to us today? Answered by the extraordinary Peak Mytikas (On the top of Mount Olympus), an excellent text by Johan de Boose, an 8-hour performance by Jan Fabre, a genius multidisciplinary artist dedicated to active provocation, who makes the crossover between the arts the signature of his visionary poetics, and 11 exceptional actors, dancers and musicians of astounding expressiveness…”
- Magda Poli | Corriere della Sera

“The music acted as the twelfth performer, continuously engaging you with transportive and, at times, hypnotic sounds blending traditional, classical, and contemporary instruments.” (…) "Like after a good rave night, I felt both exhilarated and drained as I left the theatre. The experience was both challenging and rewarding, leaving me with a newfound appreciation for the power of performance art to engage, provoke, and transform."
- Elena Martinique | Widewalls

“An extraordinary performance of eight hours, between sensuality and energy, to show a mythical body, without shame and without censorship.” (…) “The sensational performers, all masterful, Annabelle Chambon, Anny Czupper, Cédric Charron, Conor Thomas Doherty, Gustav Koenigs, Irene Urciuoli, Ivana Jozic, Matteo Franco, Pietro Quadrino and Stella Höttler... take turns on stage to give voice to the three heroes, who are thus shown to be genderless, male, female and queer (because in a politically correct world, even words acquire their own political meaning) and full of human weaknesses, underlining how anyone can find themselves in the conditions narrated by the heroes.”
- Giulia Alonzo | The International Arts Magazine EXIBART Peak Mytikas, Jan Fabre mette in scena la suacritica alla cancel culture

“Eight hours and eleven performers: ten minutes of standing ovation for the debut, in Milan, of the new work by the Belgian director who has been writing the history of theater for thirty years... Peak Mytikas is violent and sweet, unapologetic and tender, serious and a grotesque act of resistance against this wounded, disheartened, and joyless present, against ‘politically correct’ control, seizing the power to dream of ‘love, peace, unity, and respect’... A must-see.”
- Anna Bandettini | La Repubblica Viva l’amore e l’anarchia, Jan Fabre porta in scena le passioni degli dei

“(Jan Fabre) one of the greatest, one-of-a-kind artistic geniuses of our time… the rave takes hold of you and glues you to the seat… The audience, although somewhat exhausted from the eight-hour play, claps for the entire thirty minutes to the rhythm of that genius music (Composed by Alma Auer), which slowly evaporates from their heads only a few days after watching the play.”
– Ana Gruden | Croatian Magazine Express

“Jan Fabre, Angélica Liddell, Romeo Castellucci… Perhaps it is no coincidence that these three radical artists, who in the course of their careers have exploded the perturbing in the heart of the theatrical ritual, are now measuring themselves against a political dimension, on the borderline between their individual sensibility and the evolution of society.”
- Oliviero Ponte Di Pino | Cultural magazine ateatro Il dionisiaco nell’epoca del politicamente corretto  
 

DOWNLOAD THE PROGRAM BOOKLET HERE