Wake Up Hate

Overview

Belgian artist Jan Fabre seems to have made a career out of being relentlessly strange, from burning money and drawing pictures with the ashes to encrusting a palace ceiling with glittering beetle shells.  So it's hard to know exactly what to expect from one of his plays, but odds are it'll be, well, odd.

Fabre's Wake Up Hate is being performed at La Mama by Paulo Castro, a Portuguese-born performer who has toured the show to various cities in Europe, including Berlin, Reykjavik, Lisbon and Paris. It’s a solo show, a fierce monologue from a protagonist who claims to have freshly come back from the dead.  From an armchair in the ruins of a destroyed house, he launches a scathing attack on the voyeurism of contemporary society, a voyeurism he is part of because his eyes have become cameras.

Yup, sounds odd alright. But perhaps, like a beetle shell ceiling, gloriously so.

Image by Rodeo.