A visionary, dark, and unsettling journey is constructed by the multidisciplinary Belgian artist Jan Fabre for his fetish dancer Cédric Charron. In Attends, attends, attends… (pour mon père), he explores the sense of time within the absolute perceptual distance that exists in the father-son relationship. One, the father, has seen it all; the other, the son, has yet to discover it. And he asks for time. Cédric’s question to his father is clear: “Wait, wait, wait!” An solo on the art of procrastination, of putting things off for later, where the possible takes shape in a suspended space-time, a limbo waiting for the inevitable.
Dressed in blazing red and immersed in a shroud of fog, Cédric Charron resembles a modern-day Charon rowing across the Styx. He darts through the air, transforming his plastic body into that of a ferocious beast or a Christ on the Via Crucis. The piece is sparked by a true confession from Cédric to his father about the fear of loss, as well as a self-affirmation of his identity as an artist (“as an artist,” Fabre comments, “he is a specialist in the act of dying”). Yet this work can also be considered a tale with four voices. This letter-testament, this funeral rite that evokes ghosts and awakens death, does not prevent one from thinking of it as a farewell that Fabre dedicates to his own father. And, as the vision unfolds, the dimension of mystery becomes absolute, affecting us closely. We too are confronted with the unknown of the passage from the impressive stage presence of Charron and the compositional genius of Fabre.
