Abattoir Fermé

The work of Abattoir Fermé has since the very start of the company moved towards the dark, sombre and expressive. On its own webpage the company draws a limit between the productions made in the years prior to 2002, and the productions from 2002 until today. In the first phase the works are characterised as guerrilla theatre with Dadaism mixed in, while the latter work is described as more refined and with a larger artistic range in expression and sources for inspiration.

Abattoir Fermé takes inspiration from Hollywood and different pop cultural genres such as horror, science fiction, cartoons and different subcultures. The main focus is on the burlesque and the grotesque with the evil and dark of the horror movies as a returning subject. However Abattoir Fermé, French for Closed Slaughterhouse, takes the genre of horror further and creates a performative expression which can from time to time shake its audiences. The company has visited Norway (Black Box Teater) with the productions Galapagos, Indie and Tourniquet.

The theatrical expression can in many ways be described as expressionist with elements of ritualistic expressions. Drawing lines to the French theatre worker Antonin Artaud and his theories about theatre of cruelty is easy. Artaud thought that the theatre was dependent of pest and cruelty, and wished that the theatre would create a cleansing process through cruelty on stage. Abattoir Fermé places itself close to this expression, but it takes the Artaudian universe on a heated carousel ride in which the result is a dizzy expression perhaps closer to Artaud in some kind of flowering intoxication than the kind of cleansing he visioned. Similar to Artaud’s theatre idea, Abattoir Fermé creates a ritual arena focusing on human sacrifice, excrements, death and rot, while adding a large dose of abstract and absurd humour filled with pop cultural references and heavy symbols.

The human body's perishability and ugliness is what is focused on, but it is done in a carnival like, grotesque manner, always with an ironic and theatrical distance to death and evil. Where the carnival game of death most often significates release and new life, the death longing of Abattoir Fermé is a continuation of death, a circular death game in which life and death are placed side by side. The ritual reality of Abattoir Fermé is different from a spiritual perception of the ritual. Its rituality is dirty and ugly; a death cult in which new life does not arise, but in which death is life.

Sources: Stamsund Internasjonale Teaterfestival,http://www.stamsund-internasjonale.no/, 26.10.2010, http://www.stamsund-internasjonale.no/Old/2008/index.html

Abattoir Fermé, http://www.abattoirferme.be/, 26.10.2010,  http://www.abattoirferme.be/abattoirENG-aboutAF.pdf

Amundsen, Julie Rongved (2008). Article titled Bak slakteriets lukkede dører* (Behind the closed doors of the Slaughterhouse). Black Box Teater Oslo, autumn program 2008.

*Not translated into English. The title within parentheses is the Norwegian title's literal meaning.