"I Am Not an Animal": Jan Fabre's Parrots and Guinea Pigs

Animal acts and the appearance together onstage of human and animal actors have a long and rich history, but a 2002 work by the leading Belgian choreographer Jan Fabre opens up a new dimension of such activity. Parrots and Guinea Pigs, which I witnessed on tour that year at Le Maillon in Strasbourg, France, is a complex dance meditation on relationships and interactions between humans and animals, and upon the disturbing implications of recognizing that the phrase "performing animals" might legitimately be extended to the humans who are so often concerned with keeping themselves outside this category.

The title Parrots and Guinea Pigs already suggests some of the strategies of Fabre's work. Both parrots and guinea pigs are primarily associated with human surrogation, parrots "standing in" for humans vocally and guinea pigs physically. The piece begins with a fairly conventional "animal act": a talking parrot, introduced in a downstage spot with its presumed trainer who encourages it to "speak," concentrating on the loaded question "Who is the master?" Even in this opening image, basic themes of the production are struck, particularly the animal / human tension, since the woman trainer is dressed in a costume echoing the bright colors of the parrot and trimmed with elegant plumage. These two figures will preside over the rest of the performance, primarily in front of a mirror upstage center. The trainer with her megaphone serves as a kind of mistress of ceremonies, while the parrot itself provides a running commentary of squawks, whistles, and broken phrases, all echoed from time to time by actors, to provide an unpredictable, but steadily operating "animal" sound track to the production.

Figure 1.

The trainer in Jan Fabre's Parrots and Guinea Pigs, with Anny Czupper, Els Deceukelier, Palle Dyrvall, Genevieve Lagraviere, Heike Langsdorf, Lara Martelli, Anna Rispoli, Geert Vaes, Kurt Vandendriessche, Helmut Van den Meersschaut. Le Maillon, Strasbourg, France, 2002. (Courtesy of Troubleyn © Wonge Bergmann)

The other major aural element is a series of songs that provide background for most of the dance sequences. All of these songs, in English, deal directly with animal / human relationships, and the one most often used, with the parrot as a kind of physical intertext, is the rather silly ditty by Leslie Bricusse from the 1967 film Doctor Doolittle, "If I Could Talk to the Animals," which begins: "If I could talk to the animals / Just imagine it / Chatting with a chimpy chimpanzee. / Imagine talking to the tiger / Chatting with the cheetah/What a neat achievement it would be." The other key musical accompaniments provide variations on this theme. The first, "Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing," a popular tune from 1932 by Robert Hargreaves, Stanley Damerell, and Tolchard Evans, does not stress communication, but simple imitation, the human version of the parrot's mimicry: "Let's all sing like the birdies sing, / Tweet, tweet tweet, tweet tweet [...] / Let's all warble like nightingales, / Give your throat a treat. / Take your time from the birds, / Now you all know the words, / Tweet, tweet tweet, tweet tweet."

The third signature song emphasizes a central theme of this work, the common interest in sexuality shared by humans and animals. Here the central song is Jewel Akens's "Birds and the Bees" (1965): "Let me tell about the birds and the bees / and the flowers and the trees / and the moon up above / and a thing called love."

The relationship between animals and humans lies at the heart of this production, but it is a deeply troubled one. On the one hand, the production as a whole works on every level to conflate human and animal communication and activity, as we can see from the three signature songs. Visually this conflation is emphasized by the parrot / trainer duo that presides over the production, by the full-body animal costumes often worn by the dancers, and by animal-like gestures and movements during several of the dances. Within the production, however, the dancers themselves-at least when they are appearing as humans, not animals-try desperately, and...