Caught up in turn by the #MeToo wave, Belgian artist Jan Fabre is due to appear on Friday March 25 before the criminal court in Antwerp (north) to respond to accusations of “sexual harassment” within his dance and music company. an “indecent assault”.
The trial which opened on Friday morning was to begin with the testimonies of victims. Twelve women accuse him and “will be present“, assured the Belgian Institute for the equality of women and men, also a civil party. The hearing must continue on April 1 and the judgment will then be deliberated. The 63-year-old visual artist and choreographer incurs a sentence maximum of five years in prison.
This trial should be an opportunity to hear his explanations for the first time since September 2018, when the case broke out through an open letter from former employees or trainees of his company Troubleyn. In this text, published by a specialized Dutch-language media, twenty people in total, mostly dancers, denounce the pressures, humiliations and even blackmail of a sexual nature suffered in their work by the choreographer.
Jan Fabre then refutes the accusations. “We are not forcing anyone here to do things that one or the other considers beyond their limits. I never intended to intimidate or hurt people psychologically or sexually“, he pleads in a right of reply to the same media.
At the time, after the MeToo surge born in 2017 with the Weinstein affair in the United States, a study was launched by the Flemish authorities, in the Dutch-speaking north of Belgium, to identify inappropriate behavior of a sexual nature in the world of media and culture. It is in this context that Jan Fabre, a major European figure in contemporary art, was interviewed in June 2018 by the VRT channel.
When presented with the results of the study claiming that one in four women in this industry has already experienced an unwanted sexual advance at work, he replied: “home, never“. “In our company, in forty years, there has never been the slightest problem“, he assures, triggering a strong response.
The open letter is full of detailed statements and accuses him of having once said “no sex, no solo” to a dancer. She made headlines in Belgium and abroad. In Antwerp, the Labor Auditor, a specialized section of the public prosecutor’s office, opened an investigation.
Three years of investigations lead in June 2021 to a referral to the criminal justice system for “workplace violence, harassment or sexual harassment“with regard to”12 employees“, as well as for a “molestation“against one of these women.
Born in Antwerp in December 1958, Jan Fabre, an author, visual artist and theater director, has had a reputation since the 1980s as one of the most protean and avant-garde artists of his time. Famous for his beetle wing cases (he covered the entire ceiling of the hall of mirrors in the Royal Palace in Brussels), he is also known for his provocations.
In 2012, he had to apologize after a performance showing a “throwing cats” in Antwerp, which led to him being physically attacked. With the prospect of the trial, the cultural sector was shaken, sometimes having to decide between supporting a monument of contemporary art and distancing himself from of a man now too sulphurous.
A Troubleyn show scheduled for the end of 2021 in Charleroi (French-speaking Belgium) has been canceled after “pressure and invective“, according to the programmer. On the other hand, in Namur (center), there is no question of removing the sculpture of a giant turtle that has become an emblem of the city. “No one imagined deleting all of Woody Allen’s films when he was the subject of a complaint“, underlined the mayor Maxime Prévot.