Jump to full article: Agence France Presse (AFP) (fr), 2007-11-30
Intro: In many European capitals and perhaps more so in the United States, a performance glorifying the joys of smoking may have been ill-advised.
But in Athens, one of Europe's last bastions of smoker freedom, the show felt right at home.
'I am a mistake', the latest work by controversial Flemish Belgian visual artist Jan Fabre whose performers chain-smoke on stage as images of female smokers are projected in the background, had its world premiere in a packed Athens Concert Hall on Thursday.
"It is fortunate that this script was first played in Greece where the culture of smoking is ever-present," Fabre told AFP in an interview. . . .
The play has been scored by prominent German composer Wolfgang Rihm whose music is played onstage by an orchestra, while the background images were shot by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman.
. . .
the play was received with timid applause by Thursday's audience in Athens, while there was also coughing in the front rows from the billows of smoke onstage. . . .
'I am a mistake' next travels to Vienna on Saturday, followed by stops in Amsterdam, Birmingham, Luxembourg, Brussels and Cologne for shows in venues operated by the European Concert Hall Organisation (Echo).
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Quotes from this article:
It was designed as a manifesto of sorts from an artist who is himself a heavy smoker ...but the play now seems to have more relevance, with the whole world at war against cigarettes and smokers becoming a little like society's new negroes.
Flemish Belgian visual artist Jan Fabre, on his new work, 'I am a mistake.'
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