In THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER, the dancer is defined as a  pure performer, striving after perfection. Subjected to a complex,  mathematical, vigorous and exhausting choreography executed in forced  uniformity, the eight dancers ultimately slip up. And then their masks  fall.

The American photographer Philippe Halsman once said: “When you ask a  person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of  jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears.” Jan Martens  takes this stand as a starting point for THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER and exposes through the jump the person behind the dancer. Thanks to its radical choreographic form, THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER  reveals the audience’s perception of dancers, choreographers,  spectators and the current cultural policy. Where does the thin line  between art and entertainment lie? Who are we as an audience when we  contemplate the suffering of dancers from the theatre like a bullfight  in an arena? What do we want to get as audience? Do we want to  experience an intensity that we do not feel in our everyday life? Do we  want to experience beauty that is perhaps not visible in our everyday  life? Is contemporary dance striptease for the elite? THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER makes the viewer shift in his position: from being merely subjected to the experience to actively reflecting on it.
 

Jan Martens (° 1984, Belgium) studied at  the Fontys Dance Academy in Tilburg and graduated in 2006 from the dance  department of the Artesis Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp. Since 2010 he  has been making his own choreographic work which, over the years, has  been performed with increasing regularity before a national and  international audience.    

The work of Martens is nurtured by the belief that each body can  communicate, that each body has something to say. That direct  communication expresses itself in transparent forms. His work is a  sanctuary in which the notion of time becomes tangible again and in  which there is room for observation and emotion as well as reflection.  To achieve this result he creates not so much a movement language of his  own, but shapes and reuses existing idioms in a different context so  that new ideas emerge. In each new work he tries to redraw the relation  between public and performer.

Martens’ first production I CAN RIDE A HORSE WHILST JUGGLING SO MARRY ME (2010)  was a portrait of a generation of young women in a society dominated by  social networks. It was followed by two love duets that he made at  Frascati Amsterdam. A SMALL GUIDE ON HOW TO TREAT YOUR LIFETIME COMPANION (2011) was selected for Aerowaves 2011 and SWEAT BABY SWEAT (2011) for the Dutch Dance Festival 2012 and Circuit X 2013. He then created three shows about unconventional beauty, with  performers whose bodies you do not expect in the context of contemporary  dance: BIS (2012) for the then 62-year-old Truus Bronkhorst, LA BETE (2013) for the young actress Joke Emmers, and VICTOR (2013), a duet for a boy and a grown man that Martens created with director Peter Seynaeve.

In 2014 Martens focused attention on the jump as movement in the group performance THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER (2014). The production was selected for the Flanders Theatre Festival and is still touring, just like Martens’ solo ODE TO THE ATTEMPT (2014) and the project THE COMMON PEOPLE (2016),  a performance, social experiment and workshop in one, created in  collaboration with film director Lukas Dhont. Martens’ show RULE OF THREE (2017)  was a collaboration with the American sound artist NAH, and had its  premiere at deSingel in Antwerp where Martens started his trajectory as creative associate in  2017. The performance got nominated for a Zwaan (Swan) in the category  ‘most impressive dance production 2018.’ De Zwanen are seen as the most  prestigious dance prize within the Dutch performing arts field.

In the 18/19 season, Martens engaged in three collaborations. Together with 13 youths and fABULEUS, he created PASSING THE BECHDEL TEST, a theatrical production in which the voices of the youths are interwoven with  the voices of famous and less famous women from the present and the  past. He also revised the successful 2011 production A SMALL GUIDE ON HOW TO TREAT YOUR LIFETIME COMPANION with two new dancers under the title PAULINE THOMAS as commissioned by CDCN Le Gymnase in Roubaix. In January 2019, Martens himself took the stage again in the solo lostmovements,  in which he plunges into the universe of choreographer and friend Marc  Vanrunxt (Kunst/Werk). In 19/20 Martens’ focus is on the premiere of any attempt will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones.  A work for seventeen dancers between the ages of 15 and 68. The  premiere – scheduled for April 24, 2020 at DE SINGEL (Antwerp, BE) was  postponed due to the corona crisis and took in the end place on July 18  at Festival d’Avignon. On July 12, 2021 ELISABETH GETS HER WAY premiered  at Julidans (Amsterdam, NL). This solo created and performed by Jan  Martens is a danced portrait of the Polish-born Elisabeth Chojnacka  (1939–2017), an exceptionally talented and passionate musician who  contributed to the revival of harpsichord music in the middle of the  twentieth century.

In 2014 Jan Martens founded, together with business manager  Klaartje Oerlemans, the choreographic platform GRIP in Antwerp /  Rotterdam, from where they jointly produce and distribute his work as  well as support the work of Cherish Menzo and Steven Michel.

Source : janmartens.com  

Lukas Dhont is a Belgian director, born in Ghent in 1991.
Lukas Dhont is one of the new faces of the young Flemish artistic  avant garde. He studied film at the KASK in Ghent, creating  internationally renowned short films, both fiction and non-fiction  (documentaries and music videos). His work focuses on bodies and their  performances, entering into conversation with the dance world (with  choreographers Jan Martens and Sidi Larbi Cherakaoui), music (from Oscar  & The Wolf to Sylvie Kreusch) and fashion (in 2020, he collaborated  with Chanel as well as the Azzaro fashion house). His first feature  film, Girl, revealed him to a wider audience. A moving portrait  of a transgender ballerina, the film won multiple awards in Cannes and  was nominated at the Oscars in 2018. Elegant and energetic, spectacular  and sensitive, his films stage individuals in the throes of  metamorphosis: in adolescence, through the quest for gender and  sexuality or art. He is currently preparing his second feature. 
Source: La cinétek