Flemish choreographer Jan Martens’ conceptually rigorous and dynamically engaging work has been captivating audiences across Europe since 2009.

In SWEAT BABY SWEAT, he focuses on the all-consuming love affair between a man and a woman, a couple who can’t or won’t let each other go. Played out over an hour, in which a lifetime is passing, we are drawn into this modern mating ritual of two profoundly entwined lives; naïve, and at the same time comforting and confronting. Dance, music, song and video imagery are combined to produce this arresting, tender but painfully poignant study of desire, love and loss.

All Jan Martens’ works explore the possibility of a perfect balance and symbiosis between storytelling and conceptualism. He is not trying to create a new movement language, but instead he molds and recycles existing idioms and places them in a different setting, so a new idea emerges. In his work the beauty of the incomplete human being is front and center.

“A seriously intimate duet that’s like an intensely slow acro-balance routine for a couple who literally can’t let each other go.”
– Evening Standard, London