Carte Blanche Archives

Jan Martens’ Debut with Carte Blanche

CANCEL BERTHA moves to its own rhythm- a playful blend of energy, curated chaos, and unexpected creativity. The performance reflects Jan Martens’ signature approach: reimagining dance as a space for individuality, connection, and subtle humor. Scenes flow seamlessly from one moment to the next, blurring the boundaries between moments of ecstatic group energy and sequences of suspended intimacy.

In CANCEL BERTHA, music isn’t always what you hear—it’s what you see and feel. True to Martens’ fascination with rhythm, structure, and music scores, the dancers’ movements become their own soundscape. Silence holds as much weight as motion, and patterns emerge with geometry in delightful ways.

CANCEL BERTHA is bold without being brash, playful, yet precise. It’s a dense dance evening that draws inspiration from polyrhythms and a love for layered storytelling. The Carte Blanche ensemble crafts a performance that balances the poppy, the avant-garde, and the deeply human.

February 20th – 22nd, 2025 Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles, Brussels
March 26th – 28th, 2025 Chaillot / Théâtre de la Ville, Paris
135 minutes

A Dreamlike Journey

Monuments are cold, static, soundless; human bodies are warm, breathing, chanting. Carte Blanche’s new performance is undoubtedly both long and remarkable.
Springback Magazine

in collaboration with Carte Blanche – the Norwegian National Company of Contemporary Dance and composer Carmen Villain

The Living Monument unfolds worlds that have their own logic. It is a dreamlike journey, at times a beautiful nightmare, playing with duration and space like a landscape in which slowness creates its own music. Shifting sceneries, inhabited by fictional figures, reveal images and sensations which evoke glimpses of memories, fragments of narrations and futuristic visions.

Developed together with fourteen performers, the choreography is created from bodies, fabrics and objects, which continuously transform and reconfigure to form new physical, mental and visual environments. Guided by the ecological principle of recycling, materials and voices are reused and reshaped. Songs blend with natural, instrumental and digital sounds. Bodies are hidden or exposed, figures appear only to transform. Voices intermingle, they stir up sensations and carry stories that anyone can inhabit.

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