Bernardini Library // Polo Biblio-Museale of Lecce
piazzetta giosuè carducci, Lecce, Italy, 73100
'I believe that the real vanguard is rooted in tradition. You can’t be a vanguardist in a vacuum.' - Jan Fabre
Within the Bernardini Library's spaces dedicated to theatrical Culture and the performing arts, the Jan Fabre Archive and Teaching Centre represents a new addition to an internationally recognised centre for theatre research, performance history, and contemporary practice. Alongside the Carmelo Bene Archive, the Laflis of Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley, and the Savarese, D'Amico, and Pastore Collections, it forms part of a network of archives dedicated to the preservation, study, and transmission of theatre as a living artistic practice.
The Jan Fabre Archive and Teaching Centre is conceived not only as a place of preservation but also as a space for research, learning, and artistic exchange. Bringing together archival materials from Jan Fabre's theatre practice, it offers researchers, students, artists, and future generations access to a body of work that has continually explored the relationship between theatre, performance, choreography, and the visual arts.
A central part of the Centre is its ongoing educational programme. As an extension of the archive, the Teaching Centre hosts regular masterclasses led by Jan Fabre and the Jan Fabre Teaching Group. Drawing on the experience of leading performers from Troubleyn/Jan Fabre, these intensive masterclasses bring performers from around the world into direct contact with Fabre's artistic language, where physical training, discipline, imagination, and transformation are fundamental to the creative process.
'In the work of Jan Fabre, the body is never just one thing. It incorporates many forms and possibilities. For Fabre physicality is the most important impulse in acting. That's entirely different than the usual emphasis on psychology. The motivation for the actions must be clear, legible. Not from psychology but from the space, the territory. Dancers and actors have to know how to make use of the space, their territory. How to place themselves in a structure of time, place and action.' - Professor Dr. Luk van den Dries
The Jan Fabre Archive and Teaching Centre offers the opportunity to encounter this artistic approach not only through drawings, manuscripts, photographs, videos, and performance documentation, but also through embodied practice. In this way, the archive becomes a place where artistic knowledge is shared through experience as well as through documents.
As curator Giacinto Di Pietrantonio has written of Fabre's work, it emerges from 'continuous negotiations between different disciplines' and from a constant search for a metamorphic consilience between theatre and the visual arts. The Jan Fabre Archive and Teaching Centre carries this approach forward by preserving not only the record of performances, but also the working methods, practices, and knowledge that continue to shape new generations of performers and artists. It is a place where artistic heritage is studied, practised, and continually reinterpreted.
