DE MARKTEN, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM 2020

 M the (free?) Man or when action poetry collapses with/against/into live art performance.

M the (free?) Man is an exploration of epigenetic as a living sentiment and the négritude body as the last remaining proof.

M the (free?) Man questions the “Safe Space” era. Is a body broken by generations able to accept peace? to process healing? Or are pain and warfare the only way because nothing and nowhere is safe.

Sylvain Souklaye writes and screams a poetry made for funambulists. His words are so fine and invisible that the line between an ode to life and an ode to death is blurred. M the (free?) Man is a continuous and brutal flow of freedom and rage, anger and pain, past and future embodied into a collective moment.

The question of life and death triggers the performance. The body language gives a natural rhythm to the mother tongue. They become one movement in which the audience swims or sinks. It becomes an epiphany and an external exchange between Souklaye and the audience. 

During M the (free?) Man passive or voyeuristic people have to take a stand because History will not be kind with “Safe spacers”. The audience must be accountable like the performer!

It’s a countdown for him, for his ancestors and for the audience. Sylvain Souklaye chooses a witness to be the metronome and the dictionary of his final instant. He shares his body and the unsettling space with the audience and make them the new carrier of his epigenetic history.

It is not a social, gender or skin colour epigenetic. M the (free?) Man is an epigenetic of the intimate.

M the (free?) Man dives into the soul and the dirt to seek Sylvain Souklaye tipping point… It is about surviving or is it about living?