A portrait of two people. A love duet.

A couple dance in an unspecified space : a lift ? A cellar ? A caravan ? They don’t leave each other’s side. They form a wordless moving image.

 Jan Martens and Steefka Zijlstra show five key moments in a relationship. A revealing half hour during which two people shut out the outside world. Just for a while – until that world forces itself upon them again. A small guide on how to treat your lifetime companion is a piece about love, a tender and intimate performance, comforting and confronting. A contemporary mating ritual on four square metres. Recognizable, naive, with a pinch of melancholy.

Jan Martens : “The idea for this duet came to me when my partner and I decided to live together in a small flat. I thought about how we influenced each other’s life more and more. At the same time I grew more and more interested in historical and iconic love stories. I wanted to investigate how I could integrate the familiar ways of representing relationships (attraction and rejection, tenderness and cruelty) into my own creations.”