Jérôme Bel is a French choreographer whose work challenges the conventions of dance as an art form. What constitutes a performance? Who performs, and who is excluded? Contemporary dance, Bel has said, is “dead”. His intention is “to destroy the dream of the audience”, and to offer a new experience.
The first 10 minutes of Bel’s latest work, Gala, are taken up with a slideshow. We are shown a succession of empty theatres and stages, the intention presumably being to emphasise the artificial and exclusive nature of these spaces. One by one the performers come on. There are 20 of them, variously abled, young and old. To music from the ballet Giselle, each attempts a classical pirouette. There are earnest efforts, and a multiplicity of twists, spirals and coilings. You soon lose interest in the original step; these personal variants are far more informative and touching.
As the cast essay partnered waltzes and Michael Jackson moonwalks, we start to get to know them and their individual quirks. They’re dressed “theatrically” – there’s a man in a grass skirt and blue eye shadow, another in a ruff and ribboned stockings, a woman in a fur-trimmed cape – but in a random, self-assembled way. All are clearly delighting in what they are doing. Several of the cast perform solos, which everyone else follows as best they can. My favourite is a little girl who hurtles around the stage in a glittery dress to Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball.
Before becoming a choreographer, Bel was a student of post-structuralism, and of theorists such as Roland Barthes, who described how the theatrical experience is characterised by “a thickness of signs” in the form of movement, gesture, expression, lighting, decor, and so on. By using amateurs – literally, those who love what they do, as opposed to those who are merely paid to do it – Bel is attempting to thin these signs out, to eliminate the internalised mannerisms and techniques of professionals in order to present performers in a state of “pure presentness”.
Bel has talked of “de-skilling” his performers (“skills concern craft, which bores me; I find this decadent”). But he is clearly not averse to having his gateau and eating it, for much of Gala is dependent on craft, several of the cast are trained dancers, and some are indeed professionals. There is irony, too, in his critique of theatrical dance’s supposed elitism. Was there ever a more exclusive club, with a more impenetrable secret language, than that of the conceptual artists among whom Bel numbers himself?
