With Nom donné par l’auteur, Jérôme Bel presented a piece that was utterly silent and yet marked by an odd plenitude. Four large white letters create a frame for the stage: N, S, E, O set up four cardinal points within which the action takes place. Multicoloured objects are scattered on a rug (a hair drier, a flashlight, a ball, a banknote, skates). The two performers sit at different sides of the rug – Bel on a vacuum cleaner, Seguette on a stool – immobile and impassively withdrawn. They pick up one object after another, bringing about relationships between the objects: the salt spills onto the rug because the banknote is held out too far, the vacuum cleaner swallows the glow of the flashlight, and so on. Meanwhile, Bel and Seguette put their bodies on a par with the objects, without turning them into a source of expression. The process of shifting objects is sometimes rather lengthy, but it grippingly grows in density right to the end, and lets them cover the space by weaving a network of co-ordinates. They bring objects together, sometimes adding their own bodies, and thus invent sculptures that are in constant transformation. Without ever verging on the grotesque, they extract immediate meaning from the objects, which creates a theatre of movement that never strays into the traditional rhetoric of dance décors, but rather takes over the space in silence.

Mario Jandrokovic 22.07.1996