(…) In unison, in the choreography Jerome Bel by Jerome Bel, they portray no less than the four basic principles of dance : light, music and the body inhabiting a space, which over the following fifty minutes of the piece illuminate and examine one another. Onstage, the bodies are what they are. And we learn just what they are through digits and names assigned to them in the care of Jerome Bel. (…)
Although Jérôme Bel constantly refers to himself and his authorship in his work, his pieces contain no traces of personal expression. The 33-year old Parisian does not think much of the bourgeois notion of the artist being the original genius with a mission, that his works created ex-nihilo, imbue it with soul in order to express something. Instead he holds more to Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes who regard the term « author » as a legal category for the protection of ownership rights. The author, like the name « Jerome Bel » is only a coded message amongst many other coded messages that traverse his pieces. (…)
« What I tried with Jérôme Bel », he explains, « was to find a kind of « zero point of literature » for dance. I wanted to avoid two things : the erotic body and the perfectly muscular body, the body as warrior. Sex and power : in our entire culture (not only in dance) these stand for the two most dominating representations of the body, the primary instrument of dance, in a way that denies it its usual signs. » At a time when dance as a social phenomenon seems to be exploding (from the recent interest in dancing with a partner, onward to the raves of the technoscene and up to breakdance in the suburbs, its popularity spread through MTV) and with the body running the risk of vanishing behind artistic cuts and camera effects, Jerome Bel concentrates on the smaller, almost invisible coded messages of the body that turn it into an art-body.
In Jerome Bel, the remaining movements are functional and everyday ; performers play no roles ; bodies are, in the dance oriented, classical sense, neither « pretty », nor inevitably well-trained. The expansion of his constitutive boundaries, experienced in dance since the 60s through the American post-moderns and sphere of the Judson Church Group, remains determined by a minimalist definition of dance as a movement in time and space, a definition made most evident in Trisha Brown ‘s « Roof Piece ». The greatest possible extension of the space between dancers consisted in positioning them on the rooftops of different houses.
With Jerome Bel, however, the space contracts to the point of invisibility. His « signature » which Roland Barthes, contrary to the universality of language and privateness of styles regards as the third constitutive element of a text, less between the verbal mutilations of a Samuel Becket and linguistic explosion pursued by William Forsythe. Bel is fascinated by a connection between body and language which connects body images to social practices again.
« For me, dance as dance for the stage is no longer the never analysed, beautiful expression of somehow « natural » feelings through the body, a body that exists, and served because we are not sure of it. No. Not at all. Even the biological body presupposes an enormous amount of spiritual structuring work. Everything that we know about the body, that we understand, is based on codes and language » Not only does the identity of a person become with that a social and cultural construction. Even the body, usually reduced to its function of a carrier of human information, becomes a discursive construct. What is the body but water, fat and mass ? Jerome Bel likes this question. His bodies point to the performative dimensions of the body before moving, in the conventional sense, as performers through time and space.
Just as John Jasperse does in Excessories, (…) Jérôme Bel leaves behind the notion of freeing the innermost human nature, which, suppressed by civilisation processes from institutionalised forms of power, wants to throw off its shackles in modern dance and tanztheater. Michel Foucault, who already at the end of the 70s, in the first volume of his history of sexuality, clarified things regarding a theory of repression and, with that, the strict duality of individuality and suppression, sees the entwined, to and fro of the body and power as being the real production process : as creativity which first brings forth, out of a fear of the ghosts it summons, what it simultaneously has to control again. Dealing effectively the ordering things are so interwoven in one another that even dance for stage, instead of it being emancipating, is only capable of directing depositions., displacements and fissures while (de)constructing body images. Bel looks upon the body as the zone of emanation which Roland Barthes, in regard to text, formulates as « having no other origin but that of language, a language which continuously questions all origins ». Bel’s body images are readable, palimpsest-like body-texts composed of gestures of entry onto the body itself. These are formed from a concentrated fabric of quotations which nourish themselves on countless cultural practices.
Although Jérôme Bel constantly refers to himself and his authorship in his work, his pieces contain no traces of personal expression. The 33-year old Parisian does not think much of the bourgeois notion of the artist being the original genius with a mission, that his works created ex-nihilo, imbue it with soul in order to express something. Instead he holds more to Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes who regard the term « author » as a legal category for the protection of ownership rights. The author, like the name « Jerome Bel » is only a coded message amongst many other coded messages that traverse his pieces. (…)
« What I tried with Jérôme Bel », he explains, « was to find a kind of « zero point of literature » for dance. I wanted to avoid two things : the erotic body and the perfectly muscular body, the body as warrior. Sex and power : in our entire culture (not only in dance) these stand for the two most dominating representations of the body, the primary instrument of dance, in a way that denies it its usual signs. » At a time when dance as a social phenomenon seems to be exploding (from the recent interest in dancing with a partner, onward to the raves of the technoscene and up to breakdance in the suburbs, its popularity spread through MTV) and with the body running the risk of vanishing behind artistic cuts and camera effects, Jerome Bel concentrates on the smaller, almost invisible coded messages of the body that turn it into an art-body.
In Jerome Bel, the remaining movements are functional and everyday ; performers play no roles ; bodies are, in the dance oriented, classical sense, neither « pretty », nor inevitably well-trained. The expansion of his constitutive boundaries, experienced in dance since the 60s through the American post-moderns and sphere of the Judson Church Group, remains determined by a minimalist definition of dance as a movement in time and space, a definition made most evident in Trisha Brown ‘s « Roof Piece ». The greatest possible extension of the space between dancers consisted in positioning them on the rooftops of different houses.
With Jerome Bel, however, the space contracts to the point of invisibility. His « signature » which Roland Barthes, contrary to the universality of language and privateness of styles regards as the third constitutive element of a text, less between the verbal mutilations of a Samuel Becket and linguistic explosion pursued by William Forsythe. Bel is fascinated by a connection between body and language which connects body images to social practices again.
« For me, dance as dance for the stage is no longer the never analysed, beautiful expression of somehow « natural » feelings through the body, a body that exists, and served because we are not sure of it. No. Not at all. Even the biological body presupposes an enormous amount of spiritual structuring work. Everything that we know about the body, that we understand, is based on codes and language » Not only does the identity of a person become with that a social and cultural construction. Even the body, usually reduced to its function of a carrier of human information, becomes a discursive construct. What is the body but water, fat and mass ? Jerome Bel likes this question. His bodies point to the performative dimensions of the body before moving, in the conventional sense, as performers through time and space.
Just as John Jasperse does in Excessories, (…) Jérôme Bel leaves behind the notion of freeing the innermost human nature, which, suppressed by civilisation processes from institutionalised forms of power, wants to throw off its shackles in modern dance and tanztheater. Michel Foucault, who already at the end of the 70s, in the first volume of his history of sexuality, clarified things regarding a theory of repression and, with that, the strict duality of individuality and suppression, sees the entwined, to and fro of the body and power as being the real production process : as creativity which first brings forth, out of a fear of the ghosts it summons, what it simultaneously has to control again. Dealing effectively the ordering things are so interwoven in one another that even dance for stage, instead of it being emancipating, is only capable of directing depositions., displacements and fissures while (de)constructing body images. Bel looks upon the body as the zone of emanation which Roland Barthes, in regard to text, formulates as « having no other origin but that of language, a language which continuously questions all origins ». Bel’s body images are readable, palimpsest-like body-texts composed of gestures of entry onto the body itself. These are formed from a concentrated fabric of quotations which nourish themselves on countless cultural practices.
