In reality, he wanted his choreography to be composed exclusively of quotes and fragments which had left their mark and influence on him. Jérôme Bel, the young French choreographer who, with just four small works to his name, has been catapulted to the forefront of young choreographers, received a few agreements to his request to use other people’s material, as well as some refusals, due to the wish to protect intellectual copywrite. The letters are read to the audience in German and French by two performers, In an age of unlimited reproducibility, they plainly show the link between criminal law and the body with its images. Jérôme Bel has given his latest piece the title of The Last Performance A man wearing a red tartan jacket comes to the microphone at the front of the stage and states: “I am Jérôme Bel”. He casually starts his stopwatch, waits until it begins to ring and then goes away. A second man in a tennis player’s white outfit replaces him and declares: “I’m André Agassi”, before hitting a few well directed balls against the back wall. A young man, by uttering the famous quote, can be identified as Hamlet, before a woman with long blond hair, and wearing a white dress, in her turn comes onstage. She claims to be Susanne Linke, lies down on her back and, to the Schubert quartet The Young Girl and Death, begins to dance the beginning of Linke’s solo Wandlung, created in 1978. She has scarcely finished before a man in a white dress takes her place, claims also to be Susanne Linke and begins to dance the same extract. We watch the same piece of choreography four times in succession, until Jérôme Bel comes back onstage to announce: “I am not Jérôme Bel”. “I’m not Hamlet”, declares Frédéric Seguette, taking off various items of clothing one after the other, and folding them carefully, until he gets down to a pair of white underpants and announces: “I’m Calvin Klein”. In the process of establishing and cancelling his identity, the performer’s body remains on the spot, like an empty space . He could be everybody, and he is no one. With this production, Jérôme Bel reduces his zero-point aesthetic even further, practically driving it into the arms of silence. If in his previous piece, Jérôme Bel, he sought to produce a sensual immediacy between the stage and parquet by using naked performers, at first glance The last performance remains thin and laden with theory. Some consider it to be danced theory, while for others it is a light and humorous children’s game that points toward the original scene at the root of every piece of theatre : disguising one-self. Yet to say that Bel leaves nothing to the imagination would be to underestimate the primary scene of this hour-long evening : the opening of Susanne Linke’s Wandlung choreography. Its title (change or transformation) does in essence what Bel is practising here. In the metamorphoses of a body, sprawled on its back, writhing as if trying to get out of its own skin, one quickly forgets Linke. The piece begins developing a poetry of its own. Although we know that everything which occurs on stage is a quote, nevertheless, the copy reveals a fascinating life of its own, and this makes our knowledge of the original seem unsignificant. At the end of the piece, the structure of Bel’s experiment is reduced even further and the spectators are left to freely use their own imaginations. Together with Claire Haenni, Bel holds a piece of black velvet in front of the dancer with whom they tiptoe across the stage, so that we only catch furtive glimpses of his arms and legs. Antonio Carallo comes on stage wearing Jérôme Bel’s costume and holding Agassi’s racquet. Having metamorphosed into a “Belassi”, he stands in front of the microphone without saying anything. At the end, the stage remains empty. A voice-off reads out the names of the members of the audience who reserved their tickets for the evening by leaving their names at the box office. It sounds like a missing persons list, a list of the names of people who have died. We are moved and frightened, because from this point on it is us who Jérôme Bel, with this simple device, is targeting and we understand at once that the identity game is not just for Hamlet, Agassi and Susanne Linke. In doing this, Bel leaves far behind him the confident framework of the theatre and its roleplays. The Last Performance also inventories and takes a stand on what the ego might still mean in our age of media and it holds the archives of our cultural memory wide open. What does being an actor, a dancer, a choreographer or a sportsman mean? The last performance, a piece meant to end all « performances of an identity », while putting its trust in the imagination of the audience like no other, is an "Endgame" of dance. Also, it could seem as the next to last line in the last volume of subjectivity, the adjuster between images and representation, and while losing the fight against vanishing altogether, it proves itself highly resistant, where potentially endless repetitions of the already danced, lived and said are concerned. Jérôme Bel suffers like Samuel Beckett : there's no way of killing consciousness. Bel also suffers like an Andy Warhol. His way of dealing with quotes and serial formations proves that he's creative and sensitive to an extent unlike any other choreographer.