Le dernier spectacle, in 1998, was supposed to have marked his farewell to the world of dance after just three personal creations. It was meant to have been his last piece, but no such doing. Yet how is one to continue, when one has chosen pulling out, programmatically speaking, as the theme of the show, which ended up leaving the choreography entirely up to the spectator?
The French choreographer Jerome Bel’s piece consisted of a four-fold repetition of the overture sequence from Susanne Linke’s solo Wandlungen. For the fifth reprise, he had the dancer disappear behind a black curtain, letting the audience complete the choreography by drawing on their memory. Nevertheless, Jerome Bell came up with a device to keep on going. He asked his colleague Xavier Le Roy to develop a choreography in his vein and with his dancers, which he then signed, the way an artist signs a painting. The choreography, presented at the Frankfurt Mousonturm, is called Xavier Le Roy – the name of the artist who has been appropriated, and who has carried out another’s concept. But it is Jerome Bel who claims authorship.
Jerome Bel’s pieces always involve an ironic play upon the notion of author. In his works, the author is no longer an autonomous creator, constantly making art out of nothing, a myth that keeps clinging to French dance milieus, after the creative explosion of the 80’s. With a nod at Roland Barthes’ semiotics, the name Jerome Bel – the author’s signature which became the title of the second piece – serves as a discursive field, in which different codes, stemming from all conceivable cultural domains, get intertwined. The author’s name thus turns into an empty form, spread like a second body around the choreographer’s biological body. With its particular stamp, Jerome Bel is a choreographic body that other artists can connect to, such as Xavier le Roy, in order to spark off a production that stands fiercely opposed to modernist demands that movement be original and singular.
In their works, Bel and Le Roy are deliberately linked to 60’s minimalist art. They thus claim for dance something that had found its way into fine arts at least since Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol’s “Factory”, as well as the works of Sol LeWitt, Charles Ross, and Robert Morris: a work concept taking priority over its implementation and uniqueness. The radical choreographic experiments of the 60’s, precisely developed in collaboration with visual artists, are again a springboard in an altered social environment: for the dancer or choreographer, whose material is the body in its beauty, to develop strategies that oppose our mass culture of beautiful bodies and of the media’s flood of images.
The works of Jerome Bel and Xavier Le Roy are complementary. While Le Roy, in his solo Self-Unfinished, is looking for a way out of an overload of signs, Bel delightfully enacts sign proliferation. If one shows an unbranded body, that keeps metamorphosing in order to escape being fetishized as an object, the other loads bodies with brands until their identity gets utterly lost. For this sake, he uses t-shirts covered in slogans, as in Shirtologie (1997) or else lipstick on naked skin, as in Jerome Bel (1995). Like both halves of a circle, their voices ultimately meet in the inaccessible utopia of a body at its starting point, which, having integrated all signs, has thus surpassed them. Xavier Le Roy, in a thoroughly minimalist conception of art, appeals rather to the spectator’s understanding and perceptive abilities than to his sense-experience. Contrary to Jerome Bel’s previous pieces, Xavier Le Roy is actually a dry didactic piece, which shrewdly reveals his choreographic principle and notions of body as language based. Despite its stiffness, the short 40-minute piece has its share of wit.
The performance begins with music by Bernard Herrman, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Light is projected on a chair and a black screen, at which point a figure in sneakers, grey pants and blue shirt, suddenly appears on stage, the wig’s blond hair hiding the face. The figure starts running around the chair, hands up against cheeks, and then falls down behind the screen, letting out a shout.
Echoing poor James Stewart, who in Hitchcock’s classic falls into the void because of his sudden disturbing dealings with the double of the woman he’s supposed to be tailing, the spectator of Xavier Le Roy is also in the dark about whether the performance is a solo or duo. Once the music stops, the figure emerges from behind the screen, then exits again. With each appearance, a new pose is stricken, easily identifiable: Charlie Chaplin’s gait, Hitler’s salute, Michael Jackson’s “moonwalk”, Jesus crucified, Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, Michael Jordan’s leap, Napoleon’s characteristic pose, or Marylin Monroe on the subway grating. These are followed by mere pacing, and by sitting, standing, or reclining positions. The distance between chair and screen gets measured by counting steps, but the second time round, there is a sudden discrepancy in the number of steps. And then, to the surprise of all, another figure, identically dressed, comes out from behind the screen. Once the secret is out, Frédéric Sequette and Pascale Paoli go through the sequence of references two more times, once dressed and once in the nude, though without gender connotations. At the end, a figure veiled in grey appears, a neutral subject, who absorbs all differences between both visions – one naïve, one experienced – and between man and woman.
Obviously, what Bel and Le Roy are here enacting is vertigo, in the Vertigo sense. It is a whirlwind of identities, whose references stem only from the archives of our collective memory. It is also an illusion addressed to the perception of the spectator, who is being constantly urged to smooth out minimal differences in order to probe intermediary spaces. This setup, like a laboratory experiment, reduces the basic choreographic situation down to its skeleton; the body, shed of its specific weight, can act differently, according to its context, subjective memory, and individual outlook. Whatever hermetic rigor may be involved, this is what makes Jerome Bel’s Xavier Le Roy open and rich.
The French choreographer Jerome Bel’s piece consisted of a four-fold repetition of the overture sequence from Susanne Linke’s solo Wandlungen. For the fifth reprise, he had the dancer disappear behind a black curtain, letting the audience complete the choreography by drawing on their memory. Nevertheless, Jerome Bell came up with a device to keep on going. He asked his colleague Xavier Le Roy to develop a choreography in his vein and with his dancers, which he then signed, the way an artist signs a painting. The choreography, presented at the Frankfurt Mousonturm, is called Xavier Le Roy – the name of the artist who has been appropriated, and who has carried out another’s concept. But it is Jerome Bel who claims authorship.
Jerome Bel’s pieces always involve an ironic play upon the notion of author. In his works, the author is no longer an autonomous creator, constantly making art out of nothing, a myth that keeps clinging to French dance milieus, after the creative explosion of the 80’s. With a nod at Roland Barthes’ semiotics, the name Jerome Bel – the author’s signature which became the title of the second piece – serves as a discursive field, in which different codes, stemming from all conceivable cultural domains, get intertwined. The author’s name thus turns into an empty form, spread like a second body around the choreographer’s biological body. With its particular stamp, Jerome Bel is a choreographic body that other artists can connect to, such as Xavier le Roy, in order to spark off a production that stands fiercely opposed to modernist demands that movement be original and singular.
In their works, Bel and Le Roy are deliberately linked to 60’s minimalist art. They thus claim for dance something that had found its way into fine arts at least since Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol’s “Factory”, as well as the works of Sol LeWitt, Charles Ross, and Robert Morris: a work concept taking priority over its implementation and uniqueness. The radical choreographic experiments of the 60’s, precisely developed in collaboration with visual artists, are again a springboard in an altered social environment: for the dancer or choreographer, whose material is the body in its beauty, to develop strategies that oppose our mass culture of beautiful bodies and of the media’s flood of images.
The works of Jerome Bel and Xavier Le Roy are complementary. While Le Roy, in his solo Self-Unfinished, is looking for a way out of an overload of signs, Bel delightfully enacts sign proliferation. If one shows an unbranded body, that keeps metamorphosing in order to escape being fetishized as an object, the other loads bodies with brands until their identity gets utterly lost. For this sake, he uses t-shirts covered in slogans, as in Shirtologie (1997) or else lipstick on naked skin, as in Jerome Bel (1995). Like both halves of a circle, their voices ultimately meet in the inaccessible utopia of a body at its starting point, which, having integrated all signs, has thus surpassed them. Xavier Le Roy, in a thoroughly minimalist conception of art, appeals rather to the spectator’s understanding and perceptive abilities than to his sense-experience. Contrary to Jerome Bel’s previous pieces, Xavier Le Roy is actually a dry didactic piece, which shrewdly reveals his choreographic principle and notions of body as language based. Despite its stiffness, the short 40-minute piece has its share of wit.
The performance begins with music by Bernard Herrman, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Light is projected on a chair and a black screen, at which point a figure in sneakers, grey pants and blue shirt, suddenly appears on stage, the wig’s blond hair hiding the face. The figure starts running around the chair, hands up against cheeks, and then falls down behind the screen, letting out a shout.
Echoing poor James Stewart, who in Hitchcock’s classic falls into the void because of his sudden disturbing dealings with the double of the woman he’s supposed to be tailing, the spectator of Xavier Le Roy is also in the dark about whether the performance is a solo or duo. Once the music stops, the figure emerges from behind the screen, then exits again. With each appearance, a new pose is stricken, easily identifiable: Charlie Chaplin’s gait, Hitler’s salute, Michael Jackson’s “moonwalk”, Jesus crucified, Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, Michael Jordan’s leap, Napoleon’s characteristic pose, or Marylin Monroe on the subway grating. These are followed by mere pacing, and by sitting, standing, or reclining positions. The distance between chair and screen gets measured by counting steps, but the second time round, there is a sudden discrepancy in the number of steps. And then, to the surprise of all, another figure, identically dressed, comes out from behind the screen. Once the secret is out, Frédéric Sequette and Pascale Paoli go through the sequence of references two more times, once dressed and once in the nude, though without gender connotations. At the end, a figure veiled in grey appears, a neutral subject, who absorbs all differences between both visions – one naïve, one experienced – and between man and woman.
Obviously, what Bel and Le Roy are here enacting is vertigo, in the Vertigo sense. It is a whirlwind of identities, whose references stem only from the archives of our collective memory. It is also an illusion addressed to the perception of the spectator, who is being constantly urged to smooth out minimal differences in order to probe intermediary spaces. This setup, like a laboratory experiment, reduces the basic choreographic situation down to its skeleton; the body, shed of its specific weight, can act differently, according to its context, subjective memory, and individual outlook. Whatever hermetic rigor may be involved, this is what makes Jerome Bel’s Xavier Le Roy open and rich.
