Last June at the Montpellier Dance Festival, the French choreographer, Jérôme Bel, rehearsed a delicate scene with a handful of volunteers. To the music of the pop song “ Killing me softly ” he began by making the group kneel down, then everyone had to lie down curled up with their heads flat on the floor, and cease all movement. Bel, who in fact owes his reputation of an avant-garde choreographer to four pieces which comprise a minimal amount of dance movement, has just used this scene again with 21 professional dancers from the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg to create the penultimate tableau of his new piece The show must go on! which late in the evening ended the first night of the Stromberg era. This is the only really polished and choreographed scene of the eighty minute piece in which the 36 year-old choreographer seeks not so much to entertain his public as to provoke it. He reached his objective in creating the piece in Hamburg .

In fact, The show must go on! is an illustrated review of pop songs chosen from among the finest international tunes of the last thirty years - from Leonard Bernstein to David Bowie, Edith Piaf, Paul Simon and the Beatles. Right on the forestage stands a disc-jockey who makes us listen to each of the songs by playing one CD after another on his only CD player, conscientiously changing them with great ceremony and after long pauses. During “Tonight” the Leonard Berstein melody from Westside Story with which the piece begins, the stage remains in darkness. For the second song it is still empty but by now lit up. It is only with the third song, when the show has already been going for ten minutes, that the performers spring out from the wings. They are neither all young, nor all slim, and are dressed up precisely as if they were about to go to a street festival in a fairly low-down area of town.

Later on there are again scenes where the stage remains empty. To the melody of “Yellow Submarine” by the Beatles, a yellow ray of light shines out of the trapdoor through which Bel has made his troupe disappear at the end of the previous scene. When Piaf sings “La vie en rose ” , Bel empties the stage and bathes the area where the audience is seated in pink light..

For a good third of the time, The show must go on! does nothing more than grapple with the showiness and the turgidity of clichés which obviously awaken nostalgic memories for some of the audience who start to clap their hands in time with the beat, wave their arms about or even the flames from their lighters, whereas for other members of the audience, who came with more serious expectations, the show induces more aggressive interruptions.

Even during the times when the performers are there, nothing much happens and the little that does occur requires such infinitesimally little choreographic and theatrical talent that the suspicion must certainly flash through the mind of every person there watching: “But I could do that too.” This is almost certainly what the artist intended.

The troupe stands in a semi-circle or right in front of the footlights and stares at the audience. They jig up and down as if they were in some cheap disco. To the melody of “ Ballerina Girl” they try out, some more skilfully than others, certain figures of classical ballet. One of the male dancers even goes so far as to go and get a bar from the wings. At one moment , the disc-jockey himself climbs onto the empty stage, turns the volume of his CD player which he has left in the pit right up, and begins to dance clumsily like a bear at a fairground in the circle of light in the middle of the stage. Later on the performers stride across the stage in no apparent order only then to fall in a mysterious order into one another's arms, each one holding the person immediately next to him. In one of the rare more strongly organised scenes, each person supports their partner as they gently fall forward, and slowly turns them round on the spot.

Bel is not interested in creating a theatrical work in the traditional sense. He wants to provoke his audience and force a reaction out of it by teasing it. In this respect, with the first night audience at the Hamburg show he struck the bull's eye. It was not long before a man in a black suit jumped up from the sixth row of the audience and came to join the group of disco dancers. Later there was some bitter vocal jousting between the enthusiasts in the audience and those who felt frustrated. Acerbic remarks filled the silences while the disc jockey was operating his machine and these were multiplied when he intentionally started chopping up a song by Paul Simon. There were constant demands for the theatre director to get up on stage or better still, to bow out.

But when all is said and done, Bel does not leave things at his one successful provocation. He attempts to hold a mirror up to his public: by sticking literally to the words of the songs, he underlines, through attitudes which are as kitsch as those outstretched arms and tender embraces, the emphasis on our feelings of happiness and, in doing so, tries to “loosen the tongue of kitsch” as Adorno puts it. But it is this pretension which causes his piece's downfall. Bel himself falls into the very trap that he wanted to lay for the audience. The gilded mica of intense kitsch cannot turn into a noble metal, but remains just what it is: paste. Finally, it is the reactions that it provokes from the audience that make this deliberately amateur review The show must go on amusing theatrical entertainment. But its scope corresponds fairly precisely to that of its model: a review of pop songs.

Jochen Schmidt 06.10.2000