Every one of the six pieces that Jérôme Bel has choreographed since 1994 is a small masterpiece. It says something for him that his masterpieces become greater and more popular with time. That his choreographies, which he literally writes down, have more to do with dance than dancing, doesn’t change anything. Many do just dance. But few pose such relevant and important questions about dance. Jérôme Bel is constantly concerned to redefine the relationship between dancer and the audience, between author and recipient. The lively provocation that audiences from Hamburg to Paris felt with his most recent choreography The show must go on is the best proof that he has hit a nerve. Bel’s pieces, in which the social dimensions of dance performance occupy the central position, find images as simple as they are shocking for complex themes like the relationship between body and language. And yet for all of their much appreciated conceptuality, they are still naughty enough not to take themselves that seriously. If one were looking for an attempt to make a contemporary dance-theatre after Pina Bausch, Jérôme Bel would be the man. His pieces, in which thoughts literally become bodily, yield a great sensual directness one can only be moved by.

Gerald Siegmund 15.11.2000