We are living in better times. The obvious character of the division stage / foyer in the reception of performing art is getting erased. The public becomes aware that something is put in motion. It takes place in the seats and is waiting for the performative assault. (…)

The show must go on is manifested, in a structure of a crystalline clarity, like the joyful and complex reflection of performance phenomenon. Dance, music and cinema are presented in their effective ambivalence - the representation of emotions, the love legends, of passion and death and the unavoidable continuity. The expression "The show must go on", considered as sentimental insurance, ironical notice or as encouragement, is to be heard on difficult terran, a formula shared by the stage world and the everyday world. Bel knows pretty well the mechanisms of pop, of spectacle and of their "biz" in order to isolate the structures and recompose them with a blade-like analyse. In the opulent theatrical cathedral of Hamburg, this construction happened to be especially efficient. The emotion-goaled decoration of the building and the blown up sentimentality enveloped by the super-hits combined to destabilise the atmosphere. If music and cinema are making good trade of our feelings, it’s mainly because we, consumers, are making a contract with entertainment : it is the supplier to whom we deliver ourselves in exchange. In "The show must go on", the entertainment steps on the most serious stage of the German spirit and stirs up the air by waving this contract with fierce allusions. For a long time our souls have belonged to the drug dealer of entertainment or to the pontiffs of ‘the big show’. It is true that Bel falls on this moral issue only through his structural analysis. But he does so, in a most precise way. Because only one who is able to identify how a construction is assembled, can position himself inside it, in an autonomous way. And one who takes as much pleasure in the presentation of the constructive elements of industrial entertainment as in the spell of entertainment itself has an awareness of our multi-coloured jail.

It goes without saying that dance, theatre and the art market as a whole are themselves dependencies of this jail, inside which we are especially kept under surveillance, punished, celebrated and abandoned. Through the metamorphosis of shipwreck and death, Bel fills the stage with this atmosphere of a power struggle which we, spectators, so willingly let him tease us about. When Hamburg audience sitting in the dark clung onto its own uproar, because just the chorus of the song could be heard, it was clear that everybody felt especially strongly the presence of the black matter of entertainment. Because, as soon as the bright wings disappeared, the fear of the void invaded the theatre boxes, the stalls and the walled courtyard.

Helmut Ploebst 30.11.2000