Bel’s cast of twenty, arranged so often in the simple compositional devices of semi-circle or line, is perhaps simply a list of people - presented value free, without judgement or comment, for our inspection.

I saw Roy Faudre (Wooster Group) talk during the LIFT festival in London.
He said a beautiful thing : « The live actor is the one who says, « Look I am a person in front of you. You can look at me from the top of my head to the tips of my feet. »

Trained as a choreographer, Bel seems to have invented something that might better be described as conceptual time-based sculpture. Put more simply, he understands that theatre is a frame (game) constructed so that people can look at other people. He is good at constructing frames like these; deceptively transparent unfolding vantage points on the faces, bodies and movements of human beings. In The show must go on, I find myself looking at the people, my eyes scanning left to right and back again at whim. The way that one moves her wrist, the way that one dips his eyes. The way that one is good at that thing, the way the other one is not so good. I start to think that everyone looks beautiful in Jerome’s shows and I cannot fathom it at first. Of course they’re mainly young, cast in some half-chic half-dysfunctional Gap ad, but it’s more than that. Perhaps this beauty arises because everyone here is (allowed to be? shown as?) present in a mode that is resolutely without drama. Like the subjects of Warhol’s Screen Tests (1964-66) it does not matter if these dancers sweat or shrug or focus, yawn or smile or flutter their eyes or scratch their arses. Jonathon Jones wrote about the Screen Tests, « You can judge Warhol's subjects harshly or kindly, laugh at them or love them. Mostly you study and, as you watch, cool down. You do not judge, after all, but become aware of the endurance of looking, and the tenderness of allowing yourself to be looked at » (The Guardian, August 2001). No matter what, Bel’s dancers are present before us in their perfections and in their defects, in their ticks, in their stupid ideas and enthusiasms and in their cover-ups. No matter what, they somehow appear, as a stranger once said to me, « comfortable in their own skins », resigned to the act of being watched. (…)

Where drama might demand or force my attention on a moment-by-moment basis, the gift of The show must go on, in common with so much of Bel’s work, is that it gives me the space and the time to look, the space and the time to be bored, the space and the time in which to find an interest. The uniformity of the line, the slowness of change in the piece and the simplicity of movement, all hide (or rather, occasion) a wealth of vivid, amazing detail.

Tim Etchells 01.11.2002