The French daily La Croix described Jérôme Bel as a 'nonchoreographer of nonpieces presented on stage preferably by nondancers.' Mr. Bel, who has become an international cult figure in the dance world by challenging its conventions, embraces the description. 'There's no virtuoso,' Mr. Bel said of his rotating group of 40 performers. 'We're not there to be admired. We're not seductive. That's a very radical perspective to put on the stage.' Provocative, cerebral and funny, his minimalist work erases the comforting distance between performer and spectator. 'I'm trying to create equality between the stage and the audience,' Mr. Bel said, 'not to dominate the public.' The attempt has won him both cheers and brickbats from European critics. New Yorkers get their first chance to judge for themselves beginning on Thursday, when Dance Theater Workshop presents 'The Show Must Go On.'

'People who are well acquainted with the codes of performance understand how I play with them,' Mr. Bel said. 'And those who aren't play along with my new codes. The problem I have is those in the middle: the bourgeoisie, those who are sure of their values.' They're the ones who filled the Théâtre de la Ville here, he says, when 'The Show Must Go On' had its premiere in 2001. Surrounded by complete darkness for the opening few minutes, they listened to recorded numbers from 'West Side Story' and 'Hair.' Infused with collective nostalgia, they held up lighters, clapped, giggled. When the lights came up, the performers, dressed in street clothes, stared out from the stage, a Gap ad come to life. Then David Bowie sang out 'Let's Dance,' and the performers burst into a deadpan groove. They paired up and raised their arms, 'I'm king of the world!' style, to 'My Heart Will Go On,' from 'Titanic.' They clumsily channeled their inner 'Ballerina Girl' to Lionel Richie. To 18 global hits, they performed rigorously unbeautiful, starkly ironic movements, few of them actual dance steps. Spectators yelled and hissed, stormed the stage, demanded refunds, Mr. Bel recalled; one critic slapped another. The reviewer from Le Monde wrote, 'The show is in the seats.' On a recent afternoon at his favorite cafe in the Pompidou Center, Mr. Bel, 40, referred to the uproar as 'un scandale.' 'It was odious,' he said, closing his eyes and smiling. 'Dreadful!' Slight, brown-haired, dressed in orange, yellow and magenta, he drank nothing and waved his arms about like the dancer he once was. 'That was the premiere,' he said, 'and I thought we'd never perform it again.'

But 'The Show Must Go On' has been performed around the world, like most of the pieces that followed his first, 'Name Given by the Author,' in 1994. After 'Jérôme Bel,' in 1995, a man in Dublin sued over the onstage nudity and urination. (Case dismissed.) When 'The Show Must Go On' toured Israel last year, Mr. Bel said, a woman in the audience mooned the house, and someone jumped on stage and kicked a dancer. Mr. Bel's work also receives more loving receptions. A commission last year for the Paris Opera Ballet, 'Véronique Doisneau,' about a 41-year-old dancer on the brink of forced retirement, was a success with critics and audiences.

Born in the south of France, Mr. Bel grew up in Algeria, Iran, Morocco and South Africa, and returned to France to study at the contemporary dance center at Angers. Starting at 18, he worked as a dancer for 10 years. While assisting Philippe Découflé with the direction of the opening ceremony for the 1992 Winter Olympics at Albertville, he realized he was more interested in directing than performing. He then spent two years developing his performance vocabulary by reading up on philosophy, performance and semiotics.

'All that gave me the tools to reconsider the work of the choreographer,' he said. 'The question became, always, 'How do I produce a show without dance?' In France, we call my work conceptual, where the idea is more important than the realization. I'm not producing dance. I'm working at the borderline of dance.' Mr. Bel said he amuses himself when he travels by changing the 'profession' line on his immigration forms: he has used 'dancer,' 'actor,' 'playwright,' 'thinker,' 'unemployed.' During the two years it took to create 'The Show Must Go On,' he was constantly in motion; he said that using ubiquitous pop songs allowed him to gather inspiration everywhere, 'in supermarkets, cafes, taxis in Hong Kong, Madrid, Helsinki or Bangkok.' He put songs and movement together, he said, 'to produce a discourse, a way of thinking about the theater, the community.' 'And I like this idea of community,' he added. 'What does it mean to live together, to respect one another or not, to exert power?'

The North American version of 'The Show Must Go On' comes with a warning that it contains full frontal male nudity, referring to a scene in which a male dancer illustrates the lyrics of Reel 2 Real's 'I Like to Move It' by acrobatically swinging his private parts to the beat. But Mr. Bel said that the dancer was in another show and wasn't planning to travel to New York, and that he had not yet found a willing substitute. The show will go on, he said, even if the pants don't come off.

Kristin Hohenadel 20.03.2005