Trained as a choreographer Jerome Bel forgets the most of dance, as if, in the forgetting, something else might be possible. Working in a language of movement and image that could be described as a kind of delicate, humane minimalism his interests are located just at the slippery, evocative meeting point between the physical and the philosophical - the body itself and the processes by which live presence is constructed, the processes of language and the relationship of language to objects (animate and inanimate), the process by which narrative (or meaning) is constructed, through the deployment of objects (animate and inanimate) in time and space.

Shirtology is 20 performers and a collection of T-shirts. An empty space, black dance floor, white light. The performers young - late teens to mid-twenties, a range of body types and human presences. The T-shirts second-hand - replete with the workaday slogans, logos, icons and pictures of international capitalist culture, much of it outdated; slogans for products or ideas you don't remember so well, numbers and dates (festivals, occasions), statistics, jokes, faces, admonishments, warnings, demands.

As playful as it is minimalist Shirtology is 'simply' a matter of deploying the people and the T-shirts in combination and arrangement - structures through time, pictures in space. The work of the piece is that of dressing and appearing - changing clothes, presenting oneself, in T-shirts - the body clothed, always in language, mainly in silence - the fragmented conversation of written slogans on neighbouring T-shirts - CHOOSE says one, VOTEZ says another, TAKE ME says a third and the eyes of the wearer flicker across those of the audience, looking for gazes to meet and looks to avoid.

Each of the sections builds slowly around a theme - the countdown, a count upwards from one to twenty and beyond, a set of linguistic puns, or even a kind of playing/punning with cultural iconography. After 50 minutes of silence there is music on the PA - Madonna then Nirvana. Combination games on the T-shirts - 2 Madonnas, 4 Madonnas, a Marylin, 2 James Deans to dance with, a Nike T-shirt and an Adidas T-shirt dancing together - the whole thing a sentence written in some second-hand pop-culture code. The last song: Something In The Way.

But whilst Shirtology explores the relationship between the various on-stage elements (performers, shirts, sounds, space) it's primary concern is perhaps with the way these things are decoded, read and experienced by the audience, and with the ethical complexities of reading, and being read. The relationship of performers to the public here is always under-articulated and through this remains fluid and complex - at once aggressive and inviting, curious and defensive. It shifts between these things constantly, managing to do so by staying blank and open to many projections. The paradigm moment in this comes quite early on, when the performers make a line in their T-shirts very close to the audience and simply stand still, to look back at us.

It is the kind of moment that happens a great deal in late twentieth century performance - a theatrical structure that privileges the chorus rather than the soloist or star - the blank and confrontational democracy of the 'line', the point at which the stage looks most like the auditorium. Deployed by Jan Fabre or by Pina Bausch, by Peter Handke or The Living Theatre lines of this kind have been everything from revolutionary posturing to sculptural cigarette breaks - but in Jerome Bel's hands the line takes on a new fragility. There's a nakedness in the performers, clothed, a presence, a vulnerability and an unease. The public are uncomfortable too, not accused so much as worried, about the ethics of their gaze.

Only after what feels like five minutes does a performer remove a T-shirt, revealing one beneath: I THINK THEY'RE LOOKING AT US

There is a silence again and more looking. And then a further T-shirt is revealed: RELAX.

Smiles. The performers shift posture, take their eyes off us, break the line. The deadlock is broken. There are audible sighs of relief in the audience, and a shifting of postures that parallels that taking place on the stage.
Descriptions of Bel's previous two works (one a 'choreography' of ten objects/items from his own house and the other a presentation of four naked performers titled Jerome Bel) incite the idea that he is slowly and methodically building a more and more complex notion of stage presence. Indeed, in sequences like the one above Bel gambles everything in an attempt to change the way we are looking at the stage, an attempt which is linked to the construction of presences before us which are right at the very edges of what dance or theatre most often supply. Tuned in by the structure of the piece one can see the performers here - the rise and fall of breathing, the tics and gestures of faces and eyes - with an openness and in a spirit of 'nowness' that does not have a name. It makes Shirtology an inspiring piece.