How do you go on when everything has been said ? How do you produce a new piece when, in your last show, you said goodbye to your public with such eloquence and method? In 1998, with The Last Performance, Jérôme Bel staged the end of a match where the theatrical framework became scarcer and scarcer, until all activity stopped, only to move into the mind of the person watching. Yet, the French choreographer has found a way to go on beyond his self-staged end, a way out as clever as his own choreography. As the author of a piece which, in accordance with the right he has, he entitled Xavier Le Roy, he gave over the direction of it to the choreographer, Xavier le Roy, who staged a game with identities as if it were a piece by Jérôme Bel. The author “Jérome Bel” did not appear in it as a person, but as a treatise whose rules and laws other choreographers could make use of. Then there appeared The show must go on, an ironic revocation of the previous show, and with which Jérôme Bel achieved a masterpiece. Bel created the piece last September with the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. In January this year, a second version of the show was put on in Paris with Bel's own company. Today it is the Viennese public's turn to discover it.

For a long time nothing happens on stage. It is plunged in darkness and remains empty. A disc jockey is sitting in front of the footlights with a CD player and a lighting console. He makes us listen to one CD after another. There are nineteen well known pop songs which each and every one of us can hum and which play as much with our collective as with our individual memories. Dancers come on stage to carry out to the letter the words of each of the songs. Nineteen strong images are thereby produced, which are as simple as possible, but which nevertheless carry in them a whole history of the way of dealing with bodies on a stage. The show must go on by Jérôme Bel is also a corporeal reflection of our theatre history.

Whereas in the XVIIth century there was still a dominant theatrical esthetic which considered the body only to be a code-bearing surface, the latter has been allowed, since the XVIIth century's change in paradigms, to speak in a more natural and spontaneous way. What a man is and what he feels can no longer be decoded through his costume or the signs of the emotions that he presents and exposes. It is henceforth the anchoring of signs in the actor's body that has been raised to the level of a maxim. The actor's body expresses something. The body ceases all of a sudden to be ‘true' as a treatise. It is authentic because it is capable of representing in a credible way “natural” and “spontaneous” signs, in other words bodily signs. Being authentic also means being the author of your own gestures. Consequently, a credible actor is one who succeeds in making his personality disappear entirely behind the role. He must dissolve into it without trace. All his gestures and attitudes go in this direction and support what he is saying - a requirement which Denis Diderot used to check on in a very unusual way: at the theatre he would quite simply stop up his ears.

What avant-gardists and neo-avant-gardists, no matter what differences characterise them as far as their influences and aims are concerned, have been requiring of the body as a theatrical body since the beginning of the XXth century, is that it should come out of its role. The actor's subjection to his role figure, his disappearance into the role became turned into its opposite. On the one hand, this was because the role disappeared to the benefit of choral forms or it was abolished in a set of functional actions. On the other hand, because it was a question of bringing the actor's body into play, considered as it was to be the nucleus of force and energy, as well as his individual nature as a potential for erotic action to produce new possibilities for relations between actors and audiences. It was necessary to make new encounters possible.

The show must go on by Jérôme Bel interestingly sets itself up at the crossroads between the eloquent body and the expressive body, and between credibility and authenticity. Jérôme Bel's bodies also leave the roles that traditionally theatre and dance assigned to them. It attaches them to the body concept of the avant-gardists. On the other hand, they never stop talking, even if it's not with words. They use signs which can be read and understood, while at the same time acting in a completely natural manner. In Bel's theatre, bodies no longer suffer as they used to in bourgeois tragedy. This is what basically differentiates them. Jérôme Bel's bodies are always bodies that have already been recognised through the symbolic nature of the language, pop music in this case, with its individual and collective memory. Following on from this, the drama of the body on stage, its struggle for identity, characteristic of the action ballet, of dance and theatre since the XVIIIth century, has not taken place. The images follow on calmly and without tension from one another, scene follows scene, and pieces of music other pieces of music. The principle is always identical, repeated with variations which are constantly new and surprising, with deflections. It is not dramatic because the bodies don't come into conflict. Jérôme Bel's beings don't use words because they don't need them. At a basic ontological level, they are already words. Their body literally speaks insofar as it moves. Dance and theatre merge.

As in the XVIIth century, they are eloquent bodies, but what they speak about does not come from their innermost being, any more than they imitate affects “from nature”, with the right gestures, the right attitudes and adapted mimicry. They are not expressive bodies, producing the “natural” or even “spontaneous” signs of passion. They make it much more obvious that the body in its essence is already language. The body constitutes itself through sociological treatises, by way of an otherness without which it would never be able to return to itself. Jérôme Bel simply inverses the relation between body and language. Not to be a body and then have words, but to be words and only through them to have a body, such is his motto. The bodies of his dancers are letters and words which are written on the stage as on a sheet of paper.

Modern dance has believed for a long time, on the basis of its purely corporeal, non-verbal means, that it was speaking not about the body, but with the body and that it thus had access to a deeper truth. That truth, Jérôme Bel knows, can be found on the surface of the symbolic treatises which make up the body. It is, by the way, because of that that he no longer needs to fight dramatically for recognition. Bodies have always been recognised in the eyes of the public, because bodies, on one side of the footlights as on the other, are products of the culture that they incarnate. It is enough, as happens in The show must go on, to open them up and to turn their pages.

However, not everything is done undramatically in Bel's pieces. The drama that Bel acts out in The show must go on is that of the recognition of his bodies which have been discursively produced in the symbolic framework of the bourgeois theatre. In this place where red or blue velvet curtains, plush seats and richly decorated walls pay homage to an obsolete social organisation, his eloquent bodies meet resistance. There are no roles which must be represented or incarnated. Everyone is what he or she is. In everyday clothes. Rarely have bodies been seen on stage in a more “natural” way, not because they are acting “naturally”, but because they are non-theatrical in the sense of bourgeois theatre and its conception of the body. This is not to say that they have not been stage directed right down to the last detail. On the contrary. In the bourgeois theatre, the assumption of naturalness happens precisely through the bodies which go beyond it, to the benefit of a literalness that is absolutely without affects or affectation. The real body has nothing to do with the authentic body. The latter would not be able to exist. At a Jérôme Bel production, Denis Diderot would not have needed to stop up his ears. He would have realised all the same that the bodies were “real”. Instead he would just have needed to close his eyes. He would then have heard the bodies singing.

Jérôme Bel's non-theatrical bodies, in the XVIIIth century sense, give a new meaning to the old theatre cosmos. The show must go onis also a biblical account of the creation, which is told through the specific arrangement of the songs. Also in a Jérôme Bel production, it is the word which is in the beginning, before there is light and before the dancers appear to carry out to the letter what the particular song title says. A whole life unfolds between the beginning and the end of the piece, from the dancers' first appearance, which is equivalent to their theatrical birth before the audience's very eyes, to their death and their resurrection to the final programmatic song by the group Queen, The show must go on. For Jérôme Bel redemption is to be found in the theatre. More than anybody else, he believes in the stage that represents the world. In short, the theatre is the one place where you cannot die, where the actor's disappearance and final exit are never final. His pieces are also about the end of bourgeois theatre and its conception of the subjectivity which they play on. His totally original artistic production is to be found in his way of exhausting conventions and implications through a sort of virtuoso renouncement of action which he strips down to its bare bones. Jérôme Bel does not set up somewhere new to take the place of the old theatre. If, as the French sociologist, Michel de Certau, puts it, an author is someone who defines a place as his own, then Jérôme Bel is not an author. His tactic is to pass through and cross out a well known place so as to perturb its order. Bel smuggles everyday gestures onto the stage, such as dancing and singing with a walkman, while usually they only appear there in an aestheticised form. Thus the row of footlights, which separates the theatre hall from the stage, in The show must go on remains a central element of the show. Equally this assures the distance of reflection in relation to the stage, without which the show could not effectively continue.

But what Bel's work on theatrical performance within self-imposed limits brings to light is another relationship between dancers and audience. The abolition of convention leads to a reinforcement of the social aspect of a real meeting which is based precisely on being different while being similar. Bel always gives you time to watch undisturbed the individuals on stage, to choose one or another of them, to identify with him or her, and to share in a mutual exchange with him or her during the performance. Bel's non-theatrical bodies are produced in the exchange with the audience's bodies, an exchange which, in the same way as presents, is based on reciprocity.

The refrain of Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly pushes this process to the limit. In this song, the narrator talks in the first person about her meeting with a young musician whose song marks her life and marks it so deeply that it almost makes her ill. “He was singing my life with his words”, says the song. Jérôme Bel's dancers aspire only to that. They sing our lives with their words which blend here with their bodies. In each place every evening, there is the question of recreating the balance between performers and audience, who thus become actors in their turn. Thus in this way there remains, once Bel's ghosts have left the area of theatre and dance, the hope of another possible place. Such is the utopia of Jérôme Bel's theatre.