Interview by Carole Bodin

Belgium is a land of dance and the KLAPSTUK festival in Louvain whose “experimental tradition” has been unfailing since 1983 is one of the main reasons for it. For its eleventh edition, from the 3 rd to 17 th October 2003, with Alain Platel, a sort of mentor for the festival since its 1999 edition, the KLAPSTUK this year is handing over the reins of part of its programme to Jérôme Bel In this interview he re-examines the choices he has made. 

You are in charge of part of the programme of the eleventh edition of the Louvain Klapstuk which will take place in October. The other part is in the hands of Alain Platel. What brought you to accept the invitation from An-Marie Lambrechts, the director of the Stuk?

For a long time I hesitated about whether to accept An-Marie Lambrechts' proposal. I had decided to take a sabbatical year in 2003, a decision which fulfilled among other things the wish for time to concentrate more on current artistic production, since over the past few years I've been too taken up by own production which was beginning to bore me. Organising the programme of Klapstuk # 11 therefore not only gave me a means to see shows but also made it possible for me to become involved with artists by inviting them to this festival. A festival where everything goes because it has an “experimental tradition” which is unique.

Have you defined one or several lines to programme along ?

I haven't defined any lines for the programme although at the beginning, Alain Platel, An-Marie Lambrechts and myself were interested in thinking about the idea of globalisation in the performing arts. Alain Platel had just come back from Palestine , and I had returned from Australia . Naturally, this issue will not be resolved during the festival but I have however invited the “Grupo de Niteroy”, directed by the young choreographer, Bruno Beltrao whose work, which I discovered in Rio de Janeiro , is very interesting from this point of view. Bruno Beltrao in fact uses hip-hop as an artistic language, a dance form which - to my mind- is the only one deserving to be qualified as “contemporary”. Hip-hop is not Bruno Beltao's objective; for him it's a tool. He is critical in his attitude to hip-hop. He shows how alienated and alienating this culture is in his masterly dismantling of the dominant structures that have built it but this language is comprehensible from Rio to Louvain and from Louvain to Baghdad. Besides that, in Brazil and in China I was able to see shows which would be difficult to present at Louvain because they would be incomprehensible for us, uncultured Europeans that we are. So I had rather a passive attitude. I was waiting to see what the artists were saying rather than deciding myself what to say. What interests me now is to see what all the shows together will reveal. This festival is supposed to be one of research, not of preconceived ideas. I have been wrong sometimes but it's still true that the shows I've invited teach me about things I don't know.

How, beyond hosting non-Western productions, did the issue of globalisation in the performing arts arise,? Were you looking for productions that transcend the national and cultural identities peculiar to each country or each region of the world ?

The first idea effectively was to see at what level it was possible to talk about cultural globalisation in the performing arts. It's a thorny question. It was out of the question that I should be doing humanitarian work. I only wanted to show at the festival works which ought to have an importance for us Europeans. It is quite clear too that I don't for one minute believe in some sort of universality but only in socio-cultural determinism. I saw some very powerful pieces, in particular one by an Indonesian dancer, and then suddenly, when I spoke to him I realised that I was misinterpreting his piece. So I decided not to invite him. My ways of reading things did not correspond to his nor, above all, to his context and personal history, which is something so horrifying that it's completely unimaginable for us. So it was essential for me to meet the artists after their shows in order to see if what they were trying to put across with their work cohered with the reading that I had of it. I only invited the shows that I understood. There is there an enormous amount of work to be done in the field of multi-culturalism which some people have fortunately started to think about. In the final, next to Bruno Beltrao, the Brazilian, Klapstuk 11 will mainly feature European or, shall we say, assimilated artists like the Australians, Gideon Obrazanek and Prue Lang who work with William Forsythe, the Spaniards, Cuqui Jerez and Amaia Urra, the Italian who lives in Paris, Claudia Triozzi, the French people from Grand Magasin, the English people from Forced Entertainment, the New York Croat, Vlatka Horvat, the Batavo-Hungarian, Edit Kaldor, Eva-Meyer Keller from Berlin, and the Briton, Jonathan Burrows…

Can you develop on what you find interesting in the work of each of these artists ?

The festival opens with the piece One thousand and one nights by the English company, Forced Entertainment, which I saw in Beirout where it was created. Like a Western Scheherazade , the actors tell us their/our /stories for six hours on end. I had the impression that I was witnessing what is perhaps the birth of theatre. That's to say, people who tell stories to others who listen to them. The closing production is Australian Most Wanted by the choreograph, Gideon Obrazanek, who works in Melbourne . The piece was the outcome of a survey on dance carried out among Australians. Several of the pieces of work that were invited share, moreover, certain issues.
I am under the impression that these artists have reflected deeply about what the status of a representational performance is. The power of representation is constantly called into question: Amaia Urra with her work on Michelangelo Antonioni's The Eclipse, Bruno Beltrao through the fundamental Matrix, Prue Lang's fictional Borges obsessions, representations of death with Eva-Meyer Keller, Edit Kaldor's use of her computer and the new ways of performing it makes possible. Cuqui Jerez for her part gives a temporal context to different levels of presentation such as theatre and video. As for Vlatka Horvat, she perhaps does the inverse of what Cuqui Jerez does in her work! Grand Magasin's production doubtless shows the most articulate form - which is probably not really surprising ! - of the question which I would call “perceiving perception”. Of course I'm talking about it all really simplistically but that's the dangerous game of trying to find the smallest common denominator. So I'll stop there. What I am most highly interested in with this gathering of artists, is to try to create a platform where my contemporaries can outline what they find to be relevant positions for them. It seems to me that each of these productions offers a valid point of view, even if some of them are antagonistic, which doesn't bother me in the least - quite the opposite. What is important for me is that these points of view should be sufficiently argued so as to make them tangible and so that they become tools for thought for the people watching.

What does this experience which has moved you away from your normal habitus of being “a choreographer” suggest to you about the difference between how something is created and how it is received, between doing and seeing and, about the general state of choreographic creation today ?

As a “choreographer” (which is a misnomer), I am entirely responsible for what I produce myself, whereas as a programme organiser, I have the distressing feeling that I am responsible for something else as well: the public. The programme organiser is the link between the artist and the public. He's responsible for both of them. For example, there's a piece which I have invited to Klapstuk # 11 which I love. However, during a private rehearsal of this piece in front of a few acquaintances, I noticed that many people didn't understand it at all. So I started to have doubts. Thinking about it, I realised that what was involved in this piece was quite close to some of my own types of problem. I could understand it because I felt close to it. On the other hand, it seemed that not everybody could be as close to it as I was. So I suggested to the artist that she came and worked at the Stuk in Louvain and I exposed to her this problem I had with her piece of making it accessible to a wider audience. She worked on it again and finally, An-Marie Lambrechts who was there found it a suitable piece to show to the public. It's really interesting to work alongside artists like that and to be able to suggest tools for them to use in their work. There was also the problem of the Brazilian piece which was in Portuguese, a language which fortunately I can stumble along in and which made it possible for me to understand it. But for Louvain , translating it had to be considered. An-Marie Lambrechts had the idea of paying for coaching for the dancers in Rio so that they could do it in English for the performance in Belgium . As well, I hope, this English version will mean that the show can be presented at other international festivals.
Broadly speaking, I must have seen more than 200 shows - many of them on video - and most of the time it was a painful experience. Of course, there were the productions which I couldn't understand for cultural reasons. For example, what I saw in Hong Kong where many artists find themselves in a situation of trying to find an identity which they question with a certain nostalgia, that I find rather pointless. Doubtlessly, because I can't identify with it myself. But the saddest thing for me was to see the amount of work by very talented, clever, I should say, choreographers, who “stage productions” on issues that have already been raised and, unfortunately for them, already resolved.

All in all, from what you've just said, is it an experience that you would be interested in repeating ?

I don't think so. I would prefer to buy a theatre ticket and go to see what the programme organiser had chosen for me rather than seeing 160 rather stupid shows and 40 remarkable ones, so as to invite only a dozen really exciting ones. My faith in the theatre has taken too many hard knocks.