title : Tombe (2016)

a commission by Opéra National de Paris
conception : Jérôme Bel
assistant : Chiara Gallerani
performers : Henda Traore and Grégory Gaillard / Sandra Escudé and Sébastien Bertaud / Sylviane Milley and Benjamin Pech
duration : 30 minutes
premiere : Paris (France) on February 5th, 2016, at the Paris Opera, Palais Garnier
production : Opéra National de Paris

R.B Jérôme Bel is supported by the Direction régionale des affaires culturelles d'Ile-de-France, French Ministry for Culture and Communication, by the Institut Français, French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, for its international tours and by ONDA - Office National de Diffusion Artistique - for its tours in France
website : www.jeromebel.fr

Fifteen years after Véronique Doisneau, Jérôme Bel once again gives the floor to the dancers of the Paris Opera, allowing them to invite the person of their choice to share a duet performance with them. Following along the lines of Cour d'honneur, Disabled Theater, and more recently, Gala, Jérôme Bel welcomes non-professionals onto the stage as if permitting great iconoclasts onto the dance floor to challenge scenic norms and the conventions of dance. The title of his creation, Tombe (Tomb) , announced without descriptive text, seemed to suggest a piece focusing on downfall, on the failure of dancing and the means of staging a work like this in a sanctuary of virtuosity such as the Paris Opera. The title also hinted at a choice firmly anchored within contemporary aesthetics where support positions and contact with the ground are preferred to elevation steps, the ideal in classical dance. This was not entirely the case. Jérôme Bel, a deconstructer and meta-choreographer, takes mischievous delight in tricking our expectations by taking shortcuts where dance, coaxed out of its scenic comfort zone, finds itself redefined from a different perspective. With his keen critical perception wholly intact, he presents a work of humility which is delicate and terribly moving, and yet he manages, with sacrilegious license, to shatter the codes of the grand institution.

The curtain rises on decor from the second act of Giselle, a ballet from the Opera's repertoire: the naturalistic setting of a shaded forest, in the dark of night, a sepulcher in the foreground. The presence of scenography, not typical of Bel, focuses all the more on the artificial aspect, just as the reference to this opera whose libretto describes a game of disguise and inversion of social roles, blurs the distinction between fictitious action and the performance actually given. The tomb indeed has pride of place. In this way, Jérôme Bel, whose work has since its beginnings been haunted by the question of the end, returns to a mortiferous tension, a sense of solemnity that he had abandoned in his latest creations. He has found a way of putting to a test the vitality of the institution: a tomb as a perfect counterpoint to the free expression of the dancers, and signifying a place of symbolic inertia.

In voice-off, then on stage, the first duet begins a visit to the premises. The wings, the set, and the house are sketchily depicted, stimulating the public's imagination, or drawing their attention to the architectural features of the building. Jérôme Bel rapidly deconstructs this thrift of decor by flooding the house with light and then provoking, in a literally spectacular scene, a complete change of decor in a few seconds, blatantly exposing the mechanics of theatrical staging. Socio-historically, there has been less praise for the Opera's audacious aesthetics (the pompousness of Garnier constitutes the perfect antithesis to the dryness of Bel's style) than for its place in the context of political dominance (glamorous gilding as jewels which the public sees as its own precious possessions, splendor as external sign of decadence, national wealth overexposed by Napoleon III). With the false guilelessness characteristic of his dialogues, Jérôme Bel gives the Opera's audience a moment for harsh self-criticism, a sort of re-evaluation of its relationship to heritage, both material and symbolic.

The first duet, performed by Henda Traore and Grégory Gaillard, has only one moment of dance, and here, inveterate purists feel a jarring irreverence. Like an etoile, in the bright beam of a spotlight, the guest dancer moves to a chosen piece of music on her smartphone. Her choreographed performance is both free and festive, and a bit undisciplined. Her partner moves around her, accompanying her and improvising several energetic steps, mixing a classical style with African dance. The discrepancy between the discipline of the place, and the bodies of dancers letting themselves go with an unadorned pleasure of dancing, in addition to the collision between popular and elitist dance genres, lets the dancers break free from all operatic codes whose rigidity is precisely the target here.

The second duet arranges the encounter between Paris Opera sujet, Sébastien Bertaud, and Sandra Escudé, his female dance partner in a wheelchair, with choreography that is more academic. The grace and fluidity of their communication, the aesthetic strength of Escudé's amputated leg lifted to the sky in a porté, convince us, should that be necessary, of the on-stage legitimacy of the physically disabled. Touching, without calling for tears, the sequence positions the questionable disability of this exceptional performer in opposition to the institution's very real rejection of her.

The last scene witnesses the vibrant tribute that etoile dancer Benjamin Pech gives to his dance partner. Sylviane Milley, a balletomane of the Opera for sixty years, died during the preparation phase for this piece. The images of her last rehearsals, projected on a large screen, give us a glimpse of the dedication and elegance of an elderly lady who, in the twilight of her life, saw her last dream come true. The virile arms that carry her, embrace her, and support her as she pivots highlight her fragility which leaves as legacy the memory of an extremely sensitive and magnanimous communication between these two performers. As in Véronique Doisneau, Jérôme Bel makes use of a more forthright emotional device than is usual for him, though he maintains a climate of sobriety within which the Opera setting doubles the intensity of this posthumous tribute.

With this three-part project, Jérôme Bel demonstrates all the dramatic force that his conceptualist hand can bring to visual arts. By adapting to the unforeseeable whims of creation, often tragic as we see here, and deciding to let these lead the scenography; then linking the purest emotion to critical intent, Bel presents a project with remarkable conceptual and dramaturgical unity. With resonating pertinence to the recent preoccupation of the Opera (the resignation of Benjamin Millepied, who was unable to find a welcome place for anticipated new vitality), Tombe becomes, at final reading, the metaphor for an institution that is both sanctified and hardened by sclerosis, criticized for its conservatism and its rigidity, yet which nevertheless has allowed three of its performers to engage in most singular gestures of profanity.

Florian Gaité, February 2016