Jérôme Bel at Kaaitheater

1. View All Belgium Shows
 > 
2. Jérôme Bel

The French choreographer Jérôme Bel made his debut in 1994 with Nom donné par l'auteur. It was a fascinating Dadaist performance, ‘a poem of objects’ in which the two performers view the human body in the same way as when they are constantly rearranging a collection of things. Bel was then asked to create a second performance to ‘explain’ the first. This was Jérôme Bel (1995).

In it he started out from the question: what is dance? What are the minimal codes a dance performance must comply with? There has to be a body. And music. And light. Body: there are two kinds of body, male and female; in their ‘minimal form’: naked. The musical zero point lies in the human voice: in the performance a woman hums the whole score of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, while another introduces light in its most elementary form: a light bulb. In Nom donné par l’auteur the naked dancers use their own bodies to test the objects for all their uses and other possibilities.