Postcard from Paris 3
‘Portrait: Jérôme Bel’, Autumn Festival, Paris: Disabled Theatre, Pichet Klunchun and Myself, The Show Must Go On, Un Spectacle en moins
The Autumn Festival in Paris runs from September through
December each year staging contemporary dance, theatre, music and exhibitions
in venues across the city and surrounding suburbs in the Île de France. The
most recent festival ‘Portrait’ was devoted to the choreographer (though he might
resist the term) Jérôme Bel, and included nine shows from the past fifteen
years of his career. I managed to see four, and they raised lots of questions
for me about theatre and performance, culture, power and representation. They
were also, I’m pleased to say, unfailingly witty, accessible and entertaining, even
at their most provocative (or deliberately boring).
*
The controversially titled Disabled Theatre was originally commissioned in 2012 by Theater
HORA – who according to their website are ‘Switzerland’s only professional
company whose ensemble-members all have a “state certified mental disability”’.
It was remounted in Paris for the Festival at two very different venues: the community-orientated
La Commune in the working-class outer suburb of Aubervilliers, and the elegant
Espace Cardin of the Théâtre de la Ville near the Champs Élysées. I saw it at
the Espace Cardin, reserving my trip to Aubervilliers for a very different show
five weeks later (about which more below).
Bel has remarked in an interview that he refuses most offers
or requests from companies or individuals to create works for them, but that after
watching a video of the Theater HORA ensemble in performance he felt compelled
to do so. Initially he employed a question-and-answer technique he’d used
previously in collaborations with other performers in order to generate text
and movement, but here the process only yielded brief and ‘almost
incomprehensible’ responses. So he utilized ‘a tool that all bad choreographers
fall back on’: namely to invite each performer to do a dance to a piece of
music of their choice.
In fact the final structure of the show is much more subtle
than this suggests, but like all Bel’s work it’s at once deceptively simple and
profoundly complex in its ramifications. A line of eleven empty chairs faces the audience; an assistant (Simone Truong) who operates sound cues (and also speaks French and German) sits downstage left. She informs the audience (in French) that during rehearsals Bel asked her to translate between him and the performers (who only speak and understand
Swiss German). Then she begins to repeat (in German) the tasks that Bel gave
the cast in rehearsals; a French translation of each instruction appears in surtitles
on a screen above the stage. Meanwhile the eleven cast-members begin to enter and
perform each task one by one (if required to speak, they do so in Swiss German,
and a French translation of their words appears on the screen).
Even before the cast began to enter, then, our attention is
drawn to the problematic nature of the enterprise. Leaving aside the question
of the title itself, we are made aware of the fact that this is a scripted (or at least
scored) work, as well as the process of rehearsal, repetition and representation that this necessarily entails: the performances are at least to some extent ‘rehearsed’, the
performers ‘repeating’ and even ‘representing’ themselves. We are also reminded
of the power relations that exist between the performers, Bel, the stage manager/translator (who in a sense ‘represents’ Bel) and ourselves. Disabled Theatre doesn’t seek to avoid
these questions or problems: on the contrary, by exacerbating them it compels
us to think about and even ‘through’ them – without necessarily being able to ‘think them
through’.
The first task requires the cast to enter the stage one by
one (in any order they choose) and stand there in front of the audience without
moving or speaking for a full minute before exiting again. In fact the length
of time each performer remained there varied considerably, as did the
performers themselves and the emotional tone of each ‘scene’. I found this a
thrilling and confronting exercise for performers and audience alike.
In a sense all Bel’s work (and perhaps all theatre) can be reduced
to the staging of this simple event of ‘being looked at’. In the context of Disabled Theatre however it also immediately raises the question
of the ethics of looking (and staging the event) as it involves performers whom
we might not ‘normally’ be comfortable about looking at or putting onstage
precisely because of their ‘abnormality’. Once again this raises broader
questions about representation, marginalisation, responsibility and power.
For the second task the translator placed a microphone
downstage centre, and the performers were invited to re-enter (again, one by
one and in no particular order), tell us their name and what they do for a
living, and then sit down in one of the chairs. This time I was immediately confronted
by their ‘disabled’ speech; I was also struck by the fact that almost all of them
described their job as ‘actor’; though one said (I think – not being fluent myself in either French or German) – that they sold
something on the street; another said: ‘In this show, my job is to be myself.’
I found myself thinking about notions of competence, work,
acting and authenticity: what does it mean to speak, to work, to be an actor,
to be oneself – competently or otherwise? With the introduction of language
into the performance, I was reminded of the scripted nature of what I was
watching, and that the performers were in a sense ‘playing themselves’. I was
also reminded of the fact of translation – not only from French into German
(and back again) but also in the context of interpreting ‘disabled’ speech –
and therefore, once again, the problem of representation (as the old Italian
adage has it, traduttore, traitor –
‘translator, traitor’).
For the third task, the translator once again called the
cast to the microphone one by one, but this time by name – thus tightening, as
it were, the leash of power – to tell us what their ‘handicap’ was; the term
‘handicap’ being presumably an English loan-word in French, but apparently (or
perhaps not) without the same stigma attached to its usage. In any case, the
tension was palpable in the audience. It got me thinking about the politics of
naming, and the title of the work itself – which is also in English, like many
of Bel’s titles. Was ‘disabled theatre’ simply a ‘bad translation’; a cultural
difference between French and English usage; a deliberate flouting of political
correctness; or an ironic reference to theatre itself being ‘disabled’ – i.e. having
its ‘normal’ power-relations problematized and deconstructed?
The responses by the performers relieved the tension
somewhat, but left further questions hanging in the air. One told the audience,
‘I have one more chromosome than you guys,’ which got a laugh. Another said
that he was autistic (most of the performers seemed to have either Down Syndrome
or autism). Another said that his handicap was chewing his fingers (a habit I’d
noticed while he was sitting in his chair); he then demonstrated by elaborately
chewing different parts of his hand (some of the others seated behind him began
doing the same thing). Another said she didn’t know what her handicap was.
The second half of the show shifted gear into dance – and
also introduced what might be called an element of ‘dramatic conflict’ (a theatrical
convention that Bel himself would probably contest). The microphone was cleared
out of the way and seven performers were invited in turn (again by name) to do
a dance they had choreographed for themselves to a piece of music of their
choice. Their choices were mostly commercial pop tracks, well-known to most of
the audience and (with a couple of exceptions) mostly appalling. The
performances on the other hand were enthralling. They threw themselves into
their self-devised dance-routines with furious energy, the unique creativity
and beauty of each individual performer revealed. Being freed from the
constraints of language seemed to liberate their bodies; notions of
‘disability’ evaporated as each performance generated its own ‘laws of motion’.
Their movements had nothing to do with the words, which (like the music) were
in any case mostly inane and apparently irrelevant. A signal exception was
Michael Jackson’s ‘They Don’t Care About Us’, chosen by one of the most compelling
performers in the ensemble (Julia Häusermann); but even here, it was impossible
to know if the choice of lyrics (not to mention the additional irony of the
controversy that surrounded Jackson’s song when it was released) was deliberate
or serendipitous.
After the seventh dance, the microphone was replaced centre-stage
and all the performers were invited to come forward and tell the audience what
they thought of the show. The responses were as diverse as the performers themselves
and their performances. Some said they loved it. One said her family described
it as ‘a freak show’; another said she was sick of Michael Jackson and wanted
to hear Justin Bieber instead; yet another (Gianni Blumer) said that it was
unfair that Bel had chosen only the seven dances he thought were ‘the best’,
and that he wanted to do his dance too. The translator then announced that
after Gianni first made this complaint during a performance, Bel decided to let
him and the other four do their dances as well; and these now became the final
‘act’ of the show.
This acknowledgment (and inclusion) of aesthetic (and
political) judgement, conflict and resolution was a decisive moment in the show.
To disavow judgement (however subjective) about which performances were
‘better’ than others (at least in the eyes of Bel himself) would be to replicate
another, perhaps more insidious form of discrimination, by implying that such
judgements didn’t apply to them because of their disabilities. On the other
hand, by giving the performers a voice, and the opportunity to contest Bel’s judgement,
the work invited us to make our own judgements (however subjective these too
might be) about the performances (and the show). Indeed, one of the (previously
excluded) dance-routines that followed (by Damian Bright, the actor who had earlier
identified himself as having one more chromosome than the people in audience)
was for me the most powerful performance of the night.
Leaving the theatre and crossing the Avenue des Champs
Élysées to get the last bus back to where I was staying, I saw the cast
crossing the street ahead of me, presumably on their way to their own
accommodation, accompanied by a few other people I didn’t recognize, perhaps touring
or stage crew, family or other support people. Seeing them out of the context
of the theatre and in the ‘real’ world, I was forcibly reminded of their
‘disabled’ status, and found myself wondering about their vulnerability, on a
busy street in a foreign city. I thought about going up to them and thanking
them for the show, but hesitated, telling myself: ‘Perhaps they don’t want to
be intruded on. Anyway, I probably wouldn’t be able to communicate with them…I
mean, in Swiss-German...’
Then I caught myself. Prevaricating. Double-thinking. Discriminating.
*
Two weeks later I saw Pichet
Klunchun and Myself in the downstairs performance space at the Pompidou Centre.
Like Disabled Theatre, it was
originally a commission – in this case by the Bangkok Fringe Festival in 2004 –
and takes the form of a verbal and physical exchange and duet (which is also a
kind of duel) between Bel and Klunchun, a Thai contemporary dancer and
practitioner of traditional Thai court dance or khon.
As such, it’s one of a series of ‘portraits’ co-created by
Bel between 2000 and 2009 in collaboration with individual dancers whom he wanted
to ‘place in the role of being authors’ of works they themselves performed,
while he attributed only the role of ‘conception’ to himself. (In some ways
‘conceptual artist’ is a better description of what Bel does than ‘choreographer’,
since he himself states that hasn’t created more than four or five ‘steps’ of
original choreography in his entire career.) Like their namesake in painting,
these ‘portraits’ are also reflections on the art of dance or theatre itself (in
another interview Bel refers to the distinction between the two as being merely
‘verbal’). In a sense then the entire Autumn Festival ‘Portrait: Jérôme Bel’ could
be seen as a kind of self-portrait – which like the greatest visual artworks in
that tradition from Dürer to Rembrandt manages paradoxically to be non-narcissistic,
pitilessly objective, wryly humorous and deeply revealing.
In fact the question-and-answer technique Bel developed to
make these portraits was also used to make Disabled
Theatre, which thus became a kind of ‘group-portrait’ of the Theater HORA
ensemble. The decisive difference in the case of Pichet Klunchun and Myself lies in the last two words of the title
(which like Disabled Theatre is in
English), since this work very directly includes a self-portrait. As such it serves
as a kind of ‘primer’ for viewing Bel’s entire oeuvre.
Bel has said in interviews that he doesn’t like spending a
lot of time in rehearsals; he prefers to write or score the show on his own
beforehand and then simply get the performers to carry out the tasks he’s
prescribed. In the case of Pichet Klunchun
and Myself, they only had a limited time to make the work, so it was
decided that rather than writing or scoring it in detail, they would simply use
Bel’s questionnaire and then improvise their (verbal and physical) responses.
These apparently still vary to some extent from one performance to the next,
which evidently keeps the sense of play alive between them. Of course it’s
undecidable to the audience precisely when or if this happens, which adds to
the sense of play between them and us.
One of the differences that Bel seeks to deconstruct in his
work is that between ‘making’ and ‘showing’; or even more precisely, between ‘rehearsal’
and ‘performance’; and beyond these properly aesthetic distinctions, more epistemological
or even ontological ones between fiction and truth, past and present, or presence
and absence. There’s also a deconstruction of the differences between authorship
and collaboration, teaching and learning, pedagogy and making work. Finally, as
well as criticising the ‘merely verbal’ distinction between theatre and dance,
Bel is making a more subtle critique of the separation between art, philosophy
and politics, since he is in fact doing all three. Indeed one could do worse
than to borrow Brecht’s term Lehrstücke
(‘teaching pieces’) in order to describe his shows.
The show begins with two empty chairs facing each other
across the stage. Klunchun and Bel enter and sit opposite each other. Klunchun
is neatly dressed in black, has bare feet, is clean-shaven and has a shaved
head; Bel is sloppily dressed in a jacket, jeans and boots, has messy hair, is
unshaven, and carries a laptop, which he uses to refer to the ‘score’ and (later)
to operate sound cues.
In the first ‘Act’ of the show, Bel reads out questions from
the laptop, which Klunchun answers one by one, much along the lines of the
questionnaire used in Disabled Theatre:
what’s your name; what’s your profession; how did you become a dancer? (Unlike Disabled Theatre, these questions and
answers are in their shared language, English; despite the visual-spatial and
cultural gulf between them, there’s more common ground – and a more even
distribution of power – between Bel and Klunchun that with the actors of
Theater HORA, which makes what follows both less confronting and more slyly
subversive.)
Klunchun begins by explaining that he became a practitioner
of khon because his mother become
pregnant with him after praying at a temple whose resident deity appreciated
dance. He explains that khon is a
highly codified form of storytelling illustrating the Ramayana (and using
elaborate masks, costumes, music and narration) that was developed over
centuries and supported by royal patronage, but is now little understood by
Thai people themselves and largely practised as a tourist attraction.
At this point Bel intervenes to remark that Western ballet also
has its origins in the court – specifically the French court of Louis XIV, who
prided himself on his prowess as a dancer, and under whose reign the basic
steps of classical ballet were first codified. He also alludes to the
historical function of ballet (and by implication dance, theatre, art and
culture) as a political tool in the exercise of power.
We might add (though Bel doesn’t mention this) that Louis actually
sent an emissary to the Thai court, who wrote a detailed description of khon; so there’s a direct historical link
between the two traditions and cultures. We might also add that until the late
17th century French ballet (like Thai court dance, and indeed most
Western theatre from Greek Tragedy to Shakespeare) was performed exclusively by
men. Both these facts lend an extra layer of irony to the encounter between the
two men onstage, which is only enriched by what follows.
Bel now asks Klunchun to demonstrate some of the dance moves
in khon. Klunchun obliges, rises from
his seat, heads upstage and gives a basic lesson in the vocabulary of khon, demonstrating the four main
characters – warrior, woman, demon and monkey. His demonstration is punctuated
by spoken commentary; he even admits at one point that the task he’s performing
is of necessity compromised in terms of its authenticity because khon dancers traditionally perform
masked and in silence.
As in Disabled Theatre, the show makes a subtle but decisive shift at this point from spoken language to the language of the body, as well as a cultural shift to the more opaque (to us) language of the Other – in this case, Thai culture, and specifically khon. Correspondingly, I felt a shift in my own (and the audience’s collective) level of responsiveness from verbal-linguistic to visual-spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic and emotional forms of processing; and in the political economy of the show to a more Symbolic form of exchange between the two artists.
As in Disabled Theatre, the show makes a subtle but decisive shift at this point from spoken language to the language of the body, as well as a cultural shift to the more opaque (to us) language of the Other – in this case, Thai culture, and specifically khon. Correspondingly, I felt a shift in my own (and the audience’s collective) level of responsiveness from verbal-linguistic to visual-spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic and emotional forms of processing; and in the political economy of the show to a more Symbolic form of exchange between the two artists.
Klunchun finishes his demonstration; and Bel admits that the
difference between man and woman was almost indiscernible to him. Klunchun
draws his attention to the extremely subtle variations in posture and hand
gestures, and adds that the differences between the characters would normally be
heightened by the masks. He also concedes that he himself specializes in monkey.
He explains that the female character he’s just danced is expressing grief for
the death of her beloved, and this provides a touching context for the delicate
movements and gestures we’ve just seen. Bel now asks him how death itself is represented
in khon, and Klunchun responds with
two further demonstrations: in the first, he repeats the warrior dance, but
moves backwards until (somewhat humorously) he disappears into the wings; in
the second, he does an extremely slow walk halfway across the stage and then
stops. Bel correctly guesses that this is the funeral procession, and asks him
how long the whole thing would take, to which Klunchun replies: about one week.
Bel then asks if death can be represented directly onstage; Klunchun tells him
that isn’t possible in khon.
Bel now asks Klunchun to teach him some moves, gets up and
joins him upstage. Much comedy is made of Bel’s attempts to get things right;
as well as being incompetent he’s also an excellent clown. We also learn to appreciate
Klunchun’s artistry a great deal more by observing the difference between them.
In the second ‘Act’, the tables are turned: now it’s
Klunchun’s turn to ask the same questions of Bel, and the latter’s struggle to
give coherent answers provides more opportunities for comedy, as well as
revealing a great deal about Bel’s work and thought, the differences between
Thai and Western culture, and between traditional and contemporary artistic
practice. After some hesitation, he answers the question of ‘what do you do?’
by saying that he began as a dancer and then became a choreographer – or
rather, that he’s not really a choreographer but a theatre-maker. Klunchun asks
him to demonstrate what he does, and Bel offers to show him something he’s used
in more than one show because it’s one of the pieces of choreography he’s made
that he likes the most. Then he goes upstage, stands and looks out in the
direction of the audience for about a minute without doing anything else (the
task he asked the performers to do in Disabled
Theatre).
Klunchun tells him he’s disappointed (laughter from the
audience) and asks for something that involves dance. Bel obligingly puts on
the David Bowie track ‘Let’s Dance’, goes and stands upstage again, then bursts
in sporadic bouts of bad freestyle dancing whenever the title words of the song
are repeated, standing still during the other parts of the song until it’s
over. Klunchun tells him he’s disappointed again (more laughter), and Bel
concedes that many people find his work disappointing and even ask for their
money back. He explains that for him the difference between traditional and
contemporary performance is that in traditional performance the audience has
the right to expect certain things – for example that in a production of Swan Lake there will be swans – while in
contemporary performance ‘there might be ducks’. He advances the hypothesis
that traditional audiences pay for things they expect to be given, whereas
contemporary audiences are more like gamblers, placing a bet or wager on an
outcome that they don’t know in advance. He concedes that there’s pleasure in
both, but for him, the uncertain pleasure of contemporary performance (when it
delivers) is something one remembers for a lifetime. He adds that he’s not
interested in ‘expertise’ on the part of performers, but in criticizing the idea
that people pay to see other people do things better than they can themselves. He
refers to the influence of Guy Debord’s critique of the ‘society of the
spectacle’, and says he wants to create a more egalitarian form of theatre that
breaks down traditional hierarchies between performer and audience. For him the
thing about theatre that differentiates it from cinema or TV is the presence of
performers and audience in the same place and time.
Bel now offers to demonstrate another of the favourite
things he’s made – which, not coincidentally, also involves the representation
of death onstage. This is a piece of ‘choreography’ from The Show Must Go On (which I was to see the following week). He
searches on his laptop, puts on ‘Killing Me Softly’, then once more goes and
stands upstage, and begins lip-synching the words. At the end of each verse, he
progressively lowers himself towards the floor, until he’s just lying there,
lip-synching. Finally he stops lip-synching and just lies there until the song
ends.
Once again, the whole mood of the show changes; the effect
is quietly devastating. Bel gets up and goes back to his chair; after a
silence, Klunchun acknowledges that he too has been deeply moved. He tells Bel
that the performance reminds him of his mother, who died peacefully and even
gratefully after years of living with paralysis. Bel nods and thoughtfully
remarks: ‘She died softly’.
Bel has one final ‘act’ up his sleeve. Klunchun asks him
about one of his first works, the self-titled ‘Jerome Bel’ (also included in
the Festival portrait, but one I didn’t get to see), in which Bel performed
naked, and asks him why he did so. Bel explains that he wanted to make a work
that reduced dance to its essence. He asks Klunchun what he thinks this is;
Klunchun obligingly answers ‘the body’, and Bel agrees. He says that he wanted
to explore what it means to have a body, and to rediscover its almost
surprising strangeness. He gets up once more and begins to demonstrate, rolling
up his t-shirt and grasping, feeling and squeezing handfuls of flesh around his
(now flabby middle-aged) waist and torso. Then he begins to undo his trousers, but
Klunchun politely but firmly tells him to stop. Bel asks him why, and Klunchun
simply explains that ‘it’s not traditional to do that in Thai culture’. After a
couple of cheeky feints, provoking further demurrals from Kunchun, Bel respects
his friend’s wishes, fastens his belt, smooths down his shirt and sits down
again. Somewhat pointedly he observes that it’s strange to hear this, because he
thought that Thailand was famous for dancers performing naked in clubs and
bars. Klunchun’s response is even more pointed: ‘We only do that for tourists.’
The show is over, and both men take a bow.
As with Disabled
Theatre, it’s difficult to convey in words the experience of watching Pichet Klunchun and Myself – in
particular the intellectual and emotional complexity hidden beneath the surface
of its apparently artless simplicity. In fact I found it a more slyly
subversive (if less obviously challenging) work, perhaps because of the greater
degree of social and artistic equality between the two protagonists. It was
also the perfect primer for the two shows I saw the following weekend: the
undeniably spectacular The Show Must Go
On and the even more intimate and minimal Un Spectacle en moins.
*
The Show Must Go On
was originally commissioned by theatre director Thomas Ostermeier and
choreographer Sasha Waltz for the Berlin Schaubühne, and accordingly conceived
as a piece for actors and dancers; but the concept proved to be a mismatch
between Bel’s interests and those of the Schaubühne directors, and it was
reclaimed and repurposed for his own company in 2001 as an uncharacteristically
large-scale work for 30 performers, who for budgetary as well as aesthetic
reasons included amateurs as well as professionals. The result proved to be perhaps
his most controversial work, dividing and incensing audiences when it was first
performed in Paris (people climbed up onto the stage to stop the show). It’s
since toured the world in various incarnations for 15 years: the Ballet de
l’Opéra de Lyon did a version for professional dancers in 2007; and in 2015 the
Candoco Dance Company revived it for a mixed cast of twenty-two dancers and
non-dancers, with and without disabilities. This was the version included in
the Festival d’Automne which I saw at the Théâtre de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines:
a huge proscenium-arch venue in the somewhat sci-fi utopian environs of
Versailles University in the western suburbs of Paris, built in the 90s but
conceived in the 70s as part of the ‘National Stages’ project of cultural and
institutional decentralisation. It proved to be the perfect setting for the
show.
Perhaps because of the venue, or perhaps the reputation of
the show itself, the audience was a lot more ‘general
public’/’family’/inclusive than at any of the other shows I saw in the
Festival. This gave a very different (and more exciting) flavour to the event;
in particular there was a lot more audience reaction to what took place (or didn’t taken place)
onstage; which only confirmed the show’s enduring and evolving power to
provoke.
The title of The Show
Must Go On is an ironic reference to Bel’s previous work, Le Dernier Spectacle. It’s also, of
course, a song by Queen, which itself features as the closing track in a show
that consists essentially in a sequence of pop songs: ‘Tonight’ (from West Side Story); ‘Let the Sun Shine
In’; ‘Come Together’; ‘Let’s Dance’; ‘I Like to Move It’; ‘Ballerina Girl’;
‘Private Dancer’; ‘Macarena’; ‘Into My Arms’; ‘My Heart Will Go On’; ‘Yellow
Submarine’; ‘La Vie en Rose’; ‘Imagine’; ‘The Sound of Silence’; ‘Every Breath
You Take’; ‘I Want Your Sex’; ‘Killing Me Softly’; and ‘The Show Must Go On’. As
such the show has the structure of a list: one of the simplest and most
inconsequential structures imaginable. It soon becomes apparent that the songs
in this list have been chosen not because of their musical qualities (which are
sometimes woeful) but because of their titles (which in most cases we already
know, and in any case hear repeatedly during the song). These all contain
descriptions or instructions that can be followed more or less literally by the
choreography or staging (an exception is the choreography of ‘My Heart Go On’,
which doesn’t refer to the title of the song but to the most famous and clichéd
image in Titanic). In fact, as we
shall see, the staging doesn’t always involve bodies or even light onstage at
all.
The influence of Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Warhol, ‘found-object’, ‘ready-made’, Pop, conceptual or performance art – not to mention postmodern or ‘task-based’ contemporary dance – on The Show Must Go On is obvious. We’re familiar with
the songs, and we soon learn the rules. As in Disabled Theatre the interest lies in the gap between concept and realisation,
which is the space of play, freedom and the potential for meaning. This gap or
space is made all the greater because of the diversity of performers and
abilities, and accentuated by Bel’s low-fi minimalist aesthetic.
The songs (in their most familiar recorded versions) are
played by a DJ (who sits at the front of the stage with his back to us) with a
CD player and visible stack of CDs, which are gradually transferred from left
to right in the course of the show. He takes his time loading and unloading the
CDs, and each track is played in its entirety; and this deliberately
un-theatrical use of time and ‘timing’ has a dramaturgical structure and
effects of its own (suspense, predictability, boredom, frustration, tension, release)
which are essential to the work.
The show begins with a slow fade to blackout; ‘Tonight’ is
then played entirely in darkness. Already I could feel tension mounting in the
audience as the lights refused to come up. They slowly did during ‘Let the Sun
Shine In’, revealing a stage that remained empty throughout the song. A little
boy sitting on my right shifted onto his dad’s knee and began dancing and
singing along, and there was some rhythmic clapping from the audience, followed
by applause as the DJ unhurriedly changed the CD. ‘Come Together’ began to
play, and the cast of 22 duly entered from the wings, formed a semi-circle
facing the audience (who duly applauded) and then did nothing else until the
song came to an end. It was the same piece of ‘choreography’ quoted in ‘Pichet
Klunchun’ and ‘Disabled Theatre’, but here performed as an ensemble piece
following the ‘instructions’ of the song-title – and enriched by the inclusion
of several performers with disabilities, including two in wheelchairs, and two
with missing or partial limbs (I felt a certain unease at this among the
audience, and glanced at the little boy beside me, but he seemed untroubled).
There was also a carefully curated race and gender diversity among the cast –
as well as in dance skills, as soon became apparent, when they launched into
the next track, ‘Let’s Dance’, and began simultaneously yet individually
dancing to the title words whenever they were repeated, but were otherwise
motionless (again as in ‘Pichet Klunchun’).
By now the audience were thoroughly warmed up and into the
show; but Bel continued to play with our expectations. ‘I Like to Move It’
involved some exuberant shaking of bodies parts that managed to be sexy,
hilarious and confronting, not least because of the disabled participants;
‘Private Dancer’ brought the DJ to the stage for his own spot-lit moment of
bedroom solipsism; Nick Cave’s ‘Into My Arms’ involved a repeated sequence of
wandering followed by random pairing off and embracing that came perilously
close to sentimentality (and again was given extra resonance by the inclusion
of the disabled performers).
After ‘My Heart Goes On’, with its ludicrous (and
crowd-pleasing) re-enactment of the scene from Titanic, came the most challenging section of the show. For ‘Yellow
Submarine’, the performers left the stage and sang along from the wings, while
yellow light spilled onto the empty stage – which (along with the auditorium)
was then flooded with pink for ‘La Vie en Rose’ (the audience duly began
looking around and becoming conscious of each other and themselves). ‘Imagine’
plunged the house into blackout again, and once more tension began to mount as
we were invited to listen to the words of the song and obey them. (Some people
took out their mobile phones at this point, turned on their torch apps and
began waving them around.)
Then came ‘The Sound of Silence’. The opening line, ‘Hello
darkness my old friend’, got a few laughs, as the blackout was maintained, and
people began singing along; but then the DJ turned the volume down to zero
after the phrase ‘the sound of silence’ was heard, and made us listen to the
silence. He kept the CD spinning, and must have kept count on the timer,
raising the levels again every time the title phrase was repeated and then
lowering them to silence again. After a while, the audience began quietly
singing the missing words in unison to fill in the gaps. It was a strange
atmosphere, somewhere between protest and participation; and I felt the crowd
becoming uneasy, but good-humouredly embracing the spirit of things.
For ‘Every Breath You Take’ and ‘I Want Your Sex’, the
lights came back up onstage (and in the auditorium), and the performers
returned and stood in a line at the front of the stage, staring directly at the
audience. Once again, I was reminded of Disabled
Theatre: we were no longer voyeurs, or even participants, but objects of
the gaze ourselves. This was followed by a sequence during which the performers
donned headphones and danced to their own inaudible devices, sporadically
yelling out lines from individual songs
(‘I can’t get no…!’, ‘I’m too sexy…’, ‘I’m still standing…’, etc); once
more the performers became objects, eliciting relieved laughter. ‘Killing Me
Softly’ saw them lip-syncing and sinking to the floor, as Bel himself had done
in Pichet Kluncun – but this time in
a more sinister kind of mass death.
Then came the final track: Freddie Mercury singing ‘The Show
Must Go On’. The performers continued lying in a heap; then they began to rise
as the title phrase rang out, advanced to the front of the stage, bowed and
exited, returning again and again as the audience rose and continued to
applaud.
I thought about Freddie Mercury, death and the nature of
performance. As I rose to leave, so did the little boy beside me. His dad
helped him with his jacket, and I realised for the first time that he was
missing part of his right arm. I hadn’t seen it till now because I was sitting to
his left. I followed them out of the theatre
and down the street back to the train station. The boy was leaping around his
dad, full of excitement about the show. It had been, in every sense, a
performance for everyone.
*
Un Spectacle en moins is
a new work commissioned by the Festival and was developed over three weeks of
workshop and critical feedback sessions with members of the public
(unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend any of these sessions). The title
roughly translates as One Spectacle Less;
in fact it’s only show I saw in the ‘Portrait’ series that doesn’t have an
English title.
In the Festival program Bel remarks that after creating a
series of recent works that became increasingly ‘spectacular’ in form and scale,
he didn’t want to ‘go any further’ down this path and become ‘trapped’ (or even
‘skilled’) in ‘making spectacles’, but on the contrary to make something ‘as
un-spectacular possible’ – or from a more political perspective to make a work
(or a show) ‘without power’. He also chose to make and show the work at La Commune
in Aubervilliers, one of the poorest suburbs on the outskirts of Paris.
It took me about an hour to get there by train and bus on a
Sunday, and when I emerged from the RER station I found myself in a very
different neighbourhood from the Espace Cardin, the Pompidou Centre or even Yvelines.
The people in the street or the shops were mostly non-white, and mostly spoke
Arabic or an African language, and the buildings were mostly run-down
featureless post-War high-rise public housing or institutions (I counted at
least one hospital). This was a very different Paris from the gentrified and
tourist playground of the inner city.
When I arrived at the brutalist concrete structure of La
Commune and perused the marketing material in the foyer, its programming
appeared to be more overtly political and community-orientated than any of the
other venues I’d visited. Nevertheless, the crowd that gathered for Un Spectacle en Moins appeared to the
same predominately white middle-class dark-clad hipsters (young and old) that
I’d seen at the Pompidou Centre. At least, I thought, we all had to travel to
get here and see how the other half lives.
Bel was in the theatre when we entered, sporting the same
scruffy work-clothes, hair and beard he’d had in Pichet Klunchun and Myself two weeks earlier (the hair and beard
were a little scruffier). He loitered between the front row of the auditorium
and the stage until we were seated, then somewhat sheepishly thanked us for coming
and explained that what we were about to see was not exactly what had been
described in the Autumn Festival brochure, but that he had been compelled to
give the show a title and some kind of description; in fact this was only the
second performance, and he was still making adjustments, so we would be the
first (and possibly only people) to witness it in its current form.
He announced he would begin by playing a recording of a recent
radio interview with somebody about something (I didn’t pick up who or what) and
that this would be followed by four performance pieces; duly played the
interview (the contents of which I found hard to follow in French) over the
sound system (while nothing happened onstage); and then announced that he would
now perform the first piece: a seated meditation, which he informed us would
last for ten minutes.
He climbed up onto the stage, sat in a chair and closed his
eyes. After a few minutes people in the audience became restless; two people
behind me couldn’t stop muttering. I took the opportunity to focus my own inner
and outer attention, and to tune my perceptual consciousness and capacity to
observe. This I decided was the essence of what Bel was doing in all his shows,
even the least spectacular: to teach the audience to watch, and to let the
performer be seen.
Bel now invited ten volunteers from the audience onstage,
led them upstage and gave them a task which the rest of the audience couldn’t
hear. The volunteers then took five minutes to advance in a line slowly towards
the front of the stage. Some wobbled or lost their bearing; one had to stop and
lower his head for a few minutes before continuing, as if overcome; but they
all made it; and so did we, despite a certain amount of restlessness and
muttering.
Bel now invited ten more volunteers to join the initial
cohort onstage (these were also invited to return to the audience if they
wished, but most of whom volunteer to stay). Once again they were led to the
back of the stage and given instructions we couldn’t hear. Then they came
downstage centre and formed a group standing and sitting on the edge of the
stage and the steps leading up to it, as if for a group photo; Bel himself
climbed down off the stage and sat in the auditorium to watch. Then they began
to count aloud slowly in unison while facing the audience. When they got to a
hundred after a few minutes, they were greeted by cheers and applause; but they
smiled and kept counting, and Bel turned and informed us that their
instructions were to count to a thousand.
At this point several people in the audience got up and left;
more followed when the two-hundred mark was passed and it became clear that Bel
was in earnest. I was riveted. At one point Bel rose and gestured to the
lighting desk to bring up the intensity of the lights slightly and focus them a
little more tightly on the performers. At around the five-hundred mark the
sense of achievement was palpable: the performers’ voices became stronger and
their faces a little more determined, although one or two began to falter and
then seemed to regain their self-control, solidarity and purpose. People in the
audience began to clap along, and even join in the counting. When they reached
one thousand (it must have taken about half an hour) there was a huge outburst
of applause.
Bel thanked the participants, who returned to their seats.
He now announced that the fourth and final piece would be a solo dance by him
of indeterminate length, and that we were free to leave whenever we wished. He thanked
us for attending, took off his shoes and jacket and placed them on the floor of
the auditorium in a corner below the stage. Then he climbed back onstage, dragged
out a small fold-back speaker from the wings and stood beside it, adjusting his
proximity until it began to emit a single sustained tone of feedback. He began
to move, very slowly and minutely; first one arm, then his head, then his
torso; then he began sinking to the floor, where he continued to move, slowly,
rolling, lying still for a while, rolling again, raising an arm, or a leg. It
reminded me a little of the dance he had choreographed to Killing Me Softly, except that here the movements appeared to be unpremeditated
and unrelated to any discernable content or meaning.
After a minute or two, people began to leave. Possibly they
had parking or transport issues; perhaps they thought they were meant to leave;
or perhaps they were bored. Bel remained totally focussed on what he was doing.
After about fifteen minutes, he came to rest, sitting on the floor, and
remained motionless for a moment, still inwardly focussed, as if collecting
himself. Then he slowly got to his feet, stepped down from the stage, gathered
his things and left.
*
‘Portrait: Jérôme Bel’ was part of the Autumn Festival,
Paris, September–December 2017.
