To be … or not to be … that is the question | Reading Group Post V
Posted by Maia Jordaan | The Winger Reading Group
Choreographer: Jérôme Bel
Production: The show must go on (2001)
Photo: Laurent Philippe
I propose livening up this Reading Group through conversation – where we all participate in defining this field. I would like to start this conversation by inviting all of you (whether you’ve read Lepecki’s Exhausting Dance or not) to share your viewpoint on this critique of representation/virtuosity through stillness and reduction…
When Jérôme Bel had one of his performers ask this question – “To be … or not to be” – in The Last Performance (1998), he set up a critique of representation. Re-Read this famous Shakespearean quote from Hamlet as:
To represent … or not to represent … that is the question in contemporary dance.
Jérôme Bel critiques representation through stillness … or reduction … as Lepecki points out in Concept and Presence (A chapter in Carter’s book Rethinking Dance History, 2004):
“The contemporary European dance scene can be qualified by one term: ‘reduction’ – of expansiveness, of the spectacular, of the unessential…”
Pirko Husemann points out “on the level of dance an evident fading-away of dance itself prevails. Contemporary European dance becomes less and less danced in the usual sense. Admittedly, this tendency within dance history is no singular occurrence – here mentioned would be only the minimalism of American 1960s postmodern dance.”
This critique of representation is certainly not new. The lineage of this rejection of virtuosity and representation includes amongst others:
Dadaist performances,
Duchamp’s conceptual art,
Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt,
Artaud’s manifesto for a theatre of cruelty,
Performance art,
Happenings,
Installations,
Judson’s minimalism,
as well as postmodern dance in general.
It has also been theorized extensively in critical theory – Derrida; and psycho-analysis – Lacan.
What is your stance? And why?
• Listen to a discussion called “Not Conceptual” between Jonathan Burrows, Jérôme Bel, Bojana Cvejić and Xavier Le Roy.
• Watch the Last Performance lecture.
• Watch a section from The Show Must Go On (Choreographed by Jérôme Bel)
