For a long time, Jérôme Bel wanted to do a show on the memory of a theatre, on the memory of shows that would have been presented at it. We know that shows, stage performance properly speaking, leave nothing behind them except in the memory of the spectators who attended the performances. Because it is in fact the very nature of the live show to die, to disappear. Which is what creates both its grandeur and its weakness. It was in thinking of the Cour d'honneur of the Palais des papes, unquestionably one of the most symbolic theatre venues in France, that he imagined a solution: a show staging spectators who themselves relate their memories of this place and the shows they saw there. The spectators invited to take part in this project are theatre buffs or not. They are between 11 and 70 years old; they are students, teachers, graphic artists or nurses; they live in Vichy, Avignon, Paris or Clermont-Ferrand. Each in his or her own way, they offer an account of their experiences as spectators, good or bad. The challenges of this creation are therefore to attempt to quantify how shows are received by the spectators and to measure the influence of art on their life, thus in the Cour d'honneur. Because the spectator had to be given the place he or she deserved: the place of honour.

Credits

Conception and direction : Jérôme Bel
Assisted by : Maxime Kurvers
With spectators : Virginie Andreu, Elena Borghese, Vassia Chavaroche, Pascal Hamant, Daniel Le Beuan, Yves Leopold, Bernard Lescure, Adrien Mariani, Anna Mazzia, Jacqueline Micoud, Alix Nelva, Jérôme Piron, Monique Rivoli, Marie Zicari
And performers : Isabelle Huppert, Samuel Lefeuvre, Antoine Le Ménestrel, Agnès Sourdillon, Maciej Stuhr, Oscar Van Rompay
Texts extract : Médée by Euripide, French translation by Myrto Gondicas and Pierre Judet de la Combe, Le Prince de Hombourg by Heinrich von Kleist, French translation by Jean Curtis, Les Bienveillantes by Jonathan Littell, Polish translation by Katarzyna Kaminska-Maurugeon, L'École des femmes by Molière
Music : Philipoctus De Caserta (Codex Chantilly), Scott Gibbons, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Richard Wagner
Thanks to : Didier Bezace / Théâtre de la Commune, Reinout Bussemaker, Romeo Castellucci, Cidalia da Costa, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Pierre Fontes, Jean-Louis Mailles, Maison Jean Vilar, Christoph Marthaler, Marie-Josée Mas, Benoît Minvielle, Jean-Noël Obert, Colm O'Callaghan, Alice Pialoux, Alain Platel, Rosas, Björn Schmelzer – Graindelavoix, Johan Simons / NT Gent, Malgorzata Szczesniak, Nara Trochel, Lies van Assche, Anna Viebrock, Nina von Mechow, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Christophe Wavelet, Lina Zohair
Production : Festival d'Avignon
Coproduction : France Télévisions, Association R.B. Jérôme Bel (Paris)

In his early pieces (name given by the author, Jérôme Bel, Shirtology…), Jérôme Bel applied structuralist operations to dance in order to single out the primary elements from theatrical spectacle. The neutralization of  formal criteria and the distance he took from choreographic language led him to reduce his pieces to their operative minimum, the better to bring out a critical reading of the economy of the stage, and of the body on it.

His interest subsequently shifted from dance as a stage practice to the issue of the performer as a particular individual. The series of portraits of dancers (Véronique Doisneau, Cédric Andrieux, Isadora Duncan…) broaches dance through the narrative of those who practice it, emphasizes words in a dance spectacle, and stresses the issue of the singularity of the stage. Here, formal and institutional criticism takes the form of a deconstruction through discourse, in a subversive gesture which radicalizes its relation to choreography.

Through his use of biography, Jérôme  Bel politicizes his questions, aware as he is of the crisis involving the subject in contemporary society and the forms its representation takes on stage. In embryonic form in The show must go on, he deals with questions about what the theatre can be in a political sense—questions which come to the fore from Disabled Theater and Gala on. In offering the stage to non-traditional performers (amateurs, people with physical and mental handicaps, children…), he shows a preference for the community of differences over the formatted group, and a desire to dance over choreography, and duly applies the methods of a process of emancipation through art.

Since 2019, for ecological reasons, Jérôme Bel and his company no longer use airplanes for their travels and it is with this new paradigm that his latest performances (Xiao Ke, Laura Pante...) have been created and produced.

He has been invited to contemporary art biennials and museums (Tate Modern, MoMA, Documenta 13, the Louvre…), where he has put on performances and shown films. Two of them, Véronique Doisneau and Shirtology, are in the collections of the Musée National d’Art Moderne-Centre Pompidou. Jérôme Bel  is regularly invited to give lectures at universities (Waseda, UCLA, Stanford…). In 2013, together with the choreographer Boris Charmatz, he co-authored Emails 2009-2010, which was published by Les Presses du Réel.

In 2005, Jérôme Bel received a Bessie Award for the performances of The show must go on given in New York. Three years later, with Pichet Klunchun, he won the Routes Princesse Margriet Award for Cultural Diversity (European Cultural Foundation) for the  performance  Pichet Klunchun and myself. Disabled Theater was chosen in 2013 for the Theatertreffen in Berlin and won the Swiss “present-day dance creation” prize. En 2021, Jérôme Bel and Wu-Kang Chen received the Taishin Performing Arts Award for the performance Dances for Wu-Kang Chen.

Source : Jérôme Bel 's website

More information : jeromebel.fr