Jérôme Bel

Dance, Theatre
and the Subject

Gerald Siegmund

N E W WO R L D C H O R E O G R A P H I E S
 New World Choreographies

Series editors
Rachel Fensham
School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne
Parkville, Australia

Peter M. Boenisch
School of Arts
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK
This series presents advanced yet accessible studies of a rich field of new
choreographic work which is embedded in the global, transnational and
intermedial context. It introduces artists, companies and scholars who
contribute to the conceptual and technological rethinking of what con-
stitutes movement, blurring old boundaries between dance, theatre and
performance. The series considers new aesthetics and new contexts of
production and presentation, and discusses the multi-sensory, collabora-
tive and transformative potential of these new world choreographies.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14729
 Gerald Siegmund

Jérôme Bel
Dance, Theatre, and the Subject
Gerald Siegmund
Justus-Liebig University
Giessen, Germany

New World Choreographies

ISBN 978-1-137-55271-6 ISBN 978-1-137-55272-3  (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55272-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017943670

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover credit: Frédéric Seguette in Shirtology © Herman Sorgeloos

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
 Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the help of many peo-
ple. To this very day, Jérôme Bel’s fascinating and provoking work has
kept me watching, thinking, doubting, and feeling. My thoughts and
feelings are at the source of this book. I would like to thank Jérôme Bel
for his trust in my work and his willingness to provide missing informa-
tion when needed. Thanks also to Sandro Grando and Rebecca Lee from
the association R.B./Jérôme Bel for their support and help to access
the material on Jérôme Bel’s website and to obtain photo rights. I am
grateful to the editors of the Palgrave series New World Choreographies,
Rachel Fensham and Peter M. Boenisch, for being so enthusiastic about
this project. Their constructive comments and suggestions have helped
to make this a better book.
Parts of the section on Disabled Theater (2012) have been pub-
lished as “What Difference Does it Make? or: From Difference to
In-Difference. Disabled Theater in the Context of Jérôme Bel’s Work”.
In: Disabled Theater, ed. by Sandra Umathum and Benjamin Wihstutz.
Berlin and Zurich: Diaphanes, 2015. I would like to thank the publisher
for granting me the rights to re-use the text for this volume. Lydia White
has been invaluable in translating earlier versions of the sections Nom
donné par l’auteur (1994) and Xavier Le Roy (2000) from “Subjects of
Discourse”, as well as Jérôme Bel (1995), The Last Performance (1998),
and The Show Must Go On (2000/01) from “Subjects of Knowledge”
from German into English when I was stuck. Unfortunately, I could not
leave Lydia’s masterful translation alone but had to rework it to make it

v
vi  Acknowledgements

fit into the argument of this volume. I am truly sorry for that. My thanks
also extend to Christopher Weickenmeier for editing the chapters and
helping me to find the English editions of the books when my book shelf
would only yield the volumes in German. Bettina Seifried, as always, has
provided a critical eye and been valuable friend, and not just during the
process of writing this book.
Many people who have accompanied me and my thinking not only
about Jérôme Bel’s work but on dance and theatre over the past twenty
years also deserve my thanks. Some of these people I have actually met in
the context of Jérôme Bel’s work, on panel discussions we shared about
what was then called non-dance, or during festivals they organised and I
was kindly invited to: Christine Peters, at the time programing director
of Künstlerhaus Mousontum in Frankfurt am Main, who introduced me
to Bel’s work, and Arnd Wesemann, to this day editor of the dance mag-
azine Tanz, for commissioning my first article on Jérôme Bel. My thanks
also go to Sabine Huschka, Christina Thurner, Katja Schneider, Jeroen
Peeters, Christophe Wavelet, Mårten Spångberg, Hortensia Völckers,
Raimund Hoghe, Luca Giacomo Schulte, Susanne Traub, Krassimira
Kruschkova, Sigrid Gareis, Petra Roggel, Xavier Le Roy, Franz Anton
Cramer, Helmut Ploebst, and Joachim Gerstmeier. I send my thanks
across the Atlantic to Susan Manning and Susan Leigh Foster for their
sharp minds, wit, and being so much fun to be with.
Finally I need to thank Carsten Grimm, Tom Weigang, Johannes
Schmitt-Emden, Bernd Lud, Hans Petersen, Albert Wolf, Maik Weinard,
Timo Herrmann, Ludwig Lammer, Ulf Rössiling, Michael Nemitz,
Rainer Hilpert, Heiko Krebs, Ralf Baumann, and Robert Keller for
sociability, friendship, Monday nights at Café Grössenwahn, and for let-
ting me be! My biggest thanks, however, go to Rainer Emig for having
shared more than half of my life with me.
 Contents

“I Write for the Black Box of the Stage”: Jérôme Bel

and Theatre 1
Notes 13
References 14

Modern Subjects 15
The Medium Specificity of Dance: Objectifying Dance Modernism 15
Moving from the Inside Out: The Creation of An Inner Scene 18
Moving from the Outside In: The Objectivation of Movement 24
The Seeing Problem: New Modes of Reception for Dance 28
The Time Problem: Transcendence and Duration 31
Between Imagination and Memory: Repetition 36
Between Institutionalisation and Emancipation: The New Dance40
Notes 52
References 53

Subjects of Discourse 55
Theatricality and Dance 55
Nom donné par l’auteur (1994): Establishing the Discourse
‘Jérôme Bel’ 56
Between Art and Aesthetics: Conceptual Dance 65
Between Site and Non-site: The Empty Stage 68
Xavier Le Roy (2000): The Author-Function 73
Between Materiality and Signification: Theatricality 82
vii
viii  Contents

Notes 98
References 99

Subjects of Knowledge 103

Absence as a Critical Category 103
Jérôme Bel (1995): Absence and Phenomenology 105
Shirtology (1997): Absence and Semiotics 116
The Last Performance (1998): Absence and Deconstruction 124
The Show Must Go On (2000/2001): Absence and Psychoanalysis 138
The Show Must Go On 2 (2004): Absence and Comedy 158
Notes 166
References 168

Critical Subjects 173

Dispositifs of Power: From Group to Solo Work 173
Véronique Doisneau (2004) and Cédric Andrieux
(2009): Speaking Subjects 177
Staying in One’s Place: Technologies of Subjectivation 180
Critical Strategies of Desubjugation with Butler and
Foucault’s Virtue 186
Critical Strategies of Desubjugation with Freud’s Fantasy 191
Critical Strategies by Acknowledgement, or: The Emptiness
Looks Back 197
Lutz Förster (2009): The Joys of Being a Dancing Subject 200
Pichet Klunchun and Myself (2004): Post-colonial Contact Zones 204
Notes 220
References 221

Subjects at Risk 225

Risking the Performance: From Solo to Group Work 225
Cour d’honneur (2013): Risking the Many 228
3Abschied (2010): Risking Death 237
Disabled Theater (2012): Risking In-difference 244
Tombe (2016): Risking the Institution 263
Notes 266
References 267
 Contents   ix

Dance in Its Post-medium Condition 271

Notes 280
References 280

Index 281
 List of Figures

“I Write for the Black Box of the Stage”: Jérôme Bel and Theatre
Fig. 1 The Last Performance, The empty stage 3

Subjects of Discourse
Fig. 1 Nom donné par l’auteur, Frédéric Seguette and Jérôme Bel 59
Fig. 2 Xavier Le Roy, Strike the Pose! 74

Subjects of Knowledge
Fig. 1 Jérôme Bel, Frédéric Seguette and Claire Haenni 107
Fig. 2 Shirtology, Ftédéric Seguette 117
Fig. 3 The Last Performance, Dancing Susanne Linke’s Wandlung 133
Fig. 4 The Show Must Go On, Come Together 141
Fig. 5 The Show Must Go On, I Like to Move it! 162

Critical Subjects
Fig. 1 Cédric Andrieux, A Cunningham Subject 184
Fig. 2 Véronique Doisneau, Imagining Giselle 195
Fig. 3 Cédric Andrieux, Looking for an Eye 198
Fig. 4 Lutz Förster, Ode to a Chair 203
Fig. 5 Pichet Klunchun and Myself, Teaching Khôn 211

Subjects at Risk
Fig. 1 Cour d’honneur, A Greek chorus 233
Fig. 2 3Abschied, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker 240
Fig. 3 Disabled Theater, Lorraine Maier has Force 260

xi
xii  List of Figures

Fig. 4 Tombe, Parasites at the Paris Opera, photographie 264

Dance in Its Post-medium Condition

Fig. 1 Gala, Everybody Dance Now! 272
 “I Write for the Black Box of the Stage”:
Jérôme Bel and Theatre

The stage is empty. It is not merely empty, but it displays its emptiness.
Like a glaring void it stares back at us although nothing is happening on
stage. I sit in the audience and look at an emptiness that looks at me.
The theatre in its spatial divisions and arrangements, its place for action
and its place for seeing, the stage and the auditorium, is an active player
in the games Jérôme Bel devises for the theatre. Before the show begins,
its walls and curtains, galleys and elements of decor frame emptiness. The
theatre plays itself by showing itself in all its framing mechanisms, expec-
tations, rules, and traditions. These rules are, of course, nowhere to be
seen. They are absent yet manifest in the void and its framing. It is pre-
cisely because the void is framed that the unwritten and written rules of
theatre make their ghostly appearance, raising their symbolic head like a
spectre. They inform the stage, although I cannot locate them from my
individual vantage point in the auditorium.
At the beginning of Jérôme Bel’s piece Gala from 2015, as in his
other pieces, such as Jérôme Bel, Xavier LeRoy and The Sow Must Go On,
the stage is empty. While I descend the steep stairs in Halle G at the
museum quarter in Vienna, the auditorium is already full. I find a seat at
the edge of a long row close to the stage. The back wall of the theatre is
covered by a curtain that parts in the middle audibly whizzing open to
mark the beginning of the show. The drawn curtain reveals a solid back
wall that serves as the screen for a film projection. Indeed, the spatial
set-up reminds me of a cinema with the significant difference, however,
that in front of the screen this glaringly empty huge plateau of a theatre

© The Author(s) 2017 1

G. Siegmund, Jérôme Bel, New World Choreographies,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55272-3_1
2  G. Siegmund

stage intervenes. Almost like an orchestra in an Ancient Greek theatre, it

separates and links the auditorium and the ‘action’ projected in the back
distancing and connecting the spectators from the actors, dancers or per-
formers on stage.
The film is a montage of individual photographs of empty theatres.
I count thirty three. The theatres vary in shapes and sizes. They range
from the ruins of the vast Ancient Greek open air theatres to the splen-
dour of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, a renaissance reconstruction of
an ideal Roman theatre, to plush baroque theatres with their tiers of cir-
cles lining the walls to small puppet theatres up to a multitude of con-
temporary black boxes in various sizes. The theatres shown are also of
different cultural origins. In an open air space, two pillars decorated with
masks supporting a roof construction denote a Balinese theatre. The
interior of a Japanese Nô theatre with the seats of the spectators char-
acteristically lowered below stage level follows suit. Two semi-circles of
plastic chairs, half enclosing a piece of lawn in front of them, or simply
a series of logs that demarcate an empty space are instantly recognisable
as theatres, too. However different the individual topographical arrange-
ments and cultural specificities of these theatres may be, it is always the
split and the framed void that remain as the inalienable topology of thea-
tre. As in the last two examples, the framing of the void as a special place
within the space may not be achieved by the architecture of the set-up
only. It is achieved by our gaze that triggers our imagination. Although
the space is open, the split takes place nonetheless.
The projection of these photographs actually alters the space I am in
in Halle G in Vienna. The theatres are photographed from different per-
spectives. The spatial arrangement includes the actual auditorium in the
Viennese theatre and the actual stage as well as the represented stage and
auditorium in the photographs. Some photographs are taken from the
stage or even from backstage from behind a curtain into the auditorium
of the theatres, so that the four spatial components are arranged in such
a way that from my actual seat I look across the two stages into the audi-
torium on the photograph. The back wall becomes the surface of a mir-
ror doubling the space. As a member of the audience I look at myself.
The doubled and enlarged stage thus creates an arena stage that may ide-
ally be overlooked from all sides. Some photographs are taken from the
auditorium onto the stage, so that I see through the second auditorium
onto a second stage. In the far distance of the vanishing point where the
gaze of the spectators loses itself at the horizon beyond which lies the
 “I WRITE FOR THE BLACK BOX OF THE STAGE” …  3

Fig. 1  The Last Performance, The empty stage © Herman Sorgeloos

unknown, the apparatus of the theatre re-appears as a mediatised spectre.

The theatre meets the theatre in the theatre. The emptiness is doubled
and folded back on to the stage. Thus, the theatre appears as the topic of
theatre (Fig. 1).
I take these two spatial set ups and the trajectories they open as typical
of Jérôme Bel’s work. The first spatial construction is based on a circle
creating a space in the middle where we watch ourselves. The chorus of
Ancient Greek theatre no longer mediates between the action of kings
and queens in front of the skena, the house that covers the back of the
stage. No more dancing queens and princes with Jérôme Bel, but peo-
ple that are transformed by their dancing. The dancing chorus mediates
the public with the public on either side of the platform. The platform
encloses people dancing, acting, and performing for the audience and
with the audience. It carries the promise of communality. The second
trajectory is linear in character, a mise-en-abyme of stages that carries
us into the distance where all we meet are the theatre and its laws. It
excludes people dancing, acting, and performing. And yet its emptiness
is the pre-condition for the dancing, acting and performing to appear.
4  G. Siegmund

The line, symbolised in the proscenium, cuts across the circle once again
separating what the circle has brought together. In the work of Jérôme
Bel, as in Gala, dance has the function of bringing people of all back-
grounds and capacities together. This reunion takes place in the theatre,
which again divides the people who have come together by separating
performers from spectators. This book aims to understand the strategies
of staging, dancing, performing, and looking that Jérôme Bel devises to
explore and bridge this gap.
After about ten minutes the curtain closes again. For a few precious
seconds nothing happens until a figure emerges from behind a curtain
on the left side of the stage and places a calendar upright on the floor. It
is a DIN A2 art calendar whose pages, however, do not display the col-
ourful reproductions of paintings but their white backside. On the white
page addressing the audience a handwritten instruction reads “Ballett/
Ballet”. The words, the first one in German, the second underneath in
English, are both an inscription and an instruction for the scene that fol-
lows. A female dancer enters from the left side of the stage and walks
up to the middle of the proscenium. Already from the way she walks,
her arms loosely dangling and her posture slightly couched and bent for-
ward, it becomes apparent that she is not a trained dancer. Smiling she
turns and faces the audience like a ballerina. She raises her arms and puts
her feet in position to perform a pirouette turning to the right. Once
done, she repeats her preparation and pirouettes to the left before exit-
ing to the right. A gala is a festive evening where international stars of
ballet companies perform excerpts and highlights from their repertoire.
Their performance is based on virtuosity and representation rather than
on other artistic merits such as storytelling, interpretation, expression, or
the exploration of the subtleties of a movement style or technique. In a
way a gala is also a bastard genre, an evening of mixed matter where bits
and pieces are strung together to entertain. Galas, on the other hand, are
also given in dance schools at the end of each year. The name designates
a festive activity where parents and friends come to see the students mak-
ing dances (Bel 2016). In fact, Bel’s piece Gala hovers in-between these
two definitions of the genre, introducing the informal into the formal
presentation of a theatre situation.
Keeping these implications in mind, the dancer in Gala performs a
feast of virtuosity, the pirouette being a figure that describes a full cir-
cle as an emblem of perfection and harmony demanding focus and per-
fect balance from the upright dancing body. Yet, her pirouettes are far
 “I WRITE FOR THE BLACK BOX OF THE STAGE” …  5

from perfect. She cannot keep her body upright, so that the pirouette
looks rather lopsided. On this night in Vienna 18 dancers follow the first
one. One by one they perform their pirouettes, entering from the left
and exiting on the right. The 19 performers possess different technical
skills. Some pirouettes are actually very good. The performers differ in
age, sex, gender, height and physique, and are of different ethnic back-
grounds. In the Viennese performance one dancer sits in a wheelchair
and one is mentally challenged. Regardless of these differences, they all
are allowed to dance pirouettes. And they all manage to dance pirou-
ettes. Since there is no commentary or narrative that grades or interprets
the performances, one pirouette is as valid as the next one. Every one is
allotted the same amount of time to show his or her skills. In a Gala eve-
ryone is a star.
Once everybody has finished, a second section of ballet virtuosity is
shown. One by one all of the 19 dancers perform a grand jeté across
the diagonal from the right corner at the back of the stage to front left.
For this, the order of the dances has been reshuffled. The 19 dancers
perform typical figures of ballet, as the inscription on the calendar says.
They do as the words tell them. The direction of their entrances and
exits from left to right follows the direction of reading and writing in
Western cultures. Their bodies and movement tied up with language,
everyone writes in their own way. Each one of them has his or her own
handwriting, an individual bodily tracing that moves across the lines of
the stage. The scenes are neatly separated into chapters. In Gala there
are eight chapters. After the introduction of empty theatres projected
on the back wall and the “ballet” section, a chapter with a “Walzer/
waltz” follows with eight couples turning and swirling across the stage
to the music of Johann Strauss’ The Blue Danube. The remaining sec-
tions are “Improvisation” (for three minutes the entire company spreads
across the stage to improvise in silence), “Michael Jackson” (a string of
19 moonwalks to Jackson’s Billy Jean), “Verbeugung/Bow” (a series
of 36 bows, two for each performer), “Solo” and, finally, “Kompanie
Kompanie/Company Company”, in which one dancer at a time per-
forms a small solo to their own liking that all the others have to copy.
The series of tasks Gala consists of references four iconic figures of vari-
ous types of dance: the pirouette in ballet, the waltz in ballroom dance,
the improvisation as a technique in modern and contemporary styles, the
moonwalk for dance in popular culture, before finally passing the dance
over to the performer’s individual choices and practices. Like ordinary
6  G. Siegmund

people, the dancers learn by copying. And what is copied is already exist-
ing movement material from popular culture and social or artistic dance
practices. For Jérôme Bel the dancing body is a cultural as opposed to
a natural body. Cultural forms, norms, and rules subject the body and
bring it about as a dancing body in the process. By negotiating body and
cultural practices the dancers are turned into subjects. The question of
the subject lies at the heart of Jérôme Bel’s work. Rather than working
with already disciplined subjects to create new movement phrases and
dance pieces, he turns his attention towards the very formation of the
subject itself.
What is most striking about Jérôme Bel’s work is the clarity of its
structure. As becomes apparent in this brief introductory description
of Gala, this clarity is brought about by stripping away all unnecessary
adornments that would illustrate a world created and presented on stage.
With the gesture of the minimalist, Bel reduces the theatre to its bare
necessities: an empty stage, a feature that has become emblematic of Bel’s
work, simple actions, very few costumes and props. Nothing is accidental.
Everything that appears on stage is essential to the action unfolding. It is
arranged in a logical way where one thing follows the other developing
like an argument or a train of thought. Bel’s dramaturgy could be called,
as British director and head of the theatre group Forced Entertainment
Tim Etchells has done, a dramaturgy of lists. “In Bel’s work one thing
does not lead to another; instead one thing follows another” (Etchells
2004, 11). Its organising principle is the series: a series of ballet moves,
a series of waltzes, a series of moonwalks. In between the actions, ges-
tures, and movements that follow one another without transitions or
fluid and organic-looking developments that would blur the individual
clear-cut imagery, the things presented fall back on themselves. They
also visibly disappear into the emptiness between the actions succeed-
ing one another. In this reduced environment the spectator’s attention
is geared towards perceiving very little, almost nothing in all its glorious
richness of minute details. Bel’s pieces always walk a thin line between
being there, remorselessly presenting everything and everybody taking
place, and not being there, absorbing everything and everybody in the
darkness or the emptiness between the individual actions, gestures or
movements. While Bel firmly believes in the here and now of the theatre
situation, he also challenges it, dealing as French critic Laurant Goumarre
once wrote “with absence, disappearance and even death” in the process
(Goumarre 2001, 17). At close inspection, Bel finds very simple images
 “I WRITE FOR THE BLACK BOX OF THE STAGE” …  7

for very complex thoughts and processes. This is what makes his work so
intriguing. Witty and entertaining, his work balances on the brink of the
banal and the extraordinary, between non-art and art, the popular and
the philosophical.
Jérôme Bel’s work is also a body of work that actively engages with popu-
lar culture. Michael Jackson’s iconic moonwalk is placed side by side with
Chopin’s music for Les sylphides. The Show Must Go On, arguably his most
successful and popular piece that is still performed 17 years after its pre-
miere in 2000, consists entirely of 19 popular songs, from David Bowie’s
Let’s Dance, John Lennon’s Imagine, Celine Dion’s classic from the movie
Titanic, My Heart Will Go On, to Queen’s eponymous The Show Must Go
On. Even more rigidly than with the instructions used in Gala, the danc-
ers here also perform as the lyrics of the songs tell them to do. Bel’s singu-
lar project casts itself as a project of writing exploring the faultlines between
the body and language. In seventeenth century France it was customary
to notate and write down dances and to submit these scores for inspection
to the Académie Royale de danse. Once approved by the authorities, the
dances would then be sent back to the dancing masters for performance
(Laurenti 1994). Choreography, from the Greek choros, the dancing place
and space for dance, and graphein, the drawing or writing of both the dance
and its place, thus existed independently of a physical practice in the studio.
It certainly existed without an improvisational practice that would explore
the possibilities of the body to move and to relate to others and their envi-
ronments. While the historical writing of choreography was directly linked
to the absolutist power of Louis XIV, Jérôme Bel’s writing project towards
the end of the twentieth century, on the other hand, can know no such
power. Where Louis XIV tried to control both the social and political activi-
ties of the dancing masters in the regions of France by controlling the bodies
of the dancers, inscribing them with the right order, Bel’s power is much
more diffuse. Instead of controlling the bodies, the dancers’ bodies are
inscribed with and written by popular culture that nobody may own, posses
or embody in its absolutist totality. Bel thus stages the body’s relation to the
cultural as an impersonal pervasive principle that gives the dancers agency in
playing with its signifiers. He addresses the question of power relations in
dance by working through the questions of authorship and the subjectivities
dance produces. Bel explores the implications of the cultural body for dance
as an art form that since the heyday of modernism has based its guiding
principles on the laws of physics and biology, thereby inventing the body as
8  G. Siegmund

physiologically and organically natural. Contraray to the modernist doctrine,

Jérôme Bel looks for other ways to make the body speak to its audiences.
“I write the shows before I meet the actors”, Bel says in an interview.

Without a doubt this is due to laziness because I don’t like rehearsing at

all. Besides, I find these rehearsals more and more pointless. It seems to
me that there is only one type of theatrical practice possible for me, that is
to say the public performance. Writing the piece, alone or with a circle of
a few loyal and understanding assistants around me, and rehearsing with
the performers are only risky speculations because theatre cannot be done
without the presence of the public, which changes everything. The com-
parison to a writer is pertinent only in as much as the writer writes for the
‘white page’ and I do for the ‘black box’ of the stage (Bel and Siegmund
2002, 26, transl. Lydia White).1

The writing for the black box of the theatre infuses dance with a cer-
tain maturity that is reflexive of its history and its modes of production
and reception. But it also confuses established modes of understanding
and interpreting dance. Writing for the stage implies a different respon-
siveness from audiences that is intellectual rather than kinaesthetic or
even emotional. Yet Bel’s work is anything but dry and theoretical. In
1999, choreographer and dancer Xavier Le Roy drew attention to the
duplicity in Bel’s work:

The four pieces by Jérôme Bel [Nom donné par l’auteur, Jérôme Bel,
Shirtology, and The Last Performance, G.S.] are amongst the very few
pieces that radically change the possibilities of choreography by suggesting
a different perspective. They propose a look at the dancing body as vested
in a semiotic thinking that includes their presentation as well as their per-
ception. […] The choreographies of Jérôme Bel provide rare moments
during which I could see a thought developing on a theatre stage. In
the process of their performance they do not only allow for moments of
reflexion and intellectual stimulation but they also create poetic spaces and
humour […] (Buffard and Le Roy 1999, 29).

The development of a thought that Xavier LeRoy consideres to be the

exemplary strength of Jérôme Bel’s work, however, at the time ran counter
to established views on dance. Towards the end of the 1990s when Bel’s work
gained more and more prominence on the international dance circuit, critics
found very little dance in Bel’s dance pieces, sometimes even commenting on
 “I WRITE FOR THE BLACK BOX OF THE STAGE” …  9

the lack of choreography. In his self-titled piece Jérôme Bel, an elderly female
dancer lies naked on the floor at the front of the stage holding up a single
light bulb. Another naked female dancer stands against the back wall sing-
ing Igor Strawinsky’s score to Le Sacre du printemps, while a male and female
dancer, also naked, explore their bodies drawing images on their skin with
a bright red lipstick. Movement that could be considered dancerly because
of its rhythmical structure and expenditure of energy is nowhere to be seen.
Neither is there a choreography that would order the perfunctory movements
of the performers into recognisable patterns. Dance, indeed, was absent from
Jérôme Bel. Yet it was conceived of and programmed as a dance piece.
The case against Jérôme Bel was officially brought forward by audi-
ence member and patron of the festival Raymond Whitehead, who in
2002 sued the International Dance Festival Ireland after attending a per-
formance of Jérôme Bel.2 Not finding any dance in it, which he defined as
“people moving rhythmically, jumping up and down, usually to music”,
this particular spectator felt traumatised by the performance (Roy 2011).
He was shocked to see four naked dancers playing with their skin,
manipulating body parts, and urinating on stage. Although Whitehead’s
case was ultimately dismissed, his criticism rightly articulated a popular
understanding of what dance is and what audiences would expect from a
contemporary dance performance. Bel counters these expectations. Since
Bel’s dancers neither performed steps to music that structured space and
time, nor displayed inner motivations that led to movement or gesture,
to connect their activity to dance seemed an almost absurd proposition.
Indeed, it seems as if thinking and dancing do not go together. Instead
of linking and unfolding steps and phrases, Bel unfolds thinking. Instead
of jumping up and down to music, the dancers engage in banal actions
that to some come across as cheap acts of provocation. Considered to be
theatrical at best, a fact that could hardly be denied since the pieces were
performed in theatres and in front of an audience, Bel’s work fell under
the verdict of ‘stop dance’, ‘anti dance’, or ‘non dance’.3 In an article
in The Guardian in 2011, in his “step-by-step guide” to the work of
Jérôme Bel, Sanjoy Roy still uses these terms to characterise Bel’s work.
With his “anti-dance” this “naughty French philosophe of contemporary
dance” engages the mind rather than the body (Roy 2011).
Bel shared what was originally meant as a derogative label with a
wide range of European dance artists emerging in the mid 1990s: Xavier
Le Roy, Raimund Hoghe, Jonathan Burrows, Boris Charmatz, Meg
Stuart, Maria La Ribot, Vera Mantero, and Thomas Lehmen, whose
10  G. Siegmund

work, Bel writes, he discovered at European dance festivals to which

they were invited to perform their work (Bel and Charmatz 2013, 75).
In the early 2000th choreographers and dancers Thomas Plischke,
Martin Nachbar, Alice Chauchat, Antonia Baehr, Eszter Salamon and
Juan Dominguez followed suit. The list is not exhaustive. Despite the
heterogeneity of their approaches, their different aesthetics, and the
different aims they pursued in their artistic trajectories, their work was
considered conceptual rather than dancerly. It provoked heated debates
amongst critics, scholars, audiences, and dancers about what exactly the
conceptual nature of these pieces is. From Baroque court ballet in the
seventeenth century to Isadora Duncan’s impressionist dances at the
beginning of the twentieth century, dance has always put forward a spe-
cific idea about the body and its relation to power and the social. Every
dance technique is based on a whole philosophy of the body, its relation
to life and death, to concepts such as beauty, to physical components like
breath and gravity that structure the dance, up to the relation of move-
ment to the psyche. If dance can hardly ever be considered to be with-
out concept, the pieces by Jérôme Bel caused a stir because they did not
hide the concept behind a phantasmagoria of imaginary bodies, which
with each movement creates a fictional world that belongs to the stage.
Instead, the pieces are stripped down and minimalist, only stating what is
necessary for the thought to develop.
Although there always is movement in Bel’s pieces, the concept took
precedent over dance. It was made visible and staged— as a thought or
development of a thought about dance that did not necessarily entail
any dancing. And yet, as Jérôme Bel shows, a thought about dance may
do without stylised movements, but it cannot do without bodies that
unfold the process of thinking. At least it does not do so in the work
of Jérôme Bel. Hence there is always a physical, almost visceral, side to
his performances that exceeds the realisation of a concept. What these
concepts are in the case of Jérôme Bel’s work will be the topic of this
book. Right through to his most recent production Tombe in 2016, his
work is remarkably consistent. There is a coherent line of development
and argumentation in the sequence of his pieces that this volume seeks
to extrapolate. In all the different phases of his career Jérôme Bel is con-
cerned with the notion of subjectivity in dance. By focusing on the dif-
ferent conceptions of the dancing subject, I will combine an analysis of
his pieces with a theoretical reflection on their relation to dance.
 “I WRITE FOR THE BLACK BOX OF THE STAGE” …  11

This interruption of the flow of movement that Jérôme Bel stages

has been theorised in various ways. André Lepecki reads it as an exhaus-
tion of modernity’s drive to motion, a running out of energy that pro-
pelled mankind forward with all the colonial implications this forward
motion holds (Lepecki 2006). Helmut Ploebst interprets Bel’s produc-
tions as resistant strategies against the commodification of bodies within
our contemporary societies of the spectacle (Ploebst 2001). Laurance
Louppe sees them as rebellious acts against the rule and aesthetic con-
ventions of dance (Louppe 2007). As Jérôme Bel himself argues, what
takes the place of dance in his pieces are the rules of choreography that
are exposed as language and “words that cover the body and substitute
for dance” (Goumarre 2001, 17). The symbolic (language, concept)
takes precedence over the imaginary (the wholeness of potential bodies).
Staging the codes and conventions of dance, reflecting on its modes of
production and presentation, takes the upper hand. Instead of produc-
ing an imaginary surplus of movement that dazzles, impresses, interests,
moves or affects the spectator, spectators here are asked to assume a dif-
ferent attitude. Spectatorship is cast differently. This change in the defini-
tion of spectatorship will be one guiding line for my argument in what is
to follow. Rather than conceiving of the dancing body as a natural phe-
nomenon that gets worked on and through by dance and its techniques
to be articulated in an objective way, Bel conceives the body as a primar-
ily cultural phenomenon. To come to an understanding of theatre, dance
as a cultural and not as a ‘natural’ activity and experience means to be
able to read the bodies on stage and the codes that inform them in order
to understand the “words that cover the body”.
Drawing out some of the faultlines between modernist kinaesthesia and
post-modernist movement objectification in relation to Jérôme Bel’s work
will be the task of the subsequent chapter, “Modern Subjects”. The aim
of this chapter is twofold. Firstly, it will outline the historical background
against which Jérôme Bel’s work takes shape. It will side Bel with the idea
of spectatorship that post-modern choreographers like Yvonne Rainer and
Pina Bausch put forward, namely that movement on stage is also move-
ment being seen, mediatised and read, regardless of the intention of the
artist. Secondly, it also draws attention to the institutional framework that
was created in France during the 1980s to further the development of
contemporary dance. Bel’s work can also be considered as a break with
the institutionalisation of the new dance in France during the 1980s.
12  G. Siegmund

If the central topic, as Bel claims himself, of his work is subjectivity,

then at least four different types of subjects can be distinguished. As the
chapter “Subjects of Discourse” argues, in Bel’s universe dancers and cho-
reographers are effects of a discourse on dance; they are subjects of the
discourse ‘Jérôme Bel’. Referring to Bel’s very first piece, Nom donné par
l’auteur, and the piece Xavier Le Roy, I will look into Bel’s idea of writ-
ing, notions of authorship and the conceptual heritage his notion of dance
as a proposition on dance is entangled with. Building on the basic defini-
tion of dance as discourse, the chapter “Subjects of Knowledge”, will cast
both dancers and spectators as subjects of cultural production. Dealing
with the remaining five pieces from the first phase of his work from 1994
to 2004, Jérôme Bel, Shirtology, The Last Performance, The Show Must Go
On, and finally, The Show Must Go On 2, this chapter shows how notions
of absence are crucial in staging Bel’s discourse on dance that oscillates
theatrically between the materiality of the body and its significations.
“Critical Subjects” shifts the focus away from the production of knowl-
edge to aspects of power inherent in contemporary dance practices and its
institutions. From 2004 to 2009 in pieces like Véronique Doisneau, Pichet
Klunchun and Myself, Cédric Andrieux, and Lutz Förster, Jérôme Bel allows
dancers to take centre stage and speak about their working experiences in
their respective dance companies. “Subjects at Risk” finally, deals with danc-
ers and performers taking risks with their own skills, thereby risking the form
of the pieces they perform in. From 2010 onwards pieces such as 3Abschied,
Cour d’honneur, Disabled Theater, and Tombe deal with subjects at risk.
Making dance risky again is argued to be a political strategy under contem-
porary conditions of dance production and reception. Coming back to the
piece Gala, the conclusion points out some of the defining features of Bel’s
contemporaneity. In the process of engaging with the unknown, perform-
ers unleash a transformative power that carries them away as subjects. Being
carried away they experience a basic human freedom from what they are as
members of a social group: the freedom to become other. It is not last of all
this basic freedom that Jérôme Bel’s work is about.
My first encounter with Jérôme Bel was in January of 1998 in
Frankfurt am Main for an article commissioned by the German dance
magazine Ballet International/Tanz Aktuell, which is now simply
known as Tanz. Bel was presenting his piece Jérôme Bel at Künstlerhaus
Mousonturm and I was to interview him. Towards the end of 1997
the magazine featured a series of portraits on a then new generation of
 “I WRITE FOR THE BLACK BOX OF THE STAGE” …  13

choreographers called “Dialogue with the Body” addressing new forms

of corporealities and research on the body, its presentation and represen-
tation on stage. The series focused on dance artists that chose to expand
traditional notions of dance and choreography working with their more
often than not naked bodies as if they were performance artists. At the
dawning of the age of the internet towards the end of the 1990s crit-
ics and artists alike were preoccupied with images of the body. Our first
encounter resulted in my essay “Im Reich der Zeichen” (Siegmund
1998) quoting the title of one of Roland Barthes’ famous books, Empire
of Signs. Bel and I shared a mutual fascination for Barthes’ work, which,
although we had never met before, made our conversation easy. Over
the course of now almost twenty years Jérôme Bel and I have held sev-
eral conversations, some of them were published as interviews or became
parts of articles I wrote about Bel’s work, while still others remained
email conversations. Since then I have followed Bel’s work with a genu-
ine enthusiasm and a general trust in his artistic approach. The follow-
ing book tries to remain faithful to my engagement with Bel’s work and
the discourse it has generated since. Perhaps not surprisingly Roland
Barthes’s thoughts on the theatre and theatricality will, next to Michel
Foucault’s work, be one of the theoretical backbones of this book. This
book will follow Bel’s own artistic trajectory from the beginning to his
most recent piece in 2016. Since our fist encounter, Jérôme Bel’s work
has been widely discussed; undoubtedly he is one of the most prominent
artists working in the field of dance and choreography today. His pieces
have met with great praise and with severe criticism, which this book, I
hope, will not pass over lightly. Whichever arguments one follows, Bel’s
approach to dance and theatre hardly leaves you cold or disinterested.

Notes
1. The interview was republished in an abridged version in 2012 in André
Lepecki (ed.) (2012).
2. Una Bauer takes this incident as the starting point of her essay on
Jérôme Bel’s piece Jérôme Bel, providing details of the law suit and the
Whitehead’s argumentation (Bauer 2008).
3. The late German dance critic and author Jochen Schmidt in his book on
twentieth century dance uses the label of ‘Stop Dance’ to characterise the
work of Jérôme Bel and his contemporaries (Schmidt 2002, 428–436).
14  G. Siegmund

References
Bauer, Una. 2008. The Movement of Embodied Thought. The Representational
Game of the Stage Zero of Signification in Jérôme Bel. Performance Research
13 (1): 35–41.
Bel, Jérôme. 2016. Email Conversation with Gerald Siegmund. June. Frankfurt.
Bel, Jérôme, and Boris Charmatz. 2013. Emails 2009–2010. Dijon: Les presses
du réel.
Bel, Jérôme, and Gerald Siegmund. 2002. Jérôme Bel. In Hall of Fame. Jahrbuch
Ballettanz 02, ed. Arnd Wesemann, 24–31. Berlin: Friedrich Verlag.
Buffard, Alain, and Xavier Le Roy. 1999. Dialogue sur et pour Jérôme Bel.
Mouvement 5: 29–31.
Etchells, Tim. 2004. More and More Clever Watching More and More Stupid:
Some Thoughts Around Rules, Games and The Show Must Go On. Dance
Theatre Journal 4: 10–20.
Goumarre, Laurant. 2001. Jérôme Bel. La perte et la dispartion/Can’t Stop
Losing. Art Press 266: 15–18.
Laurenti, Jean-Noel. 1994. Feuillet’s Thinking. In Traces of Dance. Drawings
and Notations of Choreographers, ed. Laurence Louppe, 81–108. Paris:
Éditions Dis Voir.
Lepecki, André. 2006. Exhausting Dance. Performance and the Politics of
Movement. London: Routledge.
Lepecki, André (ed.). 2012. Dance. Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge,
MA and London: MIT Press and Whitechapel Gallery.
Louppe, Laurance. 2007. Poétique de la danse contemporaine—La suite. Brussels:
Contredanse.
Ploebst, Helmut. 2001. No Wind No Word. New Choreography in the Society of the
Spectacle. München: K. Kieser.
Schmidt, Jochen. 2002. Tanzgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts in einem Band.
Berlin: Henschel Verlag.
Siegmund, Gerald. 1998. Im Reich der Zeichen: Jérôme Bel. Ballett
International/Tanz Aktuell 5 (4): 34–37.

Internet Source
Roy, Sanjoy. 2011. Step-by-step Guide to Dance: Jérôme Bel. http://www.the-
gurdian.com/stage/2011/nov/22/step-by-step-dance-jerome-bel. Accessed
5 Jan 2016.
 Modern Subjects

The Medium Specificity of Dance: Objectifying

Dance Modernism
From the very outset of his career in 1994, labels such as anti-dance or
stop dance have characterised Jérôme Bel’s work as deficient. His pro-
ductions have been described as lacking dance, with the definition of
dance by implication described within the parameters of modern and
contemporary dance. Bel’s dance pieces lack what other modern or con-
temporary dance productions possess: a work on the body’s energy to
move and the pleasure to be gained from this movement. Conceptual
dance appears to be a type of dance that deprives the spectators of their
aesthetic pleasure. It is dance minus the aesthetic and the sensual experi-
ence it provides when watching dance, which, in turn, implies that so-
called non-conceptual dance is equal to its aesthetic dimension minus the
conceptual.
It is perhaps helpful to note the general distinction in the field of phe-
nomenological philosophy between aisthesis and aesthetics as two or even
three modes of perception. While aisthesis here denotes the most general
mode of perception of things or phenomena, aesthetics describes a spe-
cial mode that focuses on the phenomena themselves, singling them out
from their environment and giving them full attention. By doing so, the
person perceiving is also affected by the phenomena: soliciting perceptual
nuances and atmospheric details as well as sensual responses when look-
ing at the object or the work. A person in an aesthetic mode of perception

© The Author(s) 2017 15

G. Siegmund, Jérôme Bel, New World Choreographies,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55272-3_2
16  G. Siegmund

will perceive more and other things than in an everyday context defined
by pragmatic decisions and actions towards the world. It is obvious that
most works of art possess an aesthetic dimension because they bracket our
everyday responses to our environment by singling out a time-space for
actually looking at things and changing our perceptions. However, while
the aesthetic is much wider than its specific function within works of art
(I may also look at an everyday phenomenon in an aesthetic way), when
applied to works of art the aesthetic mode of perception develops a slightly
more complex dimension. Art can not be reduced to its aesthetic, that is
to say its sensual and sensible dimension, alone. For it is precisely through
art’s capacity to draw attention to its own modes of operation that works
of art gain a self-reflexive and reflective dimension. Works of art do not
appeal to the senses alone, but to the understanding of their rules of pro-
duction, protocols, and critical impulses. They show and draw attention to
how we perceive things while we perceive them. Conceptual art that rose
to prominence during the 1960s and 1970s seems to provide little oppor-
tunity for sensual and aesthetic engagement, while it foregrounds art’s
dimension of (intellectual) reflecivity. Thus, conceptual art that Jérôme Bel
has been critically aligned with, must still be considered art. It is, however,
as British philosopher Peter Osborne argues, art that strives to separate art
from its aesthetic dimension by analysing art’s modernist conflation with
the aesthetic, which here is understood as the work of art’s sensual and
emotional qualities (Osborne 2013, 37–70).1
Following the logic of this argument borrowed from the visual arts,
Bel’s works of art are still dance pieces, albeit dance pieces that work
through dance’s modernist and postmodernist definitions. In order to
understand Jérôme Bel’s particular take on dance and its aesthetic tradi-
tions, it is helpful to go back to the foundation of movement as a kinaes-
thetic experience in dance modernism. In his survey of conceptual art,
Peter Osborne singles out four categories with which conceptual art is
critically engaged. They represent the modernist definition of art that
conceptualism tried to reject: the material objectivity of the art work,
its medium specificity, visuality as its source of aesthetic pleasure, and its
autonomy (Osborne 2002, 18). Osborne’s categories are also conveni-
ent analytical tools for tracing and understanding the changes the art of
dance undergoes from its modernist and postmodernist to its conceptual
incarnation in the work of Jérôme Bel. Therefore, I base my argument
on these four categories that need, however, certain adjustments when
it comes to dance. When applied to the field of dance, the four categries
 MODERN SUBJECTS  17

translate as follows: The material objectivity of dance is its embodied

character. The body and its capacities guarantee dance’s material objec-
tivity. Its medium specificity is its work on and with movement, while
its aesthetic pleasure derives from the kinaesthetic experience dance pro-
vides for dancers and spectators alike. All three make up dance’s auton-
omy as a specific from of art, based on the morphology of its structure
working on its formal elements through choreography. I add a fifth cate-
gory that is more pertinent in relation to the performing arts and dance,
namely time. How does Jérôme Bel’s work critically engage with these
categories geared towards establishing dance’s autonomy as a form of
art? If his work is considered to be conceptual, what is the proposition
on dance as a form of art that it makes? My take on Jérôme Bel’s concep-
tualism is divided into two parts. In the following sections, I will recapit-
ulate the modernist and postmodernist frame within which Bel’s pieces
gain significance, while the next chapter outlines the conceptual param-
eters of Bel’s work, which cast dance as a discourse. While this chapter is
primarily historical in nature, the next chapter is conceptual.
My understanding of dance modernism is informed by Susan Manning’s
alternative description of dance modernism as a movement that aimed at
expressing movement by reflexively rationalizing it (Manning 1988, 35).
Objectifying movement through dance was modernism’s the central ration-
ale, and it remained so for many postmodern dancers in the 1960s. While
they replaced expression of movement with movement articulation, there is
a continuation between modern and postmodern dance in the objectifying
tendencies in their respective dance practices. In the continuation between
modern and postmodern dance that Manning postulates, however, another
rift appears that I consider the more serious, as it moves dance away from
its medium-specific definition and practice. The rift that appeared during
the 1960s produced a shift away from kinaesthesia as dance’s medium-
specific source of aesthetic pleasure (embodied feeling and/or articulated
movement acquiring an objective form through choreography and/or score
work). Modes of perception that were conscious of other media—film, tele-
vision, photography—became prominent, framing and altering the viewer’s
perception of the dancing body. This view holds true for forms of dance on
both sides of the Atlantic: for both the postmodern practices in the United
States and the emerging Tanztheater in Germany. My argument therefore
also produces a subtle rift in the perception of Pina Bausch’s work, which
I take as an example for the crucial shift to seeing movement, as primar-
ily dealing with emotions. While Bausch’s work undoubtedly develops
18  G. Siegmund

resonant emotional qualities, it achieves this by working on the outside

(cultural, medial, and social) framing and production of the dancing bod-
ies and their emotions. Pina Bausch’s bodies are bodies twice seen. I place
Jérôme Bel’s work in this tradition of bodies and movement not primarily
felt, but seen. By being seen, dance and the dancing body become explicitly
culturally informed, which forms the basis of Bel’s work.

Moving from the Inside Out: The Creation of an Inner

Scene
Drawing on physiological research from the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, dance scholar and critic John Martin in the 1930s theorised how
the modern dances by choreographers and dancers like Mary Wigman, Doris
Humphrey, or Martha Graham could communicate with their audiences.
Since none of these artists choreographed dances that depicted narrative
scenes with pantomimic gestures to be read by audiences, the question arose
how their abstract dances composed of pure movement could be understood
by the spectator. Martin’s answer, in short, is by kinaesthetic experience that
relies on empathy. His theory of dance as kinaesthetic communication has
since become paradigmatic even for a more contemporary understanding of
dance. Give or take a few modifications on how kinaesthesia operates and
what its aims are, the fallout of Martin’s theory persists until today.
Dramaturgue and dance scholar Bojana Cvejić characterises this fall-
out as a ‘body-movement bind,’ that is, as the establishment of an intrinsic
connection between the physiological constitution of the body, the move-
ments that result from it, and their communicative potential (Cvejić 2015,
18–22). Body, movement, and the kinaesthetic experience gained from the
moving body are inextricably linked and respectively stipulate what dance
and movement are. It has since become the new norm of dance production
and reception. Together they make up dance’s medial objectivity, its medium
specificity and its mode of communication that I call the ‘inner scene.’ The
body-movement bind constitutive of a modernist understanding of dance
entailed an entirely different conception of dance spectatorship as a special
form of communication between the dancer and the spectator. How, then,
does Martin conceptualise dance spectatorship and in what way does his
conception differ from that of Jérôme Bel?
As Susan Leigh Foster’s research has shown, John Martin’s think-
ing about dance as kinaesthetic communication is built on changes in the
 MODERN SUBJECTS  19

concept of empathy underway since the middle of the nineteenth century.

At the crossroads of experimental psychology, phenomenology, and aesthet-
ics, German scholars Theodor Lipps and Robert Vischer developed theories
of perception based on emotional responses to the world we live in. Rather
than receiving an image from the outside world that is then replicated in
the consciousness, Lipps and Vischer developed theories of empathy that
connected human beings to their surroundings. Empathy is thus foun-
dational for any kind of experience human beings may have as well as for
their understanding of the world. Empathy allows for a universal transfer-
ence from the inner to the outer and, vice versa, “through a simultaneous
moving into and melding with the substance of the other,” as Susan Foster
describes (Foster 2011, 154). Thus, the properties of a building with pillars
“supporting a mass above,” as John Martin writes, giving an example of
kinaesthetic communication, are experienced by the observer as a physical
or motor response. “The building becomes for a moment a kind of rep-
lica of ourselves and we feel any undue strains as if they were in our own
bodies.” (Martin 1965, 48) We transfer to our consciousness “those motor
experiences” as if the building were capable of feeling them. We reflexively
become the building by physically experiencing its properties. Since we
translate everything we see or hear into our own present experience, we
mimic it. We respond with the same action. Or, rather: we can understand
actions and movements of others because we are able to respond and have
the same experiences. It is imperative for Martin that this is not an intel-
lectual procedure but rather a muscular and therefore an almost instinctive
response. It happens immediately. He calls this body-conscious procedure
inner mimicry: “the faculty for transferring to our own consciousness those
motor experiences” of an animate or inanimate other (1965, 49).
The more general concept of an inner mimicry has a specific bearing
when it comes to the art of dancing. In the concert of the arts, dance for
Martin holds a special place. For dance, movement is absolutely foun-
dational—dance reaches into the very substance of life, which is move-
ment. Dance articulates life via movement. Therefore, it is the prime
form of art in which to give the spectator an experience of life, since life
in Martin’s terms equals movement. As opposed to an analytic approach
to the understanding of dance, dance as experience relies on “inner mim-
icry.” The spectator melds and merges with the dancer and his or her
movements. He or she also moves or dances in response to the dancer’s
intention, grasping the meaning of the dance by appropriating it physi-
cally (1965, 31).
20  G. Siegmund

How, then, does this reception process work? Sense impressions pro-
vide contact with the outside world. These impressions “prepare the
body for appropriate movement with relations to the objects reported
upon” (1965, 42). The appropriateness of the response relies upon prior
experiences and conventions; it relies on the known. Impressions and
movements are linked, and impressions produce movements. Humans
possess a movement sense known as proprioception. Receptors on the
joints and muscles register minute changes in posture and provide the
brain with information about the relation of the body’s limbs to each
other as well as about their orientation in space. The body is thus in con-
stant alignment with itself and the outside world through movement.
Martin goes on to postulate a link between the muscle or movement
sense and what he calls the inner man and his emotions.
With the advance of scientific knowledge about the body’s muscular
functioning, John Martin was able to relate the movement-energy-body
bind to the muscles and their “neuromuscular coordinations” (Foster
2011, 113). Proprioception acts on the part of the nervous system that is
responsible for the generation of emotions. Sense impressions that stipu-
late an inner muscular response therefore carry with them emotions that
communicate. If movement is the “element in which we live” (Martin
1965, 53), the dancer’s movements cannot help but produce emotions
that merge with the emotions on the side of the spectator. The specta-
tor moves in his or her seat along with the dancers physically experienc-
ing the movement. The dancer’s movement stimulates the audience’s
motor sense and the proprioceptors that trigger the same emotions felt
and expressed by the dancer. Communication as an experience guaran-
tees an uninterrupted flow of emotions and meanings that rely on the
uninterrupted flow of movement between the sender, the dancer, and
the recipient, the spectator. We are gifted with a quasi-natural faculty for
understanding modern dance: the motor sense and inner mimicry that
rely on recognition of the known, only to draw attention to the move-
ment and its experience.
John Martin’s understanding of the act of spectatorship creates
an inner scene or even an inner drama that unfolds between impres-
sions and their muscular emotional responses before they are expressed
and communicated to an equally inner self on the side of the spectator.
Movement and its kinaesthetic and empathetic responses need to harmo-
nise not only the inner and outer world of the dancer but also the worlds
of the dancer and the spectator. Dance originates from this inner scene
of kinaesthetic experience that is universal. Cutting across gender, race,
 MODERN SUBJECTS  21

or cultural differences, this inner scene with all its players makes dance a
universal experience where everyone experiences the same feelings. The
truth of the movement is verified by its origins in the inner scene with
its connections to the psyche. Thus, interiority becomes a measure of a
truthful and meaningful dance articulating the human condition.
Apart from the enchaining of impression, kinaesthetic movement
response with its psychological and emotional overtones of movement
expression through dance, Martin’s theory also operates on a second
level. It is not only the body-movement bind that is crucial to his the-
ory of dance, but also the objectivation of the movement thus produced.
Experiencing the dancer’s feelings is not enough, because it is not the
feeling as such that is important to the artist but the feeling about a cer-
tain object or situation (Martin 1965, 53). In order to make movement
and by implication communication specific, movement has to be organ-
ised. Therefore, it is the choreography the artist develops that charac-
terises movement and speaks to the spectator. Martin here draws up a
distinction between play and art. Whereas play is an “ingoing activity”
that focuses on the individual skills of those who play, art is an “outgoing
activity” (1965, 40) that solicits responses from others, namely specta-
tors. Therefore, dancing that serves recreational purposes for the dancers
is play, not art. The aim of art is to realise truths that may not be real-
ised in an individual life, but may nonetheless be articulated. The artist is
the person who externalises and communicates these truths. The creative
life therefore provides satisfaction to both artists and spectators when the
outside world withholds it. The artist looks for beauty where hitherto
there has been none. “All art, with the dance in the forefront,” as Martin
sums up its purpose, “is a matter of compensation. It deals not with
what we already have, but with what we lack.” (1965, 130) The artist
works on subjective experiences but gives them the breadth of universal
experiences. The communication between artist and spectator functions
because it is based on universal experiences both parties share. The spec-
tator already recognises these truthful experiences on a biological-physio-
logical level before any kind of rationalisation can occur.
Such a conception of dance, however, is under threat of limiting
dance to the expression of the already known. The joy of recognition
leads to the self-indulgence in the beautiful. Therefore “adaptations in
the objective direction” are necessary and inevitable because art strives
to go beyond the pleasures or recognition of the familiar (1965, 141).
Movement has to be sculpted and organized. This conscious process on
the side of the artist brings “an element of objectiveness” to the dance,
22  G. Siegmund

which is thus bestowed with “a higher concentration and a focus to the

ends of clear communication” (1965, 142). Dance draws from direct life
experience only as a starting point to meet the spectator. In a second
step the artist abandons the familiar to lead the spectator away from the
“actual into the conceptual”: to an idea about the world and the sub-
ject’s relation to it. These “abstractions and distortions” (ibid.) of the
familiar are necessary for expressive dance to communicate the meaning
of life.
In John Martin’s conception of expressive or modern dance two
operations are intertwined. The first is the creation of an inner scene that
makes any kind of movement an expression of the psyche and its emo-
tions. The inner scene can be said to be responsible for the creation of
the dancing subject. The dancer is subjected to movement that he or she
embodies. By this operation he or she is turned into an expressive sub-
ject. He or she becomes a subject through kinaesthesia and kinaesthetic
responses to the world. The second part of this process is the objectiva-
tion of the subjective kinaesthetic responses to life in the artistic process.
Although highly subjective and, as the very foundation of life, natural,
movement, if it wants to be art, is worked upon, shaped, and performed.
It is here that the artist’s agency lies, in a kind of regaining of control
over one’s own proprioceptive responses and the emotions that are
tied to them. While Martin does not elaborate on this, there is a cer-
tain danger involved in the dancer’s responsiveness to the world. The
dancer always risks getting carried away. Not knowing where the forces
of nature may take it and in which way they will move it both physically
and psychologically, the subject risks undoing itself at the very moment it
comes into being.2
The subject of modern dance thus emerges at the turning point of
loss and control, emerging at the still point of the re-appropriation of
energies that promises freedom for both the artist and the spectator.
Thus, the subject of modern dance only fully comes into being once the
dancer re-appropriates his own subjectivity by handing himself over to
kinaesthetic empathy that he shapes into a form that communicates.
John Martin’s theory of dance already implied that the movement
expressed by the dancer’s body is always highly subjective in origin and
a new experience for the dancer. If it is necessary for the artist to go
beyond the familiar, to discover, explore, and shape the unknown, then
he brings into being that which does not yet exist or has not yet been
expressed. The freedom to transgress the boundaries and constrictions of
 MODERN SUBJECTS  23

life and its familiar manifestations leads to an uncovering of dimensions

that life has hitherto refused to reveal to us or of discovering experiences
it has so far refused to provide us with. For these movements to keep
their artistic credibility it is imperative that they retain their connection
to the life experience of the artist. Steps or movement pattern degener-
ate into the spectacular or ornamental to the extent that they distance
themselves from the originators and their individual experience. That is
to say, they lose their potency when they are cut off from the kinaes-
thetic interiorities of both the dancer and the spectator. Thus, the “sub-
jective impulses” of the dancer that connect him to the “life experience”
shared by the spectator need to be observed. The “subjective impulses”
are therefore the lifeline of expressional dance that provide its subjects
with access to the “meaning of life” and, above all, the artist’s “individ-
ual relationship to it” (1965, 141).
The dancer as subject produces highly individualised movements
using the body as a responsive and proprioceptive vessel of expression.
She opens up a subjective perspective on life that, because it is bound
to the individual body of the artist, does not exist prior to or inde-
pendent of her dancing. The movements are new because we have not
experienced life like this before. The dancer cannot help but develop a
unique and individual style of movement that speaks of her subjectivity.
The world is impressing on the dancer’s body that by virtue of being
a living body is open, connected, responsive, and susceptible to move-
ment. Human beings respond to impulses coming from the outside, they
mimic and process them, and they balance these conflicting impressions.
The creation of an inner scene, which with the second generation of
modernist dancers increasingly relied on the body’s proprioception, per-
mitted modern dancers to become subjects of their own creation. They
became authors of their own work. Often voiced in solos, these danc-
ers were author and performer, choreographer and dancer at the same
time. They even authored dance techniques such as the Graham tech-
nique, Humphrey-Limon technique or, in the German context, Laban
technique or Jooss-Leeder technique. They all carried the names of their
genius originators who had mastered the forces of life such as gravity,
pull, and momentum to give them a different shape. They distilled these
qualities into movement principles such as contraction and release, as
in the case of Martha Graham, or fall and recovery or rebound in the
case of Doris Humphrey. Thus, they shaped the musculature of the body
into a sensitive instrument ready for engaging with and responding to
24  G. Siegmund

the play of universal forces, thereby unfolding and explicating their emo-
tional implications in a unique way. Both dance technique and choreog-
raphy are instrumental in objectifying movement and the experiences it
articulates. The choreographed relations between the individual move-
ment phrases brought about by technique make up the singular structure
of the work. Referring to each other to generate emotions and meaning,
they make the work autonomous.

Moving from the Outside In: The Objectivation

of Movement

The inner scene that was constructed from the middle of the nineteenth
century onwards came under review one hundred years later. The re-
examination of dance’s communicative powers entailed a revision of the
subjectivity modernist dancers had created for themselves. Reviewing
the inner scene must here be understood as a continuation of the first
modernist principle, the medial objectivity of dance. What so-called
postmodern dance since the 1960s has in common with its modernist
lineage is, as Susan Manning has pointed out, the objectivation of move-
ment as movement (Manning 1988). Dance in the 1960s still produces
an objectified corporeality, but this time by subtracting the subjective
dimension of kinaesthetic experience and foregrounding its objectify-
ing component instead. In order to achieve this, the second modernist
claim of medium specificity—dance is movement in time and space—
was not abandoned but enlarged. Everyday movements were now con-
sidered to be dance movements, and so were movements of objects and
other material artefacts the body interacts with. Reviewing the inner
scene of modernism, on the other hand, also implies a shift in the aims
of movement objectivation. Re-Viewing can here be understood literally:
movement was meant to be seen as movement. The visual element that
postmodern dancers re-introduced to the understanding of dance cut
through the kinaesthetic as dance’s sole mode of medium-specific com-
munication. The concern with the visual dimension of dance especially in
performance brings the art of dance closer to the concerns of the visual
arts of the time, their embracing of performance and time-based works.
Both, however, approach the hybrid medium of performance with dif-
ferent aims. Whereas dance tried to ascertain its objective materiality as
physical movement in performance including other media, the visual arts
 MODERN SUBJECTS  25

tried to undermine theirs by abandoning work with colour on a flat sur-

face. Both lost their material specificity as well as their respective aestheti-
cal dimensions (visuality, kinesthesia) along the way, exchanging one for
the other. Dance extended the notion of embodied movement by move-
ment in general, the visual arts gained a performative dimension. Dance
became visual, the visual arts kinaesthetic. Medium specificity in dance,
in this respect, now included the specificity of the performance situation:
dance as a form of art is performed for spectators to see. To objectify
movement, the kinaesthetic dimension of dance was cut off from its psy-
chological and emotional foundations. Kinaesthetics continued to play a
huge role in postmodern dance, but it was recast, as Susan Leigh Foster
underlines, as pure physical articulation (Foster 1986, 46–57).
Postmodern dancers kept the kinaesthetic based on propriocep-
tion while cutting its direct relation to the human psyche and there-
fore emotion. The inner space became a space not of travelling forces
and energies to be negotiated, but of cells, joints, bones, and muscles
to be coordinated. Both subjectivation and objectivation result in what
Bojana Cvejić calls the “organic regime” of dance modernism: “The
subjectivation of the body through movement and the objectivation of
movement through the body constitute the organic regime of dance:
they connect the body and movement in one organic whole, either com-
prehended by inner (emotional) experience or by physical activity (task,
action).” (Cvejić 2017, 203) If dance is to be, as John Martin defined
it, an “organised and sustained emission of movement” (Martin 1965,
134), this sustained emission now does not depend on the inner veracity
of movement guaranteed by the body’s access to archetypes or emotions
via the muscular and, connected to it, the nervous system. The sustained
emission of movement produces a pure kinaesthetics that is a physical
action rather than an expression aiming at the articulation of movement
itself.
To cut movement loose from the dancers’ subjective responses, Merce
Cunningham used chance procedures to facilitate unforeseen combina-
tions of body parts and their unpredictable orientation in space to sur-
prise both the dancers’ and the spectators’ expectations of what the
body is able to articulate beyond the subject’s individual movement
patterns and choices. In the late 1950s, with the introduction of tasks
by San Francisco-based artist Anna Halprin in her workshops, every-
day movements were increasingly considered dancing. Its yardstick was
the production of a heightened and new awareness of the body while it
26  G. Siegmund

was executing even the simplest of tasks, like sweeping the famous deck
where Halprin gathered her dancers. As with Cunningham’s belief in the
unfathomable wealth of physical articulation, Halprin’s tasks relied on
and researched kinaesthetic awareness to articulate movement in a differ-
ent way.
What becomes apparent in this move towards a pure postmodern
kinaesthetic that denies the modernist relation between movement and
emotion is the fact that it still relies very strongly on an understanding
of dance as a kinaesthetic experience, which is the result of the danc-
ers’ proprioception. Thus, the inner scene is still operative even in con-
temporary somatic or sports-like practices. It has, however, changed its
understanding of what is considered to be ‘inner’ by eliminating the psy-
che and putting biology and the laws of physics in its place. The purely
physical and sports-like activity of contact improvisation, for example, is
made possible by the dancers’ feeling of the weight of the partners body
on parts of one’s own body, the balancing of these bodies as well as the
momentum gained from shifting weight and balances. The feeling of
joy or elation induced by moving, pushing, shifting, and sending bodies
through space is facilitated by proprioception without having to make a
detour via the psyche. A somatic practice such as Body-Mind Centering®
is looking for the roots of human “expression in movement” rather than
the expression itself. Learning to listen to the body and the wisdom of
cells does not primarily imply listening to the emotions produced by
movement. Above all, it “involves direct experience of anatomical body
systems and developmental movement patterns” of a biological nature. It
is based on the “observable principles and functions of anatomy, physiol-
ogy, psychology, and infant development. It is also based on the laws of
physics and mechanics as they are expressed through the human body”
(Hartley 1995, xxix). The same holds true for release-alignment tech-
niques that direct the self-awareness of dancers to their spine and skel-
etal apparatus to align their bones in a healthier or more conscious way.
By creating space for movement within the joints themselves, the body
opens up from the inside to become a transparent tool for movement.
Emotions, if considered at all, are considered to be the result of an ana-
tomical positioning and re-positioning of the body, of listening and
touching. They only arise after the body’s objective articulation of move-
ment. In an essay looking back on Trisha Brown’s work, Yvonne Rainer
articulates the distinction between two ways of dealing with emotions in
 MODERN SUBJECTS  27

dance. One can be called the modernist way, the other the way was sug-
gested by many postmodern dancers, including Trisha Brown.

Memory stored in the body. Here Trisha is referring to something other

than the commonly understood kinetic memory that allows dancers to
remember and execute, once learned, complicated sequences of movement
without ‘thinking’ […]. To the contrary, she is talking about emotion
stored in the muscles and the process of accessing it through gesture and
movement. This is a very different idea from ‘expressing’ emotion through
gesture, a more conventional method for finding an appropriate movement
to match a known emotional state. (Rainer 2002, 52)

With Trisha Brown, it seems the emotions or emotional states are not
known before their being accessed by gesture, which seems to produce
the emotion rather than expressing it. Gesture and movement set the
presumably natural connection between interior feeling and outward
expression adrift. Emotion may not be known and therefore kinaestheti-
cally expressed. It occupies a strangely exterior position within what is
considered to be the inside of the body and its muscles. Therefore, emo-
tions, or rather affects, may hit you with all the surprising force of an
unprecedented event. The dancer’s expressive reaction to the affect will
always come too late and will therefore miss the cause for its expression.
If, as I argued above, there is an underlying continuation between
modern and postmodern dancing subjects in their reliance on an inner
scene defined by kinaethetics and the physical presence of the body, the
two imperatives related to this are also still in operation. The impera-
tive of the ‘new’ encourages the dancers’ individuality and subjectivity
to be articulated through their movements, which are now considered
a pure form of physicality. John Martin describes dance as a sustained
emission of energy, by consequence and ideally it produces a continu-
ous flow of movement that is not interrupted by stills or poses, as in the
ballet tradition. Rather than structuring movement phrases into a prepa-
ration, build-up, and climax that is underlined by the dancers’ holding
their positions and striking a pose, modern expressionist dance works
with ebbs and flows of energy. Modulation of energy creates a certain
dynamic that works with attack, speed and repose, spending and recov-
ery of energy at the end of a movement phrase. Recovery of energy then
allows for a transition to be made and for the movement to continue. As
Yvonne Rainer points out in her seminal essay on her own work, Trio A,
28  G. Siegmund

here, too, a dramatization of movement and the body is at work. Since

phrasing as the manner of execution of movements accentuates highs
and lows, the effect, not unlike that of the pose in ballet, is drawing
attention to the more relaxed phase which, as Rainer writes, “becomes
the focus of attention, registering like a photograph or suspended
moment of climax” (Rainer 1995, 266).
With the shift of the inner scene away from emotion to articulation,
the dramatization of the body by means of phrasing comes under scru-
tiny. Stripping her own dances of any kind of embellishments, idealisa-
tions, virtuoso leaps or the use of conventional techniques that give the
body a dancerly comportment, Rainer brought about a dancing body as
a kinaesthetic muscular machine. The physical machine of a pure kinaes-
thetics may not produce flow in the modernist sense described above.
It produces what Rainer calls “a different kind of continuity” relying on
a “continuum of energy” that results in an uninterrupted continuity of
unaccentuated movements in a single phrase (Rainer 1995, 269).

The Seeing Problem: New Modes of Reception for Dance

Despite the likelihood of this new continuity of articulation also produc-
ing a kinaesthetic response from its viewers, kinaesthetic empathy either
in its modernist form of an emotional communication of experiences or
in its postmodern variant of a communication between physicalities is
not the only channel through which dancers speak to their audiences.
The bond between dancers and audiences forged by inner mimicry or
meta-kinesis is broken by the gaze of the spectator. Dancers and cho-
reographers such as Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown were very aware
of their dances taking place in a performance situation. Rainer there-
fore often talked about “the ‘problem’ of performance” (Rainer 1995,
271) or “the ‘seeing’ difficulty” (1995, 272) of movement that had to
be addressed in the performance itself. Dancing thus inevitably involved
an element of seeing and being seen, of watching and being watched.
According to Rainer herself, even Trio A contains an element of simula-
tion, or, to put it differently, of theatre that intercepts the reciprocity of
production and reception that was so paramount in casting dance spec-
tatorship as an experience. Despite its unspectacular appearance, Trio
A creates the illusion of non-phrasing when actually the dancers must
invest various efforts to maintain the level of energy needed to guide
them through the performance. What the spectator sees is not what the
 MODERN SUBJECTS  29

dancer does. Rainer calls this the “look” of the movements (1995, 270)
or, “‘apparent’ energy […], regardless of the physiological or kinaes-
thetic experience of the dancer. The two observations—that of the per-
former and that of the spectator—do not always correspond” (1995,
266).
The seeing difficulty thus prompts the question of whether what the
spectator sees is what he or she feels kinaesthetically. If the dancer has to
acknowledge that he or she is performing and that performing in front
of an audience makes it impossible to behave in an everyday fashion, ele-
ments of staging the body and of theatrical display enter into the equa-
tion of the dancer-audience relationship. The difficulty of seeing takes on
two meanings here. Since dance is ephemeral, it is difficult for specta-
tors to actually see movement. It disappears before they have even con-
sciously noticed its qualities. Apart from that, the seeing difficulty creates
a problem for a factual, objective way of performing. Since spectators
and performers alike are culturally informed, they cannot help but refer-
ence what they see. Their perceptions are already shaped by their sur-
roundings that inevitably influence how and what one perceives. This
dilemma, as Carry Lambert-Beatty conclusively argues in her study on
Rainer’s work, necessitates a negotiation between the objectivity and the
physicality of the body with its mass, weight, and articulation on the one
hand and the body as an image perceived and its awareness of being seen
on the other hand (Lambert-Beatty 2008).
In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” the German philosopher Walter Benjamin asserts that
“sense perception […] has been changed by technology” (Benjamin
1982, 244). Since the advent of photography, film, and the gramo-
phone, human perception itself has undergone a radical transforma-
tion. Although based on biological factors of the human being, human
perception is historically contingent. It changes its nature according
to cultural developments. The technological possibilities inherent in a
new medium such as film or photography do not merely “render more
precise” what was already visible or audible. Rather, they make things
“unclear.” Like the photographic enlargement “it reveals entirely new
structural formations of the subject” (1982, 238). With the advent of
film, we have acquired the faculty to connect disparate elements and
histories cutting across space and time in a non-linear fashion without
losing an understanding of the story’s coherence. Since the Weimar
period in which Benjamin wrote, technological change and development
30  G. Siegmund

has increased drastically, thus making changes in the very structures of

human perception an even more urgent question.
As noted by Yvonne Rainer, not only ballet but also modern dance
shares an eye with photography when the dancers slow down or arrest
movement altogether in a still for the spectator to take in. Despite its
efforts to produce an unbroken continuity of movement by hiding
the work of phrasing, even Rainer’s own Trio A is not exempt from
the medial structuring of perception. The distinct and diverse move-
ments that the dance sequences into its unique continuity like cogs in a
machine make the body both felt and seen. Like a photograph that sug-
gests a transparency of the world and the events depicted on the image,
the dance is performative at the very same time that it is indexical to a
reality, a movement seen before. The dancing cannot help but produce
traces of previous dances and movements that would mean something
to the spectator. As Carrie Lambert-Beatty points out, Trio A is not a
“photograph-like dance” because “it has quasi-photographic moments in
it.” Unlike modern dance or ballet, its photograph-like dimensions can
be found in the way “it makes meaning” (Lambert-Beatty 2008, 155).
The movements inevitably point to something that is at very same time
visible on the surface of the dance, which tries to be only in the here and
now. This paradoxical operation, like the illusion of a steady expenditure
of energy the piece creates, hands over the performative to the register of
representation. “The photographic returns to Trio A not as actual image,
but as a structuring paradox” (ibid., 160).
Taken seriously, Lambert-Beatty’s insight profoundly challenges
the notion of subjectivity as conceived by modern dance. The subjecti-
vation of the body through movement and the objectivation of move-
ment through the body’s articulation are confronted with a third
element, the gaze, that tears the continuum of experiencing and feeling
apart. What you see is never what you get. And what you get is never
all that you see. The gaze has a mnemonic function. It brings in refer-
ences, images, and bodies seen before that may not be the direct and
unmediated result of a kinaesthetic response on the side of the specta-
tor. The intervention of the gaze prepares the scene for the imagination
that is at the same time culturally informed as it is transgressive to the
here and now. Rather than dancing along in the seats, the spectator reads
the dance. Rather than experiencing universally valid truths, the specta-
tor interpolates his or her own culturally specific knowledge and social
experience. Historically, and this is my thesis here, it is the appearance of
 MODERN SUBJECTS  31

the visual in dance overriding the work on articulation and the objecti-
vation of movement that modernism’s paradigms begin to shift. Thus,
it is not the inclusion of pedestrian movement nor the functionality of
tasks nor the changes in dramaturgy facilitated by score work that marks
the rift between dance modernism and its postmodern variant. It is the
shift away from kinaesthesia to seeing that prepares the ground for many
contemporary experiments in the field of dance. The medial objectiv-
ity (embodiment) and medium specificity (movement) of dance and its
mode of aesthetical reception (kinaesthesia) are replaced by the body as
a cultural sign or signifier to be seen and to be read. Jérôme Bel’s pro-
ject embarks on this very route by giving up kinaesthesia as dance’s aes-
thetical mode of being almost completely. This has consequences for our
fourth category, the notion of dance’s autonomy.

The Time Problem: Transcendence and Duration

To see dance, one has to interrupt its flow and its continuity. Repetition
therefore became a prominent device to draw attention to the seeing of
movements. In order to see, the spectators have to be situated in the
here and now of the situation emerging between themselves and the per-
formers. Once they see, they are referred back to their own subjective
experiences that are not necessarily congruent with those of the dancers.
What comes into view here are the two remaining modernist categories
that are being processed: the autonomy of the dance and its transcen-
dental notion of time, which I will deal with in the following section. If
the way Trio A makes meaning is dependant on the media infused cul-
tural memory of the spectator, tapping the audience's memories relies on
acts of repetition that ground the spectators in their cultural situation.
Thus, repetition becomes the means to process both the autonomy of
dance and its promise of a transcendantal meaning that is considered to
be timeless and universal.
The emphasis on seeing movement, which becomes a kind of sur-
face information to be processed, is made apparent in Trisha Brown’s
Accumulation series from the 1970s.3 Primary Accumulation (1972),
the second instantiation of her concept, was performed by Brown her-
self lying on her back. The compositional principle was mathematical
and simple. Brown performed one gesture, such as raising the forearm,
repeated it, and added a second simple movement like raising the entire
arm. Again, she repeated these two movements, adding a third one and
32  G. Siegmund

so on, until the twentyninth and thirtieth movements turned her body
by 45 degrees. The whole sequence was then performed four times, so
that in the end her body described a full circle bringing it back to its
starting position (Teicher 2002, 312–313). What marks a stark contrast
to modernist or even some postmodernist choreography like Trio A is
the break with the idea of a linear temporality that develops movements
according to either a narrative and dramatic or task-like and energetic
logic. As each perceptual moment immediately refers the spectator back
to a previous moment, time’s linear unfolding begins to stutter. Instead
of a steady elapsing of time, time’s texture of past, immediate past, pre-
sent and not present anymore, future imminent and future past becomes
palpable. By overriding present with past and future, time’s continuity
gains a thickness of layers not unlike the thickness of a written document
whose scratched surface reveals older layers of writing. This palimpsest
of time that refers the spectator to the past in a continuous loop thus
emphasises the seeing of the movement. In fact, because it is repeated
up to thirty times as in Brown’s Primary Accumulation, the spectator
cannot miss it. Rather than triggering kinaesthetic awareness, the perfor-
mance underlines the seeing of movement simply because it will not go
away. This is also emphasised by the 360-degree turn of the body that
over the course of the performance will have presented itself to the spec-
tator from all sides and angles in a self-contained completeness like an
object or a minimalist sculpture in space.
The example of Trisha Brown’s Accumulations is situated at the cross-
roads between modernist notions of autonomy and time’s transcend-
ence on the one hand and conceptual concerns with heteronomous
functions of the work of art on the other hand. Brown’s use of repe-
tition, in fact, points in both directions. First, the impression of a self-
contained completeness that the piece produces conceives of time as
timelessness sustained by the elements of the piece closing in on them-
selves. This reading is underlined by the fact that, as in true modern-
ist art, even in Accumulation through repetition the single gestures refer
to one another. Thus in each repeted instance, the entire work is pre-
sent.4 It reveals its meaning at every instance of the piece’s perception.
The pieces in Brown’s Accumulation series, it seems, have a lot in com-
mon with dance modernism and its particular understanding of time as
transcendence. The cycle of movements creates a 360-degree complete-
ness in itself that now includes the spectator and the seeing of the move-
ment that gains transcendence, because the repetition of movements
 MODERN SUBJECTS  33

produces a hypnotic effect that blurs any consciousness of the here and
now. Repetition makes you blind to what is actually happening. At the
same time, however, a second reading can focus on the stuttering of the
present moment, which produces precisely the opposite effect. The loop-
ing of time throws the spectators back upon themselves and with every
repeated movement refers them back onto their current positioning in
space and time. Material is organised according to the principle of the
series, which is durational since it is potentially never ending. The serial
repetition of movements or actions destroys the self-contained complete-
ness of the work of art, which is built on a hierarchical organisation of
the material. Accumulations has been performed on park benches, a lake,
a public plaza, or in a sports hall in a group or as a solo. Therefore, the
piece is decentred, open, never ending and specific to the situation in
which it is performed. The second reading draws attention to the actual
situaion created between the dance and the spectators, which defies
transcendence.
The notion of dance’s ephemerality or fleetingness is counteracted by
the creation of an enduring presence that is sprawled out. Time almost
becomes space while it opens itself up to heterogeneous aspects of tem-
porality where past, present, and future co-exist without ever blending
into one. The present becomes porous to the extent that it refers the
spectator back to processes of memory and cultural experiences. In rela-
tion to the conception of time that dance modernism proposes, the post-
modern idea of time is a thoroughly ambiguous affair. In conjunction
with modernism, it holds on to a notion of presence that is, however,
just like the inner scene of kinaesthetics, understood in a different man-
ner. Despite creating and insisting on a presence in the act of spectator-
ship, and this is the more radical suggestion, the postmodern notion of
presence radically questions the very notion of presence itself. Instead of
being in the moment, as hinted at by Rainer and Brown’s insistence on
the act of seeing, it carries the subject away from the present and into the
realms of cultural and personal memory, connecting these memories as
Ramsay Burt suggests in relation to Trisha Brown’s Accumulations in a
previously inconceivable way. (Burt 2006, 147). The following sections
will therefore outline the fault lines of this discussion that, like the dis-
cussion on kinaesthetic empathy, goes back to the very notion of mod-
ernism itself. What kind of time does the spectator of modern dance
experience? In what respect does this experience differ from the one
provided by postmodern dance? And how can this notion of time be
34  G. Siegmund

radicalised to include moments of absence within presence, of not being

on time or in sync with what is happening on stage? Thus, presence is
considered to be the pre-condition of any performance, but not its end.
Spectators and dancers meet in the here and now of the performance sit-
uation, but what is happening on this basis is a de-synchronisation and
singularisations of experiences. The result is a multi-timed conglomerate
of presences created by absences, of presence being opened up by the
creative powers of the imagination and past experiences.
The temporal implications of modernist aesthetics have been spelled
out explicitly in art critic and historian Michael Fried’s now infamous
essay “Art and Objecthood” from 1967. In his essay, Fried distinguishes
between true modernist art and what he calls literalist art or minimal art.
The latter falls short of his modernist ideals because it fails to transcend
its objecthood. Sculptures by Donald Judd or Tony Smith, or dances
like Trisha Brown’s Accumulation as we may add, insist on their status
as physical and material objects. As objects they exist in time rather than
transcend time. According to Fried, this transcendence that modernist
art aspires to is made possible because in each part of the work the whole
of the work is present. In looking at modernist sculpture or painting, the
spectator instantaneously perceives the whole of the work in its fullness
and richness, “because at every moment the work itself is manifest” (Fried
1995, 145). Thus, modernist art has “no duration” but is “secreting, or
constituting, a continuous and perpetual present” (1995, 146). It con-
veys meaning in a kind of epiphany that Fried likens to a religious expe-
rience. Whereas minimal art exists in the mere “presence” (1995, 127)
and the mundaneness of everyday life, modernist art produces a “pre-
sentness” that is “grace” (1995, 147). The truth of the artwork comes
upon the spectator  in an epiphany that makes itself instantaneously evi-
dent as a universal truth or value to be received by everybody who looks
at the work.
Minimalist art avoids this spiritual surplus that for Fried seems to be
the aim of modernist art because minimal sculptures are structured dif-
ferently than modernist ones. Whereas modernist sculptures relate their
constituent elements to each other to create a self-contained autono-
mous work of art, minimal artists work by mere repetition. The sculp-
tures or objects by Donald Judd repeat the same element, a rectangular
box that depending on the work comes in different colours, by stack-
ing the boxes on top of each other and leaving an empty space between
them. Here, it seems, there is nothing to transcend, the experience of
 MODERN SUBJECTS  35

time the spectator has is one of endlessness or duration, because the

number of boxes may be infinite, “being able to go on and on, even
having to go on and on” (1995, 144). It is here that Fried reproaches
minimal art for being theatrical. Theatricality comes into the equation
because minimal works of art need the spectator to exist. Like the thea-
tre they are nothing without being watched, thereby violating the prime
law of modernism as defined by Clement Greenberg: instead of work-
ing through their very own medium specific conditions, they refer to
an element of another form of art, namely the spectator who belongs
to theatre, and become impure in the process. They do not exist in and
for themselves like modernist art does. Taking the spectator into account
opens up the work to the specific situation the spectator is in while
watching the object. Rather than carrying him or her away to the realm
of an ideal truth, it appeals to “the beholder’s body” (1995, 127) that
relates to the sculptures in the here and now of the gallery or museum
situation. Objects and subjects watching these objects share the same
space and time negotiating their status.
Fried even goes on to claim that art is the opposite of theatre and that
all good art must “defeat or suspend theatre” (1995, 135) in order to be
art. Theatre corrupts and perverts art and, vice versa, “[a]rt degenerates
as it approaches the condition of theatre” (1995, 141). Fried’s idea of
theatre here implies that because theatre exists for the spectators’ eyes,
it in return must pander to their expectations. It gives the spectators
what they want, thus appealing to their narcissism. It invites spectators
to identify with the stage. To theatre scholars, Fried’s idea of the thea-
tre is rather limited, addressing only a certain type of theatre based on
characters, identification, and entertainment. What Fried ignores is that
his modernist principles of object and medium specificity are also part of
theatre’s attempts to come into modernity. As theatre and performance
scholar Philip Auslander (1997) has pointed out, in the field of mod-
ernist theatre—with directors like Peter Brook, Jerzey Grotowski, or
Julian Beck—the creation of a presentness is also paramount to the art
of theatre. Although theatre obviously unfolds in time, performing aims
at the transcendence of its material conditions. The subject of modern-
ist theatre is a transformed subject that in the act of being transformed
receives universal truths about human existence. These truths are time-
less and eternal; they make the spectators leave their everyday existence
by grounding it in a higher, spiritual plane.5
36  G. Siegmund

What holds true for theatre and painting also holds true for dance.
As we have seen, John Martin’s definition of spectatorship in dance is
entirely in keeping with Greenberg’s and Fried’s modernist ideals. Inner
mimicry and kinaesthetic empathy as a biological-neurological fact ena-
ble the transcendence of the physical dancing body. The subjectivation of
the body through movement and the objectivation of movement by the
body both rely on what I have called the inner scene that grounds move-
ment in the body only to transcend it, to lift it to a higher ground. At
the historical juncture of the 1960s, however, new modes of spectator-
ship were developed and experimented with that went against the grain
of then dominant modernist ideals. Where John Martin turns the body
into the holy grail of universal human experience and dance into a quasi-
religious communion of bodies and feelings, the body now becomes
grounded in the here and now of its cultural formational experiences.
Before the spectators passively felt, received, and experienced universal
truths. Now they actively see, play, and perform their identities. Once
the spectator enters into play as a seeing subject, the meaning of the
dance no longer lies in the dance itself, but is constructed by the reader-
spectator as a human being living in time. As a consequnce, meanings are
contingent, the process of reception turns into an open process.

Between Imagination and Memory: Repetition

Everything that happens on stage takes place in the eye of a huge TV
camera on the left side of the stage. The screen of a TV set, placed in
front of the camera on the floor of lush green grass that smells of damp,
throws its flickering blue light into the audience. The camera propped
up by a tripod and facing the stage assumes its place close to the pro-
scenium. A huge microphone takes centre stage waiting for somebody
to take their position behind it in the absurd showcase of vanities and
competitive bitchiness that is to follow. To the right side of the camera a
chorus line of female dancers has lined up, their bodies huddled closely
together. A man holding a carafe of water parades up and down in front
of them. Unexpectedly at first, he flicks some water into the face of the
first woman in line making her jump and cry out. Observing their col-
league closely, the other dancers know what to expect once the man
passes in front of them. They try to keep composed, although when it is
their turn, they, too, cannot help but scream. A second man inspects the
girls and then a third. They ask them to jump or to whistle, each time
 MODERN SUBJECTS  37

rating their success until finally, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for some
legs, as one of the performers says. With their long dresses hitched up,
the women move their right legs forward. They know all the right moves
and how to expose their skin to maximum effect, apparently having gone
through this degrading ritual before. After a while, the men of the com-
pany are asked to join the women. They squeeze in between their line
and roll the legs of their trousers up. Together they form a grotesque
display of exposed male and female legs and knees, hairy, wobbly, long
and elegant, short and stumpy, trying to outdo each other clamouring
for attention.
Being watched by the male jurors of the competition, their co-com-
petitors, the audience and, lest we forget, the camera in front of them,
the dancer's bodies bodies, their looks, and their movements only exist
to be seen, judged, and evaluated. They are formed and informed by the
expectations of others internalising the social norms and codes of right
behaviour by acts of repetition. What could be a televised beauty con-
test or an audition for a dance and theatre production is, however, first
of all an episode in Pina Bausch’s piece 1980. The bodies being trained
how to put themselves on display are the bodies of the dancers and per-
formers of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. They repeat the image
that speaks of competition, sexism, and subordination and hold it up for
inspection. Mapping the mediatised production of beautiful gendered
bodies on the production process of a performance that in turn gets
included in the actual performance as an episode, the dancers also reflect
upon their own situation as dancing subjects. Like the characters they
invent for themselves, they, too, are being trained and judged according
to their abilities to perform. The strictures of social life, the performativ-
ity of norms, here, are grafted onto the performativity of the theatre with
its own protocols. The bodies of the dancers appear as socially produced
bodies that re-enact and talk about their own process of production.
By doing so in the performance itself, these norms that produce what
is considered to be adequate gender behaviour are played around with
to, in this instance, comic effects. The absurdity of showing your legs for
inspection that seems acceptable as long as the women do it, is exposed
once the men, hitherto exempt from being treated as objects, join them.
Playing with these social norms does not only reveal and reflect them.
It also profanes them in the sense that the subjects constituted by these
norms may re-appropriate them, lampoon them, change them, leave
them, or put them to a different use altogether.
38  G. Siegmund

The example of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater that she began to develop

at the municipal theatre of Wuppertal, Germany, from 1973 onwards
highlights another aspect of dance spectatorship. The objectivation of
movement through the body that was central to US-American experi-
mental dance of the 1960s and 1970s is complemented by German
experimental dance since the 1970s by the objectivation of the image of
the dancer. With Pina Bausch the dancers re-appropriate their own image
as dancers by reflecting on its construction, thus bringing both social and
theatrical contexts directly into play. The situation created by the dance
in the here and now that includes the spectator underlines the construc-
tion of the social body that is also a dancing body. With Bausch, it is
not so much movement that is objectified through the body, but cultural
norms and forms, including the norms and forms of dancing bodies.
While both US and German experiments brought the social body into
play, minimal art stripped it down to a neutral doing of movement whose
effectuation revealed the dancers’ subjectivity through idiosyncrasies
of moving and, as with Trisha Brown, the failure to repeat exactly. By
moving objectively by means of tasks that minimize subjective choices,
something personal may be triggered or revealed. Likewise in Pina
Bausch’s work of the 1970s and 1980s, emotions and subjectivity are
not expressed in the sense that John Martin’s modernist definition would
have it. The fragmented nature of the scenes depicted dramaturgically
cuts through any kind of cause-and-effect logic. Episodes that suggest
characters and specific situations are presented out of context, which is
left for the spectator to supply. Structured around series of repetitions of
movement, gestures and verbal utterances, the audience is allowed to see
how emotional responses are produced. The episodes are above all ana-
lytical in nature rather than emotional. By acts of repetition the spectator
is made to see the production of normative behaviour. Its results—the
inadequacies and restrictions for men and women, the despair, the cold-
ness and the dizziness of longing for love—are not directly enacted by
the dancers. Rather, they are demonstrated as gestures in the Brechtian
sense carrying the full weight of the social situation they are abstracted
from. By imagining the conditions, motives, and consequences of the
fragmented actions shown on stage, emotions are produced on the basis
of a formal act. Emotions are objectified, too. The spectator is not so
much identifying with the dancers’ personae but compares their actions
intellectually with previous and other actions supplying contexts out of
their own experiences and memories until emotional responses may be
 MODERN SUBJECTS  39

produced. The spectators are thus cast in an active role. Their activity
resides not only in seeing the movement, but in seeing and imagining
the conditions and consequences of cultural and social norms as they are
inscribed in the body.
If the time of the theatre is the here and now that Michael Fried
loathed so much, the mere contingency of presence as opposed to a
complete presentness, the advent of the social body and its relation to
the spectator changes the here and now of the performance situation
beyond Fried’s fears. The fact that meaning resides outside the autono-
mous work of art but emerges and is negotiated between spectators and
stage implies that what is negotiated comes from somewhere else, from
another time and space intercepting the presence of the situation. The
stuttering of the present moment in pieces by Trisha Brown or Yvonne
Rainer, the time loops in which the present comes back upon itself can,
depending on the specific piece, be read in two ways, however. One,
repetition completes the movement as seen. Two, repetition organises
its material into distinct series, and it is performed in ever new instan-
tiations of the same mathematical principle. Instead of focussing on the
morphology of the piece of art, works by Rainer, Brown, or Bausch focus
on what dance can do in social contexts. Rather than emanating time-
lessness, they provide experiences of time as multi-layered, consisting
of memory and history as well as imagination and futurity. This second
notion of time is even stronger in Bausch’s Tanztheater than in Rainer’s
or Brown’s minimalist abstractions. The porousness of the present, its
multi-layered richness of past and future aspects of time, gains promi-
nence in Bausch’s re-appropriation of the dancing body through the
social body. The de-synchronisation of the present moment, the present
being out of sync with itself, is accomplished both by the emphasis on
the existence of movement here to be seen and acts of the imagination.
Imagination is intricately linked to memory, and together they separate
the present from itself making it more than itself.
The work of imagination does not merely consist in supplementing
what the stage only hints at. While it certainly is a work of imagination
to imagine a kitchen when only a chair, a table, and a couple of pots
are placed on an otherwise empty stage, this can hardly be called crea-
tive work because imagination here only serves the purpose to trigger
the already known and familiar. What is at stake here is the capacity of
imagination to insert completely different images or concepts from vari-
ous contexts to the present situations. It is the spectator’s imagination
40  G. Siegmund

that transforms the scene. The concreteness of the actions and settings
on stage such as the real grass that covers the floor of 1980, the physical-
ity of the dancing bodies or the silly competitions the dancers have to
participate in, allow for a whole range of subjective responses to forge
entirely new situations. It grafts images, experiences, knowledge, and
above all, memories from beyond the closed setting of the stage that put
new or unfamiliar perspectives of the already known to make it strange
and different and to permit alternative situations to emerge.

Between Institutionalisation and Emancipation:

The New Dance
To add a further dimension to the discussion about modernism and
postmodernism or conceptualism in dance, this section looks at the
institutional side of dance. Whereas the previous sections dealt with dis-
courses and practices, theories and concepts, the following pages sketch
the institutionalisation of these discourses in France in the early 1980s.
The chapter, therefore, provides the more specific historical background
to Jérôme Bel’s work that is both a product of and, like postmodern
dance, a reaction to these institutionalised practices. What happens when
the emancipatory impulses of dance modernism and postmodernism are
cast into institutional structures?
With the establishment of regional Centres chorégraphique nation-
aux (CCN), in the early 1980s, the French government intervened into
the then existing system of dance education, production, and diffusion.
Changing what Michel Foucault called an ‘apparatus’ or a ‘dispositif’
of dance, a new national politics of dance came into being that gave
already existing discourses and practices a new spin and direction. For
Foucault, an apparatus is “a sort of […] formation which has as its major
function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent
need” (Foucault 1980, 195). This formation consists of material as well
as immaterial elements, “the said as much as the unsaid” (1980, 194),
which form a kind of grid or network to facilitate and control, to pro-
duce and to govern new forms of dance. “I said that the apparatus is
essentially of a strategic nature,” Foucault continues,

which means assuming that it is a matter of a certain manipulation of rela-

tions of forces, either developing them in a particular direction, blocking
them, stabilising them, utilising them, etc. The apparatus is thus always
 MODERN SUBJECTS  41

inscribed in a play of power, but it is also linked to certain coordinates

of knowledge which issue from it but, to an equal degree, condition it.
(1980, 196)

The strategy of the new socialist French government at the beginning

of the 1980s was to give France a new politics of dance representing
the new socialist ideals for the country. When Louis XIV, who in 1661
founded the Royal Academy of Dance (which later became the Paris
Opera with the Paris Opera Ballet), he unified the diverse activities sur-
rounding dance throughout the whole country and brought dance
education and the possibilities of its musical accompaniment under gov-
ernment control. Likewise, French cultural minister Jack Lang picked up
the multiple developments of modern and contemporary dance in France
since the 1960s to establish regional dance centres. In doing so, he
reversed Louis’ absolutist and centralist stronghold over dance and dif-
fused power to the regions to implement the new government’s egalitar-
ian and democratic political ideals.
In 1989 Jack Lang explained his view on dance to justify the establish-
ment of a network of regional choreographic centres. As part of François
Mitterand’s socialist government that came into office in 1981, Lang
attributed a significant importance to contemporary dance, reserving
for the first time a government budget for the development of the new
dance. In his discourse Lang opposes rationalistic French culture that
privileges the word over the body and speech over movement to a physi-
cal culture that speaks more truly and directly to the people. According
to his opinion even Baroque ballet, which he considers to be the most
French of all arts, was more often than not conceived as being merely
a subsidiary to music. Even in seventeenth-century France the physical-
ity of movement was worth less than the intellectuality of music. Lang
legitimises dance by attributing values to it such as emotionality, abun-
dance, dynamism, spontaneity, and veracity. He conceived of dance as a
form of expression that is authentic rather than rational, that speaks from
person to person and is therefore able to help build communities and
further communication between people. Communication that is honest
precisely because it is embodied, the building of communities by means
of truthful bodies: the social values contemporary dance, with its search
for a new gestural language represented, were, as French sociologist and
dancer Muriel Guigou argues in her study on the new French dance,
the same values (authenticity, honesty, cummunality) that the socialist
42  G. Siegmund

government wanted to present to the public. In the official political

discourse, dance is considered to unite body and soul (Guigou 2004,
53–54).
Jérôme Bel started his career as a dancer and choreographer in a situ-
ation characterised by the institutionalisation of contemporary dance.
Taking Jack Lang’s political discourse on dance into account, the CCN
institutionalised the very same modernist values that John Martin theo-
rised during the 1930s, drawing on the dance of his day. In the minds
of cultural politicians in the 1970s and 1980s, the body-movement bind
was still in full swing when it had, in fact, already come under review
by certain forms of dance during the 1960s under the influence of new
media technologies. The political discourse surrounding the founda-
tion of the CCN, on the other hand, put forward the same values as the
dance modernists before World War II.
In the 1980s Lang’s government initiative picked up on a develop-
ment in dance that had been underway in France since the 1950s. The
dominance of classical or neo-classical ballet and the stronghold of the
Paris Opera as the legitimate dance institution of the French nation
since the times of Louis XIV were questioned by a first wave of post-
war dance artists that trained with German expressionist dancers from
the Weimar period. Thus, Françoise and Dominique Dupey trained with
Jean Weidt, while Jacqueline Robinson and Karin Waehner, two pupils
of Mary Wigman’s, taught German dance to children and adults in
sports and education programmes in schools and universities (Ginot and
Michel 1995, 176). Trying to combine contemporary influences with
neo-classical ballet, Maurice Béjart’s Ballet du XXe siècle proved to be
another influence on the contemporary movement, with Maguy Marin
and Dominique Bagouet, two of France’s most prominent contempo-
rary dancers, having started their careers with Béjart. In the course of
the 1970s the influence of US-American dance took over. The compa-
nies of Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor were regularly invited to fes-
tivals like the Festival d ‘automne or to theatres like Théâtre de la Ville
in Paris. With American dancers Carolyn Carlson, Susan Buirge, Joseph
Russilo and Peter Goss, the young generation of French dancers learned
new improvisational and compositional techniques from their postmod-
ern New York colleagues.
In 1981 the new wave of independent dance artists created a platform
for regular meetings and an exchange of interests and ideas (Guigou
2004, 49–50). In the spirit of autonomy and self-organisation of the
 MODERN SUBJECTS  43

time, dance professionals joined forces to implement contemporary

dance into the public and political consciousness to gain recognition
for their art. In 1983 a committee of French professional dancers and
choreographers drew up a report on the future development of the art
of dance and submitted it to the cultural ministry. Jack Lang followed
suit and, in 1984, adopted almost all of the measures suggested by the
report. As a consequence, dance education, the creation of dance works
and their distribution was reorganised. Dance was now considered to be
an autonomous form of art, independent of music. Government plans
for the development of dance included the opening up of dance acad-
emies hitherto reserved for ballet education to contemporary techniques,
the creation of regular degrees in contemporary dance both in schools
and the academies, the implementation of a committee to distribute gov-
ernment funding for dance, and the foundation of choreographic cen-
tres, the CCN, as places for the education of dancers and the creation
of work. In 1984 three choreographic centres were put in operation in
Montpellier (under the direction of Dominique Bagouet), Grenoble
(Jean-Claude Galotta), and Créteil (Maguy Marin). Today a total of 19
CCN centres exist all over France. Anchored in their respective regions,
the task of the director of the CCN is to collaborate with local and
regional dance activities, to spend time creating new work with the com-
pany resident at the CCN and, finally, to tour the productions in the
region as well as in the whole of France and Europe.
Within the CCN ideals of community that were so important to Jack
Lang’s argument for the value of contemporary dance, were held high;
ideals, however, that over the years many found hard to live by. In her
study on the structures of the CCN, Muriel Guigou distinguishes three
areas that were of particular interest to the artists working at the choreo-
graphic centres: the valorisation of the dancers’ personalities and creativ-
ity, the decentralisation of power, and the building of affective relations
to create a community (2004, 67, 125, 177). Often these aims would go
together. Choreographers like Karine Saporta or Catherine Diverrès put
an emphasis on the dancers’ input into the creative process of making a
piece, emancipating them from technical virtuosity of ballet and modern
dance as an end in itself. As Diverrès said in a statement typical of many
choreographers who came into prominence in the 1980s:

The dancer cannot simply execute steps, he is an autonomous artist. The

interest to make a piece only comes into existence when everyone finds the
44  G. Siegmund

necessity for his proper mode of expression. It is work that takes place in
a much more general way and which goes through various phases. It is a
way of thinking, an attitude towards life that requires a lot of humility and
strength from the dancer. (ibid., 99, my trans.)

To consider dancers emancipated artists, because their work is an integral

part of their life and personal develeopment, obviously changes the rela-
tion between the choreographer and the dancer, which ideally assumes
a much less hierarchical character. The decentralising of power instru-
mental to Jack Lang’s cultural politics and social democratic values finds
its equivalent in the organisation of the companies working at the CCN.
They were also reflected in the organisation of the dancing body itself,
whose parts are considered equally valid and expressive. The body opens
up to its surroundings and finds new ways to perceive, relate, and inter-
act. These destabilised bodies that are often tilted from their vertical ori-
entation function as channels for emotions and affective relations, which,
in turn, as in the work of Régis Obadia and Joelle Bouvier at the CCN in
Havre, Normandy, become the subject of the dance.
Even before Jack Lang’s initiative, the first choreographic centre
was founded in 1978 in Angers, a town in the Northwest of France
towards the Atlantic coast. Its founding director was the American Alwin
Nikolais, who developed an educational programme for dancers. From
1981 onwards, Cunningham dancer Viola Farber took over the edu-
cation programme in Angers, where future CCN directors Mathilde
Monnier and Angelin Preljocaj would study with Faber. One of Nikolais’
pupils in Angers towards the end of the 1970s was Phillip Decouflé. The
particular type of theatricality that characterises his work as a choreog-
rapher is very much reminiscent of Nikolais’ shift of focus away from
the body as the prime means of communication in dance. Instead it was
directed towards phenomena such as light, costumes and props as equal
means of expression that all shape movement as well as the perception
of movement. Découflé later went on to found his own company and
famously choreographed the opening ceremony for the 1992 Winter
Olympics in Albertville, where one of his assistants was Jérôme Bel.
Bel, too, received one year of formal education at the centre in
Angers. Before joining the national choreographic centre for contempo-
rary dance (CNDC), as it is officially called, in Angers in 1984 under
the direction of Michel Railhac, Bel spent two years in Bordeaux taking
private lessons in Cunningham technique as well as in classical ballet.
 MODERN SUBJECTS  45

Having a natural penchant for movement, as he says, which makes it easy

for him to pick up and copy movement on the spot, he spent his younger
years moving in the streets in Algeria, Iran, and Morocco where his fam-
ily lived, changing countries with his father, an engineer working for an
international company. Initially seduced by the theatre, Bel took acting
classes in the French cultural centres abroad wherever the family lived
at the time, but his talents as an actor were, as he recalls, limited. After
having been expelled from one of the courses for not learning his lines,
he remembers in an interview, “I stayed in the room waiting for the next
class to start, which was a dance class, modern jazz. And there I immedi-
ately felt at ease. The teacher made me work, and this was the first time
I was appreciated for doing something that belonged entirely to me”
(Hivernat 1999, 7, my trans.).
Applying for the school in Angers, Bel was chosen together with
twenty other students out of three hundred applicants. The dance edu-
cation in Angers continued along the lines of his earlier dance forma-
tion, that is Cunningham and ballet, with Bel taking lessons with
Cunningham himself. “From the time I spent in Angers I will never for-
get the classes Merce Cunningham gave us. He asked us to show him the
simplest movements a body can do and ended up choosing six elements
out of all the material we presented to him. After several hours, by magic
we all did Cunningham while all the time being aware of the infinite pos-
sibilities to combine these elements. I often have this in mind when I
work as a choreographer” (1999, 8, my trans.).
The educational cycle in Angers normally takes two years, but Bel,
who was learning quickly, found himself expelled from the course after
only one year. The reason, he remembers, was an application for a grant
to study in New York. Bel was looking for new challenges and “more dif-
ficult things to do” (Bel 2016). He did not get the grant, because he was
officially enrolled in Angers, but his application backfired when his appli-
cation was considered an act of disloyalty for which he was expelled from
the school. Bel moved to Paris where he worked as a dancer for Angelin
Preljocaj, but left the company after only a short time. He then joined
the company of Joëlle Bouvier and Régis Obadia, L’Esquisse in Havre,
whose work he appreciated for the emotional qualities they released in
him as a dancer. Joining the piece Le Royaume millenaire while it was
already on tour, Bel experienced the total trust the two choreographers
put in him, which enabled him to open up on stage as a dancer.
46  G. Siegmund

In 1990 he went to Venice to work with Caterina Sagna on her piece

Lenz, after a novella by the German writer Georg Büchner. Working with
Sagna, Bel reconnected with his love for literature and language. “[F]
or the first time I made a direct connection between movement and the
text. The entire choreography was based on language and there was not
a single movement that was accidental.” (Hivernat 1999, 8, my trans.)
Bel then went on in 1992 to become an assistant to Philippe Decouflé
for the XVIth Winter Olympics in Albertville, which he remembers pri-
marily as a huge spectacle. “What I always keep in mind from this expe-
rience is the tableau I created with all the folklore groups from Savoie,
three minutes of choreography with 850 people and nine months of
solid work. I learned enough about organisation for a lifetime!” (ibid.,
my trans.).
In Bel’s account of his formational years as a dancer the problems
inherent in the newly established structure of the CCN become appar-
ent. After almost seven years of working as a dancer in contemporary
companies, he felt a certain fatigue at the thought of simply continu-
ing. Having earned enough money from his exploits at the Olympics, he
took two years off and started to frequent the public library next door
to his flat in Paris. There, Bel began his self-education as a dance art-
ist. Spending hours poring over the works of Roland Barthes, Michel
Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Pierre Bourdieu, Jérôme Bel came to
understand the field of dance as a complex set of cultural and social
rules that subjected the agents operating the field in different ways.
Since Angers prided itself in training dancers and not choreographers,
the school did not offer any courses in theory, art history nor, perhaps
more surprisingly, the history of dance. Bel’s complaint underlines the
fact that even in the field of contemporary dance the traditional image of
the dancer prevailed. In order to function in a company, dancers have no
need for any other type of knowledge but the development of technical
skills. They are passive agents of a culture to which they are deliberately
prevented from having access.
With the institutionalisation of the choreographic centres the pressure
on its directors to create work and to build up a repertoire, to tour and
to offer workshops often curtailed creative processes at the expense of
the emancipated dancer. Technique, from which Karine Saporta tried to
free her dancers, became important again. To produce a touring piece
took precedent over research interest and made Catherine Diverrès’
claim to only make a piece when everyone feels the necessity to actually
 MODERN SUBJECTS  47

do so obsolete. As Jean-Claude Galotta, who until 2015 had been head

of the CCN in Grenoble for thirty years, put it succinctly: “The danc-
ers have to master all techniques, so that if I ask them to do something,
they are capable of doing it. I see the dancers as material to be formed”
(Guigou 2004, 47, my trans.). Admittedly, Galotta’s point of view is
extreme in its subjection of the dancers to the choreographer’s com-
mands and is certainly not shared by all his colleagues. His statement
nonetheless highlights a structural problem within the organisation of
the CCN. The distance between a choreographer working in the field of
classical ballet and a choreographer working in the field of contemporary
dance is not as wide as some would have hoped. Thus, old hierarchies
between the choreographer in charge of the project as well as the insti-
tution and the dancers as executioners of steps and phrases continued.
As Muriel Guigou sums up the development, the companies and groups
installed in the centres gradually turned into big name choreographers,
choreographers who stamped the CCN with their personal style (ibid.,
243). Thus, younger and independent artists with different aesthetics
and different questions in relation to dance would not find themselves
included in the system of recognition that is the CCN. In 1997, a group
of next-generation dance artists together with older colleagues left at the
margins by the official structures, Les Signataires du 20 août, submitted
an official letter to the cultural ministry demanding the opening up of
the choreographic centres to new and interdisciplinary works. They fore-
saw a future for the CCN as veritable centres of research for different
ideas about dance and not just as a showcase for the style of one leading
choreographer (ibid., 286–287). Among the signers was writer, curator,
and dramaturge Christophe Wavelet; Emmanuelle Huynh, a choreogra-
pher who in 2003 would take over the CNDC in Angers and develop
a new educational programme for dancers; Another signer was Boris
Charmatz, who, in taking over the CCN in Rennes in 2009, renamed it
Musée de la danse and turned it into an exploratory place for all kinds of
interdisciplinary activities surrounding dance. Some directors of choreo-
graphic centres, like Mathilde Monnier at Montpellier, were supportive
of the new ideas. During the 2000 edition of the Montpellier Danse fes-
tival, she invited dancers, choreographers, visual artists, theatre directors,
and video artists to think about the topic of exchange value and market
economy, imagining different economies of expense and circulation for
dance. The results were presented under the title Potlatch, dérives dur-
ing three days of the festival. Thus, with the focus on gift economies,
48  G. Siegmund

as in the native American practice hinted at in the word Potlatch, and

Situationist explorations, as quoted in the word dérives, the participants
of this research group—among them Jérôme Bel—envisioned dance as a
critical practice re-thinking its relationship to its audience and its produc-
tion mechanisms.
Although Bel himself did not sign the petition of 20th August, claim-
ing that at the time he was still very much isolated and working for him-
self (Bel 2016), he later joined forces with his fellow artists. Despite their
heterogeneous work and individual approaches to dance, Bel and his
contemporaries were publicly perceived as belonging to one generation
of dancers with a common agenda. International dance festivals were
above all instrumental in both connecting the artists and providing plat-
forms for meetings and exchange as well as shaping the perception of the
public. Dance festivals started to invite Bel and his contemporaries from
the mid-1990s onwards. Bel was introduced to the work of the Spanish
dancer and choreographer Maria La Ribot, who was equally inter-
ested in the visual side of the dancing body, at the festival SommerSzene
in Salzburg, Austria, in 1996. In the same year, he met German
dancer and former dramaturgue to Pina Bausch, Raimund Hoghe, in
Rotterdam, Netherlands. In 1997, during the Tanz im August-festival in
Berlin, Germany, he was introduced to the work of Xavier Le Roy. In
1998 Hortensia Völckers, curator of the dance programme for Wiener
Festwochen in Vienna, Austria, organised a so-called ‘theory event,’ Body
Currency, to bring together scholars and artists from the field of dance.
Next to programming new work by Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, Boris
Charmatz or Meg Stuart, festivals like Wiener Festwochen organised and
staged a discourse surrounding new forms of dance as part of their offi-
cial programme. By inviting scholars and critics to give lectures and to
host roundtable discussions, they triggered new questions concerning
dance and instigated new formats such as lecture performances given by
the artists themselves on their work. In 1999, the festival Montpellier
Danse showed a first retrospective of Jérôme Bel’s first four pieces: Nom
donné par l’auteur, Jérôme Bel, Shirtology, and The Last Performance. In
2000 the Wiener Festwochen and Hortensia Völckers, today head of the
German National Foundation for the Arts, and Im Puls Tanz Vienna
under the direction of Karl Regensburger joined forces to host a huge
festival called tanz2000.at—ReMembering the Body.6 The programme
united many of the protagonists of the so-called conceptual dance move-
ment, from Christophe Wavelet and the collective Le Quatuor Albrecht
 MODERN SUBJECTS  49

Knust, including Charmatz and Huyhn as performers, who also per-

formed work with their own companies, to artists like Meg Stuart,
Thomas Plischke, and Martin Nachbar. Their contemporary positions
that dealt with historical propositions about dance were programmed
next to work by some of the protagonists of the 1960s neo-avant-garde.
These included Trisha Brown; Lucinda Childs, who was present with a
reconstruction of her seminal piece Dance; and the Merce Cunningham
Dance Company, which re-staged the avant-garde classic Walk Around
Time. If the formal education for dancers, as Jérôme Bel complained,
held no place for dance history, the dancers at the end of the twentieth
century made sure to find out for themselves. In September 2001, critic,
theoretician, performer, and dramaturge Mårten Spångberg invited a
group of dance artists including Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, La Ribot,
Vera Mantero, and Tino Sehgal for a week of research workshops and
presentations to the Panacea Festival held at the Museum of Modern
Art in Stockholm. The festival was co-produced by Siemens Cultural
Programme in Germany.
This brief overview of activities makes apparent two crucial develop-
ments in dance around the turn of the millennium. First, the festivals
provided a platform for Bel and his contemporaries to meet and to con-
nect, underlining a new view on dance, its production and reception.
Work was being produced outside the CCN on the basis of international
European festival and theatre networks. Often, financial support for a
production was given transnationally. Second, because theory and theo-
retical reflection were an integral part of these activities, they helped cre-
ate a discourse around dance that included the artists themselves. Their
work was being discussed at the same time as it was seen, and these dis-
cussions would find their way into the work itself.
Significantly, then, when Jérôme Bel started work on his first piece
as a choreographer, he did not do so within the institutionalised frame-
work of the CCN. He did not even do it in France, where he could
have applied for funding as an independent choreographer working out-
side the CCN structure. Instead Nom donné par l’auteur was produced
independent of any financial support and in 1994 was premiered at the
SKITE festival in Lisbon, Portugal. Production credits for Bel’s pieces
regularly included Kaaitheater in Brussels, Belgium, the Cultural Centre
of Belem, Portugal, La Menagerie de Verre in Paris, TanzWerkstatt
Podewil and Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Germany and a whole range
of smaller venues and organisations. In 1994 Bel founded his own
50  G. Siegmund

association, R.B./Jérôme Bel, which functions as a production company

helping to organise, stage, and tour his pieces. The association is sup-
ported by the French ministry for Culture and Communication (DRAC
Ile-de-France) and by the Institut Français, French Ministry for Foreign
Affairs for its international tours.
Jérôme Bel’s work is situated within the context of contemporary
dance in the mid to late 1990s in France and Europe. It can be con-
sidered a work of self-empowerment of the artist asking questions about
received opinions about dance, such as dance’s presumably natural abil-
ity to communicate. His work builds on and radicalises the spin that
American postmodern dancers—and their attempts to objectify move-
ment—and the German Tanztheater of Pina Bausch with its focus on the
cultural inscriptions of movement patterns gave dance modernism. Both
questioned modernist systems of representation of the dancing body by
emphasising that dance is also something to be seen, and what has been
seen since the 1960s has more often than not been filtered through dif-
ferent media technologies. Dance is less a natural than a cultural activity.
Jérôme Bel’s specific trajectory through this field of questions is
informed by his training in Cunningham technique, his experience with
the emotionality of dance in the piece by Bouvier-Obadia, and finally
his interest in literature and language and their relation to movement.
What is important, however, is that he gives all three of these seminal
encounters a specific twist, wrenching them from their original intention.
With Merce Cunningham it is not his technique or movement style that
Bel adopts, but rather his idea of choreography as a structural play of
limited elements that may produce infinite possibilities of combination.
Although all of his pieces have an emotional quality, emotionality is not
rooted in the movement of the dancers. Instead it is produced entirely by
the spectators as a reaction to the staging of the bodies. Bel’s admiration
for Pina Bausch, whose pieces he had seen throughout the 1980s and
1990s, gave him the courage to break with the representational codes of
dance thereby producing an emotionality that would rely on the produc-
tion rather than the expression of emotions (Siegmund 1998).
Jérôme Bel’s work is also a reaction against the impasse of contempo-
rary dance in France within the institutional developments at the CCN.
Reverting to old hierarchical ways of working, succumbing to the pres-
sure of developing a recognisable style instead of engaging in an open
research on dance, contemporary dancers were just as subjected to the
institutions of the CCN as classical dancers are to the Paris Opera. In
 MODERN SUBJECTS  51

this regard Bel’s work is an act of desubjugation and desubjectivation.

Whereas the apparatus of dance in its “strategic elaboration” as Foucault
puts it, fulfils its function of representation, it at the same time produces
an “effect of functional overdetermination” (Foucault 1980, 195), which
opens up routes for future transformations of the apparatus, “lines of
flight,” to borrow Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s phrase (Deleuze
and Guattari 2004, 9–10). Bel’s trajectory along this line of flight makes
spectators aware of how the apparatus of contemporary dance functions
by analysing and exposing its rules and tacit expectations. Working from
within the theatrical apparatus of representation, he gives the elements
of the system a new direction. With Bel, choreography is scenography
that builds on the spatialisation of thought. Jérôme Bel’s project is a pro-
ject of writing. As such it lends itself to questions about the textuality
of movement and bodies, the role of authorship, and the activity of the
spectator as a reader.
Interrupting the seamless production of new dances and choreogra-
phies, Bel questions the identity of dance. In this regard, his work can
be considered conceptual. Coming back to the five categories that heu-
ristically define the work of conceptual artists, Jérôme Bel’s most radi-
cal break is the one with dance’s focus on kinaesthetics as its source of
meaning production and aesthetic pleasure. Although there is aesthetic
pleasure to be gained from his pieces, it does not result from modern-
ist or postmodernist claims to kinaesthetics either as emotional commu-
nication or physical articulation. With Jérôme Bel the “body-movement
bind” (Cvejić) is broken. What takes its place is an analysis of the pro-
duction of meaning and emotions in a theatrical setting. Thus, medium
specificity as one of the main categories that defined modernist dance
gives way to medial unspecificity, as the meaning of dance no longer
resides in the corporeality of the dance, but in language and the dis-
course constituting the dancing body. As a consequence, medial objectiv-
ity is no longer defined by embodied movement practices, but can take
other medial forms such as theatre or films. The serial character of both
the pieces and their structuring principles opens up time and space to the
pragmatic relations of the dancers to the spectators. Radicalising the con-
ceptual leanings of 1960s, postmodern dance and conceptual art, Jérôme
Bel is a post-conceptual artist.7 To better understand the comparison
of Jérôme Bel’s work to conceptual art, the next chapter deals with the
conceptual implications in Bel’s work beginning with his very first piece,
Nom donné par l’auteur.
52  G. Siegmund

Notes
1. Peter Osborne’s use of the concept of aesthetics narrows it down to the
sensual dimension of art. In a broader understanding of the concept, aes-
thetics as a philosophical discipline also includes the critical and self-reflex-
ive dimension of art, its conceptual nature as well as its experiental side.
In fact, aesthetics in relation to art (as opposed to everyday phenomenon)
does not only provide the spectator with a heightened awareness of the
object, but it also indicates how these sensual effects are produced, see for
instance Seel (2004) and Rebentisch (2012).
2. German expressionist dancer Mary Wigman, for instance, in her famous
dance Drehmonotonie from 1926 builds her conception of modern dance on
the play between loss and regaining of control, see Huschka (2002, 185).
3. Trisha Brown began her series of Accumulations with a 4½ minute solo
version to the music of The Grateful Dead’s Uncle John’s Band in 1971.
In the following years she produced longer solo versions as well as group
versions, with or without musical accompaniment, in theatres, gymna-
siums, or outside places. As in Accumulation Pieces from 1973, she also
used the mathematical principle of Accumulation to add hitherto distinct
pieces onto one another to form a new and longer piece. Brown ended
the series in 1979 with Accumulation with Talking plus Watermotor, add-
ing language to her activities and including her short solo Watermotor
from 1978 into the proceedings; Ramsay Burt places the series and espe-
cially Accumulation with Talking plus Watermotor in the context of mini-
mal art since the 1960s. He underlines the importance of the physicality
of the dancing body being exposed by the repetition of the task, because,
as Brown herself stated in an interview, the body is incapable of repeating
exactly, thus opening the pieces up to subjective responses and the emer-
gence of difference (Burt 2006, 138–147).
4. To describe this effect, Burt uses the metaphor of a hologram that, once
shattered, contains an image of the whole within each fragment. He fails to
link this idea to the commands of dance modernism (2006, 146).
5. Philip Auslander (1997) traces the complex intersections of modernism
and post-modernism in theatre by explicitly drawing Michael Fried’s anti-
theatrical position into the debate.
6. An international publication documents the activities of the festival,
Brandstetter and Völckers (2000).
7. Peter Osborne defines post-conceptual art as art that historically fol-
lows the heyday of conceptual art in the late 1960s. Post-conceptual art-
ists work on the premises staked out by conceptual art, its legacy and its
changed modes of production and reception of the artwork (Osborne
2013, 48).
 MODERN SUBJECTS  53

References
Auslander, Philip. 1997. From Acting to Performance Essays in Modernism and
Postmodernism. London: Routledge.
Bel, Jérôme. 2016. Unpublished Email Conversation with Gerald Siegmund.
Frankfurt.
Benjamin, Walter. 1982. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction. In Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, 219–253. Bungay:
Fontana Press.
Brandstetter, Gabriele, and Hortensia Völckers (eds.). 2000. ReMembering the
Body. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz.
Burt, Ramsay. 2006. Judson Dance Theater. Performative Traces. Abingdon, NY:
Routledge.
Cvejić, Bojana. 2015. Choreographing Problems. Expressive Concepts in
Contemporary European Dance and Performance. Houndmills: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Cvejić, Bojana. 2017. Problem as a Choreographic and Philosophical Kind
of Thought. In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, ed. Rebekah
Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin, 199–220. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004. Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian
Massumi. London: Continuum.
Foster, Susan Leigh. 1986. Reading Dancing. Bodies and Subjects in
Contemporary American Dance. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Foster, Susan Leigh. 2011. Choreographing Empathy Kinesthesia in Performance.
London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. The Confession of the Flesh. In Power/Knowledge.
Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, 194–
228. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Fried, Michael. 1995. Art and Objecthood. In Minimal Art. A Critical
Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, 116–147. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Ginot, Isabelle, and Marcelle Michel. 1995. La Danse au XXe siècle. Paris:
Bordas.
Guigou, Muriel. 2004. La Nouvelle Danse Française. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Hartley, Linda. 1995. Wisdom of the Body Moving. An Introduction to Body-Mind
Centering. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
Hivernat, Pierre. 1999. C’est Jérôme. Les Inrockuptibles 14: XII–XIII.
Huschka, Sabine. 2002. Moderner Tanz. Konzepte, Stile, Utopien. Reinbek:
Rororo.
Lambert-Beatty, Carrie. 2008. Being Watched. Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
54  G. Siegmund

Manning, Susan. 1988. Modernist Dogma and Post-modern Rhetoric: A

Response to Sally Banes ‘Terpsichore in Sneakers’. TDR: The Drama Review
34: 32–39.
Martin, John. 1965. Introduction to the Dance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book
Company/Dance Horizons.
Osborne, Peter. 2002. Conceptual Art. London: Phaidon Press.
Osborne, Peter. 2013. Anywhere or Not At All. Philosophy of Contemporary Art.
London: Verso.
Rainer, Yvonne. 1995. A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the
Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of
Trio A. In Minimal Art. A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, 263–
273. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rainer, Yvonne. 2002. A Fond Memoir with Sundry Reflections on a Friend and
Her Art. In Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue 1961–2001, ed. Hendel
Teicher, 47–53. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rebentisch, Juliane. 2012. Aesthetics of Installation Art. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Seel, Martin. 2004. Aesthetics of Appearing, trans. John Farrell. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Siegmund, Gerald. 1998. Im Reich der Zeichen: Jérôme Bel. Ballett
International/Tanz Aktuell 5 (4): 34–37.
Teicher, Hendel. 2002. Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue 1961–2001.
Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
 Subjects of Discourse

Theatricality and Dance
The last chapter retraced the steps of dancemodernism and postmodernism
under their common interest in objectifying movement. The means to do
so shifted from choreographingkinaesthesia to objectifying movement in the
eyes of the beholders. Seeing the dance as a visual rather than kinaesthetic
phenomenon during the 1960s and 1970s produced a shift in the percep-
tion of dance towards an increasingly media-conscious process of perception
that turned dance into a cultural rather than a natural phenomenon. This
move away from feeling movement ultimately questioned dance’s medium-
specificity and aesthetic values, producing a myriad of hybrid forms of dance
and performance such as GermanTanztheater in its wake. As I argued, the
shift in the perception of dance creates a rift between what is produced on
stage and what is perceived by members of the audience. It is in this rift
between production and reception processes, which liberates or “emanci-
pates,” as French philosopher Jacques Rancière describes it (Rancière 2009,
1–23), the spectators to meet the performance with their own knowledge
and associations in which I locate the notion of theatricality. In the work of
Roland Barthes, on which I base my argument in the following chapter, the-
atricality comes to be seen as a mode of perception that oscillates between
the materiality of the dancing bodies and the chains of signification they are
inevitably engaged in. Both sides in the operation of theatricality are mutu-
ally exclusive, yet produce and depend upon one another. In performance
both sides are staged and exposed together, thereby never allowing the gaze

© The Author(s) 2017 55

G. Siegmund, Jérôme Bel, New World Choreographies,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55272-3_3
56  G. Siegmund

of the spectator to settle. The gaze wanders between the physicality of the
dancers and their potential meaning connecting what is seen and heard with
the culturally informed imagination and memory of the individual specta-
tors. This operation transforms the elements on stage. By moving, the opera-
tion of theatricality produces a train of thought that is reflexive of its own
limits, which are its very conditions of being. In other words, it is conscious
of the body tout court. Theatricality emerges at the point of paradox that
Bel’s attempt at establishing a ‘degree zero of writing’ on stage produces.
It also appears at the crossroads of the conceptual nature of his work once
it admits to engaging with the material side of the work of art. This chap-
ter deals both with Bel’s attempt at neutrality on stage and the concep-
tual nature of his work. In an interview with dancer and writer Una Bauer,
Jérôme Bel states that there is no difference between the work of art and the
discourses surrounding it (Bauer 2008b, 46). His artistic work is a discourse.
As Michel Foucault defines it, a discourse consists of a set of elements and
the rules that govern their combination to produce a meaningful utterance
(1980). Starting with an analysis of Bel’s very first piece as a choreographer,
Nom donné par l’auteur, and its conceptual implications before taking a
closer look at the piece Xavier Le Roy, I want to highlight the elements of
Bel’s discourse on dance, most prominently so the role of the choreographer
and author as a figure in this discourse. These discussions finally lead up to
the exploration of the concept of theatricality in the work of Roland Barthes.
My argument is that theatricality is Jérôme Bel’s most prominent mode of
organising his discourse and its mode of producing meaning and affect. In
the interview with Bauer mentioned above, Bel himself brings theatre and
dance together: “The term ‘choreographer’ seems to me to be obsolete in
regard to what choreographers are doing and what I am doing. I would say
that I am a theatre director whose subject is dance. I am producing a theatre
of dance (some are producing a theatre of text, a theatre of image, for exam-
ple). I use the frame of the theatre (architecturally, historically, culturally and
socially speaking) to analyse dance, to produce a discourse from it” (2008b,
43). Bel’s “theatre of dance” is the topic of this chapter.

Nom donné par l’auteur (1994): Establishing

the Discourse ‘Jérôme Bel’

Jérôme Bel’s first piece, Nom donné par l’auteur, is characterised by the
objectivation and reification of the codes of dance and theatre. Over the
course of the performance, two dancers, Frédéric Seguette and Jérôme Bel
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  57

himself, have the sole task of moving objects around the stage.1 In doing
so, the demeanour that both of the dancers assume is one of neutrality
and sobriety, meaning that no affects or emotions come into play. There is
a contrast between the affective, energetic, and lively qualities that are usu-
ally attributed to dancing and dancers during a dance performance, and
the motionlessness of the objects in Bel’s piece and the mechanical way
that they are moved around. As Jérôme Bel himself explained in an inter-
view with the present author:

The use of objects, the absence of any kind of stage illusion and the maxi-
mum withdrawal of our presence on the stage were all part of a strategy
to give appearance to a choreography that, paradoxically, did not mark or
sketch even the smallest dance step! After this operation, only the skeleton
of the dance performance remained: a choreographic skeleton that had rid
itself of the flesh of dance (Bel and Siegmund 2002, 26, trans. Lydia White).

The presence of choreography becomes visible because all of the

other parameters of dance have been made absent. At the beginning of
the performance, Frédéric Seguette carries four letters made from coated
wood onto the stage and places them on two intersecting diagonals. N,
S, E and O stand for the French words for the four directions, ‘nord’,
‘sud’, ‘est’ and ‘ouest’, and the letter for north is placed on the stage in
the actual direction of north. As a result, the placement of ‘N’ and the
other letters varies from show to show. The stage as an area of action is
thus compared with the windrose of a compass; the actions of the danc-
ers take the place of the compass needle that usually dances over the
windrose. Even at this early stage, there is a shift in the concept of cho-
reography, which is peeled away from the idea of dancers as performers
and the theatre as their frame. The mechanical movement of a compass
needle can also be considered choreography when it is liberated from its
pragmatic function of providing orientation within a space.
Once the letters—which the events on the stage have already iden-
tified as having an inherent linguistic framework—have been set up,
Seguette and Bel carry ten objects onto the stage that they will use to
develop their choreography in the ensuing sixty minutes: a vacuum
cleaner that serves Seguette as a chair, a carpet on which the other
items are laid, a salt shaker, a pair of ice skates, a dictionary, a stool on
which Bel sits opposite his partner parallel to the front of the stage, a
ball, a banknote, a torch, and a hairdryer. A small island has thus been
58  G. Siegmund

established in the centre of the stage. In its axially symmetric structure

with the two protagonists on either side, this island corresponds with
the traditional stage space of classical ballet. For quite a while, Seguette
and Bel each simultaneously point to one of the objects toward the mid-
dle: Seguette grabs the dictionary and Bel holds the ball toward it. The
banknote is paired with the salt shaker, from which salt is poured onto
the carpet, the yellow ball with a red torch that lights it up. The car-
pet is rotated by 180 degrees so that the objects switch sides. With time,
the dancers’ actions and combinations become more and more complex,
during which it becomes obvious that they themselves are nothing other
than two more objects that treat themselves as such. In the middle of the
stage, they wrap up all of the objects in the carpet, hide them, removing
them from view. Seguette and Bel then lie down in front of and behind
the carpet, curled up, so that the three bodies form a diagonal from the
back right to the front left. The objects and bodies are now lying in a
single line. Moreover, links emerge that distribute the objects within the
space. One of the dancers uses the hairdryer to blow the banknote over
a line of salt that was shaken out previously, while the other steps on the
banknote at the other end of the line to stop him (Fig. 1).
If one looks closely, one can even detect a series of small pas de deux.
The salt shaker bursts all over the carpet while it is perched on and being
held up by the ice skates. This concentration of action on one point is
followed by the dispersion of the objects and their distribution through-
out the space. At the back right, Bel vacuums the words out of the open
dictionary, a kind of degree zero of the meaning of words, while the
hairdryer at the front left blows them into Seguette’s face so that he can
speak them out loud. It is not just that the bodies and objects are all
located on the same level, but rather that they are all speaking elements
of a choreography. The words are objects, and the objects are also words.
Although there is no speaking in the performance, it is not mute. At the
end, the windrose is shifted to the left, carrying all of the objects offstage,
only to subsequently wander towards the right, until only the ‘O’ is left
on stage. Like the dancers, the objects appear and disappear through the
crossover. But they all come back for the applause. Seguette and Bel carry
the objects back onto the stage and place them in the middle, right in
front of the rear stage wall. With the help of the objects, they use three
of the letters to form the word ‘FIN’. From pas de deux to corps for-
mations, from diagonals to rows to circles, from entrances and exits to
tableaus, from symmetries to parallelisms, Nom donné par l’auteur stages
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  59

Fig. 1  Nom donné par l’auteur, Frédéric Seguette and Jérôme Bel, © Herman
Sorgeloos

all of the ideal-typical elements of classical choreography. As a result, the

piece makes it clear that, on the level of choreography, the dancer is just
another object that exists as a means for the choreography to appear.
In an exhibition about Roland Barthes, which took place in the
autumn of 2002 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, one of the items on
display was a video recording of a piece by Jérôme Bel. The reason why
he made theatre and dance pieces, Bel was quoted as saying, was because
they enabled him to read Roland Barthes (Alphant 2002). In fact, Bel
has made repeated reference in a number of interviews to the French
thinker, whose analyses of and reflections on art and culture he has
applied to the field of dance. He even used Roland Barthes’ first book
(1953), Writing Degree Zero, as a template for his first pieces Nom donné
par l’auteur and Jérôme Bel (Siegmund 1998, 35). Where are the refer-
ences to Barthes in Bel’s work? Which terms and concepts does Bel zero
in on when he cites Barthes?
In Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes differentiates between three
concepts that characterize literary texts. For Barthes, language, style, and
60  G. Siegmund

the mode of writing or écriture are the three dimensions of the literary
form on which each writer relies in his or her own specific way. During a
discussion of Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre, Barthes uses the mode of writ-
ing in an attempt to develop the utopia of engaged literature, whose
engagement is founded in the form of the artwork rather than in its
struggle with social issues on the level of content (Ette 1998, 59–82).
First, language (langue) is, for Barthes, the general horizon of any pos-
sible utterance. Every writer is forced to fall back upon it; it is “merely a
reflex involving no choice, the undivided property of men, not of writ-
ers” (Barthes 1968, 9). Style is required to transform general language,
which belongs to nobody, into a writer’s own particular language. For
Barthes, style is almost like an impulse or a driving force. It is “a ger-
minative phenomenon, the transmutation of a Humour” (1968, 11).
Both language and style are a given, things familiar to the writer, one
historical, the other almost physiological, although the writer cannot use
them to articulate a social stance. This requires the third concept—that
of the mode of writing. Barthes develops an axis model, in which lan-
guage assumes the x-axis as familiarity with history, and style the y-axis
that leads into the writer’s past as a deeper layer. In contrast, the mode of
writing is a vector that transverses the others. It passes through language
and style and zeroes in on the historic and social location of writing.

A language and a style are blind forces; a mode of writing is an act of his-
torical solidarity. A language and a style are objects; a mode of writing is
a function: it is the relationship between creation and society, the literary
language transformed by its social finality, form considered as a human
intention and thus linked to the great crises of History. (1968, 14)

As a function, the mode of writing is, on the one hand, variable but, on
the other, always predetermined as a relational phenomenon. It plays out
between two elements, the literary work and society, and thus opens up
the closed model of self-referential art to its historic place and its social
necessity. The mode of writing is a kind of conscious strategy to behave
in a certain way at a certain moment. As has been pointed out in the
last section of the previous chapter, for Jérôme Bel this moment occurs
at a time when for many artists the institutionalisation of contemporary
dance in France had reached a creative impasse. This specific historical
moment in the middle of the 1990s for Bel necessitated a different mode
of thinking about dance and making dance pieces. As a strategy to shift
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  61

the vectors of the dispositf of contemporary dance, it prompted a neutral

or “degree zero” way of writing.
In Bel’s pieces, the function of the mode of writing comes to the
fore to the extent that it makes absent both a language of dance (in
the sense of a universally valid code and vocabulary of movement), and
a style in the sense of an expression, and shifts them into a position of
latency. Neither the choreographer expresses his or her personal style by
choreographing bodies and their movements in a certain way (a specific
movement combination, a particular sense of articulation or a preference
for flexing arms and feet) nor may the dancers develop a personal style
of dancing that would transform the choreographic material once it has
been taught and implemented in the dancers’ bodies. Bel formulates the
reasons for the absence of language and style with reference to his sec-
ond piece, Jérôme Bel, in the following way:

I wanted to avoid two things: the erotic body and the perfectly muscular
body, the body as a warrior. Sex and power: These are the two most domi-
nant representations of the body throughout our culture (not only in dance).
I have examined the body, the primary instrument of dance, with view to
how I can deny it its usual signs. (Siegmund 1998, 36, trans. Lydia White)

This quote sketches out a broader social horizon in which bodies in

general and dancing bodies in particular are victim to the market as dis-
cussed above in relation to Pina Bausch’s piece 1980 that decides the
value of their (sexual) potency and power to perform. The virtuosity
with which choreographers and dancers have been approaching different
techniques and styles since the explosion of free dance in the 1980s has
unified dance and the market. If beautiful bodies are everywhere, when
they dance incessantly in music videos and sell consumer products and
lifestyles in advertising, what remains of dance, whose instrument is pre-
cisely that body that is made potent through training and technique, but
should, as the modern era wanted, lead us back to (inner) truth or to
nature? In a society in which the flexibility and mobility of capital and
human beings have become imperative, dance, whose means of com-
munication is eternally flexible movement, is suspected of only depicting
the mechanisms of a globalised economy. It is against this backdrop that
Jérôme Bel’s mode of writing marks this exact moment of satiation and
renunciation to give stage dance back its freedom to reflect, which had
been lost when the market began occupying its principles.2
62  G. Siegmund

But how can we define this mode of writing more precisely? Bel does
not choose any of the general possibilities of movement, which in itself is
not a language, or any of the numerous languages of dance, for example
ballet or the techniques of modern and post-modern dance. Furthermore,
the purely functional movements that the figures carry out on the stage
in order to move the objects in Nom donné par l’auteur are in no way
uniquely formed or stylistically excessive. They are not laden with any
particular energy and are not performed with any intention other than
the fulfilment of their function. Movement does not come into focus as
something meaningful or as the choreographer’s and dancer’s individual
expression. The relationship between stage and auditorium is emphasized
in a desubjectified, objectified presentation of rules, which is central to
all of Jérôme Bel’s pieces. The absence of a language and style of dance
lets the mode of writing come to the fore in a way that drives the social
function of the theatre situation into the centre of the examination. The
absence of dance passes the metaphorical ball to the spectators, who are
no longer able to consume ideal bodies and beautiful souls. Instead, they
are forced to become aware of their position in relation to that which is
being shown as active teammates, partaking in the functional mechanisms
of our culture to the same extent as the dancers on the stage.
Bel’s first two pieces are the equivalent of that which Roland Barthes
describes as a “neutral mode of writing,” as “écriture blanche”, which he
believes he identifies in the writing of Albert Camus (1968, 76). To begin
with, the neutrality of the mode of writing is a liberation “from all bond-
age to a pre-ordained state of language” (ibid.). That which is unmarked
perseveres in the indicative mode, the mode of determination, and thus
rejects all unwanted complicity with any historical ballast or mythical lan-
guage, and therefore with language and style. It is located in the midst of
all the other emotional and instrumentalised modes of writing, of which
it partakes ex negativo as their absence, but “this absence is complete, it
implies no refuge, no secret” (ibid., 77). To the same extent that Barthes’
neutral basis language does not belong to literature or to everyday lan-
guage, Bel’s dance is far removed from both stage dance of any style and
everyday movement. It too ultimately has a form, and is presented on a
stage before an audience in spite of its indicative functionality.
The benefit of this conscious lack of history, in a double sense as
both the absence of narrated history and the absence of tradition, is a
kind of honesty that does not release the thinking of the writer or cho-
reographer—as the one who writes with movements—from his or her
responsibility.
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  63

If the writing is really neutral, and if language, instead of being a cumber-

some and recalcitrant act, reaches the state of a pure equation, which is
no more tangible than an algebra when it confronts the innermost part of
man, then Literature is vanquished, the problematics of mankind is uncov-
ered and presented without elaboration, the writer becomes irretrievably
honest. (ibid., 78)

Without any elegance or ornamentation, in Nom donné par l’auteur,

Jérôme Bel sets up algebraic equations: a yellow ball plus a red torch,
a banknote plus a salt shaker; or, more complexly: a book whose open
pages are laid around a chair leg equals the legs of a performer, or an
object plus a human body, and, finally: a dance piece minus dancing
equals choreography. The thing that is being hollowed out in order for
its density to be comparable with that of an algebraic formula is the idea
that the dancing body is able to express a truth that had existed indepen-
dently of its context or its symbolic constitution. The two dancers are
placed on the same level as the objects with which they form alternating
combinations, which hollows out the idea of subjectivity as something
that is intrinsically fulfilled. The subjects in Jérôme Bel’s piece mark an
absence that identifies the site of the subject within the symbolic order of
the theatre as a void or, as will be shown in the next section, a non-site.
Within the symbolic language of choreography, the subject is nothing
more than a shifter comparable with a personal pronoun, behind which
the subject’s experiences disappear the minute they become effable. As
objects, the subjects on the stage look at us as points within the symbolic
order to emphasise the order.
Only by going through the mathematical signs of the equations,
whose results cannot materialise independently of their respective (cho-
reographic) combinations in time, do we arrive at meaning. The existen-
tial dimension that the author in Nom donné par l’auteur lays open is
thus the unobtainability of the body, which is always framed linguistically
and distorted in its authenticity as a result. This absence becomes vis-
ible in the hollowing out of the stage space. This hollow marks the point
at which the symbolic order gazes at the spectators and speaks to them.
Bel’s play with the homonymy of nom, ‘name,’ and non, ‘no,’ marks the
entry of dance into the order of language in the negation of its other
possibilities. At the same time, it identifies Jérôme Bel as the founder, as
the ‘father’ of a discourse of dance that addresses the linguistic character
of bodies and choreography. In an act of nominalism, Bel calls this dance
64  G. Siegmund

and turns it into his proposition on dance. The task of finding the solu-
tions to the equations and operations falls solely to the spectators. Nom
donné par l’auteur is an attempt to open up potentials that rethink and
review the relationship between dance and the audience on the basis of
a neutral mode of writing. In this sense, Bel’s pieces advocate extending
the contract between stage and auditorium, which leads to the events on
stage no longer being viewed as a closed world, but rather understood
as an extension of the auditorium in its social and cultural conditionality.
In spite of his exhortations of écriture or mode of writing, Barthes in
Writing Degree Zero is not entirely averse to the promises of style that
produce a fresh take on the world. In Barthes’ words, style becomes a
corporeal phenomenon. “It is the Authority of style, that is, the entirely
free relationship between language and its fleshly double, which places
the writer above History as the freshness of Innocence” (Barthes 1968,
13). The notion of style being a body points to a contradiction or para-
dox that underlies not only Barthes’ but also Bel’s work. As Una Bauer
rightly points out in relation to Bel’s second piece Jérôme Bel, “what
could be less neutral than a naked human body on stage?” (2008a, 39)
It immediately summons up images of naked bodies both in art his-
tory and in other cultural contexts that symbolically clothe the per-
former on stage. Even a neutral mode of writing as a state-of-the-art
analysis of a given historical moment that dance found itself in cannot
avoid being a style. Bel’s sombre neutrality casts him as the founder of
the discourse Jérôme Bel: it is his style to address questions of repre-
sentation in dance by eliminating dance as a kinaesthetic phenomenon.
Bel’s style, despite his critical stance towards the invention of individual
movement in dance, functions in an avant-garde context, which appreci-
ates and expects individual positions in relation to dance, the breaking
of its rules and conventions to expand the possibilities of the field. In
short, it cherishes the ‘new.’ On an artistic level, the paradox between
écriture of a body that becomes a bearer of thought and the very mate-
riality of this body, the fleshly double of language that is not to be elimi-
nated, produces a tension underlying all of Jérôme Bel’s pieces. Despite
all the serial operations that structure the work, there are still bodies on
stage that move. “The force of the neutral that opposes its representation,
staged together with an attempt at its representation, nevertheless creates
a tension, a movement, a choreography between those two, which is the
true object of the performance” (Bauer 2008a, 39). It is precisely here
in this rift between écriture and style, between processes of signification
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  65

and the materiality of the seemingly neutral body, that Roland Barthes
discovers one of the leading concepts of his entire work: theatrical-
ity. Theatricality transforms materiality without ever exhausting it. It is
a movement between the material banality and signification, which may
never come to a close.

Between Art and Aesthetics: Conceptual Dance

Literally, Nom donné par l’auteur is the dictionary definition of the word
‘title.’ A title is a name that is bestowed by the author or artist onto the
work he or she wants to consider to be art or, in this case, dance. The act
of naming, which is a performative speech act that actually brings about
what it says, shifts the focus away from the sensual experience provided
by a work of art to its definition as art. If the artist calls it art then it is
art. Bel’s title, that is, the definition of the ‘title’ of a dance piece, has
very strong resonances with a series of works by one of the most promi-
nent conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s: Joseph Kosuth. From
1966 to 1968 Kosuth presented a series of works that all went by the
title “Titled (Art as Idea as Idea)” with a third element added to the
sequence to specify the idea: “‘Titled (Art as Idea as Idea)’ [Water]”,
“Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) [Painting]”, or “Titled (Art as Idea as Idea)
[Meaning].” Giving a dictionary definition of what are mostly abstract
terms such as “meaning,” Kosuth underlines the fact that art, above all,
is an idea and not an aesthetic experience. This idea, like in his famous
work from 1965, “One and Three Chairs,” may take various mate-
rial forms—the actual object, a picture, and a dictionary definition of a
chair—albeit these materialisations are not necessary for art to be art. In
fact, materialisations of the idea are, according to Kosuth’s idea of art,
irrelevant. “[A]rt’s viability is not connected to the presentation of visual
(or other) kinds of experience” (Kosuth 1999, 168). For Kosuth, ulti-
mately the materialisation of the concept adds nothing to the work of
art in its “art condition” (1999, 166). Art’s aesthetical dimension under-
stood as its phenomenological sensuality is extrinsic to art as art. It is
merely ornamental and as such says nothing about art, since, as has been
pointed out in the previous chapter, everyday objects may also provide
the viewer with an aesthetical experience. Kosuth’s “Titled” series draws
attention to the tautology that, for him, is the work “in that it is a pres-
entation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that a particular
work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art” (ibid., 165). The
66  G. Siegmund

actual materialisation of the idea beyond its linguistic indication, there-

fore, is superfluous or tautological.
For his linguistic nominalism, Kosuth draws on French avant-
garde artist Marcel Duchamp’s early twentieth century ready-mades
that caused a rupture within the system of art. From 1913 onwards,
Duchamps introduced prefabricated objects like the bicycle wheel or
the famous urinal into the world of art by signing them and declaring
them to be art. With Duchamps it was possible for the first time for art
to speak another language, because the ready-mades shifted the focus
away from the morphology or structure of the art work and its language
to its conception. His ready-mades were “a kind of proposition pre-
sented within the context of art as a comment on art” (Kosuth 1999,
165). What art after Duchamps does is to generate new propositions of
what art is or can be. “All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature)
because art only exists conceptually” (ibid., 164). What art then does
for Kosuth is to question the nature of art, its reality, identity, and its
definition. Art is a question about art. Questioning art here necessitates
the rejection of the divisions of artistic genres (painting, sculpture) the
acceptance of which already implies a tacit acquiescence in art’s tradition.
“If you make paintings,” Kosuth writes, “you are already accepting (not
questioning) the nature of art” (ibid., 163).
To translate Kosuth’s statement into the field of dance, the sentence
may read thus: “If you make dances, you are already accepting (and not
questioning) the nature of dance.” In this crucial respect, Jérôme Bel is
a conceptual dance artist. Bel does not simply make dances, but he ques-
tions the nature and identity of dance as an art form. He rejects the for-
malist preoccupation with the development and execution of movement
languages and styles for kinaesthetic effect. He abandons the formal sub-
divisions in legitimate concert dance styles from ballet, to modern or con-
temporary styles in favour of all kinds of movements from informal disco
dancing to other forms of social dancing and even, as the play of tennis
in The Last Performance indicates, to sports. His pieces on dance are pre-
sented in the context of art—the theatre—as a comment on dance that
rejects the distinctions between visual arts, theatre, and dance. As the title
Nom donné par l’auteur suggests, Bel’s works are linguistic propositions
about dance that progress from phrase to phrase, from piece to piece mak-
ing dance intelligible as a cultural formation. If each work of art concep-
tually is a definition of art, this definition carries the name of Jérôme Bel,
as the title of Bel’s second piece suggests. The definition of dance, which
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  67

are the pieces, are Bel’s definition: what he as author chooses to name and
propose about dance. The function of the author will be discussed in the
next section. It is not, however, a universal definition or truth of dance as
art, but his subjective view and a subjective perspective on dance.
Jérôme Bel is well aware of the conceptual implications of his work. In
his email conversation with Boris Charmatz he states that a conceptual
dance is “a text, some words that indicate a dance.” The dancers on stage
are there by his invitation to express his ideas on dance. But he goes on
to wonder about the accuracy of the label ‘conceptual dance’ to his own
or Charmatz’s work: “I have always thought that this label [concep-
tual dance, G.S.] that they (who, by the way?) gave us was problematic,
because, for the time being, we have never been able to reduce dance
simply to an idea. We are still encumbered by these stinking and aching
bodies stuffed with emotions. The concept is an idea; an idea expressed,
these are the words” (Bel and Charmatz 2013, 87, my transl.).
What sets Bel apart from Kosuth’s focus on the immateriality of the
concept as a Platonic idea, is his adamant refusal to give up the stage as
a site for dance’s materialisation. Bel has neither published nor exhibited
any of his scores, scripts, or notes that, in the strictest sense of concep-
tualism, would count as the work itself. The work, for Bel, is still the
performance; although, as we shall see in later sections of this book, just
what a performance is in his more recent pieces is a direct consequence
of his conceptualism (prone to some medial reworking). As the diction-
ary and the four letters in Nom donné par l’auteur, language figures
prominently in all of Jérôme Bel’s pieces. But it is part of the perfor-
mance not merely to define dance as an idea, but as material that shapes
and changes the perception and meaning of the other elements present
on stage, most importantly of the bodies. Above all, language has a mate-
riality of its own. Like the chalk writings and lipstick traces of Jérôme Bel
or the slogans printed on t-shirts in Shirtology, the materiality of language
adds to the tactile dimension of the performance, highlighting the ten-
derness of the skin, tickling the ear with the sound of writing or drawing,
or stipulating the pleasure of the spectator in detecting meanings.
What Bel points out here, is, in general terms, the failure of Kosuth’s
notion of a “purer” conceptualism that for its effectiveness nonetheless
depended on some kind of materialisation of the idea. Kosuth’s “Titled”
series, for instance, consisted of photocopied pages from actual diction-
aries with the definitions of the words cut out and enlarged. The size
of the typeset, as well as the size of the copies hung on the walls like
68  G. Siegmund

paintings, varied according to the exhibition space. The failure of pure

conceptual art is, however, as Peter Osborne argues, conceptualism’s
great artistic success and legacy: “It was the ironic historical achievement
of the strong programme of ‘analytical’ or ‘pure’ conceptual art to have
demonstrated the ineliminability of the aesthetic as a necessary, though
radically insufficient, component of the artwork through the failure of
its attempt at its elimination: the failure of the absolute anti-aesthetic”
(Osborne 2013, 49). As a consequence of this failure, the characteristic
ontology of the artwork is double. It consists of an idea, which is con-
ceptual and linguistic, and of an aesthetic surplus that is material. The
relationship between the two dialectical sides is either tautological, giv-
ing rise to a mute ‘thereness’ or ‘thusness’ of the material in its almost
tautological aesthetic self-presentation, or semiological in its modes of
explication and signification. In either case, the respective other side of
this duplicity is, depending on the focus of the viewer, tentatively effaced:
signification makes the material absent and the presence of the mate-
rial occludes its meaning. It is precisely at this paradoxical juncture that
Roland Barthes situates his concept of theatricality. The ultimate failure
of a “purer” conceptionalism in the case of Jérôme Bel makes way for,
as I argue in the last section of this chapter, theatricality. Theatricality is
what happens inbetween the duplicity of the artworks post-conceptual
mode of being. Theatricality has no ontology. It is an operative function.
Once again, as with the paradox of style and écriture discussed in the pre-
vious section, the paradox between art’s conceptual and aesthetic dimen-
sions produces an opening that serves as a site for analysing the condition
of art and dance and their ways of meaning production and modes of
perception. This paradox has been explored by other conceptual artists,
especially by Robert Smithson, the legendary North American landscape
artist who died in 1973 at the age of 35 in a plane crash. In his work
Smithson explores the paradox between materiality and signification,
which I call theatricality, in relation to the notion of space. Looking at
Smithson’s writings allows us to conceptionalise Jérôme Bel’s use of the
theatre space as a “non-site” for the production of meaning.

Between Site and Non-site: The Empty Stage

As the series of images of theatres at the beginning of the piece Gala
demonstrate, Jérôme Bel is fascinated by the empty theatre or stage. The
empty stage figures in all of his pieces. During The Last Performance the
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  69

action on stage is continuously reduced, until towards the end of the

performance the stage remains almost empty. In The Show Must Go On
the stage remains entirely empty for the frist 10 minutes. In this produc-
tion the emptiness engulfs all the episodes as everything that happens on
stage is visibly set in an emptiness surrounding and foregrounding the
action and the bodies. The emptiness literally releases individual bodies
and the scenes they create by interaction. It allows them to emerge, but
it also withdraws them, takes them away, almost swallowing them up into
the darkness. Jérôme Bel extracts his proposition of what dance is from
this very emptiness at the same time putting something—the show—in
its place while all the time drawing attention to the emptiness that facili-
tates it. By doing so, he produces multiple spaces between the perform-
ers, between performers and objects, between performers and writing,
and above all, between the performers and the members of the audience.
The idea of the empty stage, that for theatre director Peter Brook
was one of the bare necessities for theatre to take place, here develops
a more conceptual implication. Conceptually the empty stage comes
close to what American visual artist Robert Smithson with regard to the
museum called a “non-site”. For Smithson, tying in with Bel’s warn-
ing that a pure conceptualism misses the material side of the artwork,
“conceptual art which depends completely on written data is only half
the story; it only deals with the mind and it has to deal with the mate-
rial too” (Smithson 1996, 194). In the late 1960s, Smithson visited the
industrial landscapes around New Jersey collecting rocks, gravel, and
other materials that he then displayed in a gallery. He put his findings
into either wooden or metal boxes on the gallery floor, literally framing
them while hanging up maps, drawings, and photographs of the actual
sites on the walls above the boxes. In an interview, Smithson explains,
that “instead of putting something on the landscape, I decided it would
be interesting to transfer the land indoors, to the Non-site, which is an
abstract container” (ibid., 178). “Non-site” here comes to mean the
concrete boxes the material is presented in. By extension, it also refers
to the gallery or museum as an “abstract container” that collects and
displays all kinds of things that are eventually called art. In both cases,
the actual site is excluded. The “non-site” literally puts the site out of
sight replacing it with its framed representation in an actual container of
steel in a museum space. The photographs and maps of the site accom-
panying the rocks instigate a dialectical relation between the site and the
abstract non-site, the outside and the inside, the things seen and not
70  G. Siegmund

seen. Smithson goes on to encourage the passage between the non-site

and the site when he advocates that tours between the non-site and the
site are possible. In his short text “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites,”
Smithson specifies that these tours may not be actual tours, but can also
be a “fictitious trip.” Visiting the site of the non-site creates a “meta-
phorical space” that produces all kinds of information, “therefore, one
might call it a non-trip to the site of a non-site” (1996, 364). Here,
the notion of “non-site” refers to more than absence by representation.
The non-site is not only the actual container that represents the (absent)
landscape, but is “an essentially abstract cognitive experience,” which
recodes “the gallery/museum as a negation of both ‘site’ and ‘sight’”
(Osborne 2013, 112). It is this double signification of the non-site that
needs to be taken into account for what is at stake here. In the first step
of the operation the theatre as a conceptual non-site relates to the site
that is the outside world. In Nom donné par l’auteur the four letters N,
S, O, and E that stand for the four directions indicate the relation to the
outside, not only representing it metaphorically, but actually designating
a contiguous relationship with the spaces outside, which extend to the
inside of the theatrical space. In the second step, the theatrical non-site
turns into a site itself because it allows for the staging and materialisa-
tion of concrete sites—performances—that again are dialectically linked
to their non-site outside the theatre. Thus, what on one level is non-site
on the other becomes site and vice versa.
If the non-site is always in a dialectical relation to the site, then site-spe-
cific performances are dependent on the concept of the non-site, too. They
need to be conceptual non-sites first in order to be able to distinguish the
site they produce by their artistic intervention from the everyday use of the
site. Vice versa, the site is always also part of the non-site as it is the mate-
rial from which concepts of sites may be extrapolated. Conceptually the
site belonging to the concept of the non-site implies that sites may materi-
alise anywhere, in no particular place and in no particular time.3 The sites
may also be instantiated in various medial shapes and guises. Their dual
status as non-sites guarantees their status as works of art, however tenuous
this may become in the negotiation between non-site and site.
In the vein of Smithson, I argue here that the empty stage negates the
world “as both ‘site’ and ‘sight.’” Following this logic, theatrical rep-
resentation as a non-site, which puts the world out of sight, offers the
spectators a number of fictitious trips from the outside to the inside and
back. Thus, theatrical representation is not a mirror of the world, but a
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  71

concept of the world. The theatre is a space where concepts may mate-
rialise. The concept of modern dance with its idea of kinaesthetic com-
munication is one just like Jérôme Bel’s concept of dance as cultural
discourse is another. The very first operation of the “non-site,” according
to Smithson, is to set up a limit: a box within a gallery space (Smithson
1996, 193). This limit may be concrete—the demarcated space of a
box—but also conceptual, “an essentially abstract cognitive experience”
as Peter Osborne puts it, the limit between outside (site) and inside (non-
site) that allows for multiple crossings to produce meaning. The non-site
extends to the mental space of the spectators due to the gap or distance
between the non-site and the site. Similarly, what theatre as non-site puts
in place is first of all a limit: it demarcates a room within a room (the
stage), the border of which may be crossed mentally by acts of imagina-
tion that produce memories and fictions about the world. In more con-
ceptual terms, the non-site is not the theatrical representation, but the
theatre as theatre. The empty theatre that Bel displays is already an archi-
tectural materialisation of the non-site as a limit, a framed inside even
when it takes place outside in the open air, that holds multiple relations
to the outside that it (re)-presents. What counts as the outside, then, is
also always brought about by the operations of the non-site. The non-site
allows for views on and orientations towards the site. The re-introduc-
tion of the outside, the social world, to the inside of the theatre space that
Jérôme Bel’s later productions with non-professional dancers show, pro-
vide multiple ways for dance to imagine itself as a contemporary form of
art. Bel does not pretend to abolish the non-site that is the theatre, but
he actively and conceptually engages with it. Visiting the site of dance, he
extrapolates his concept of dance from its history, practices, and modes
of representation that he presents as a non-site on the empty stage. He
thereby emphasises that all dance is conceptual in nature despite its ideo-
logical tendency to negate its conceptual status in dance modernism.
The dialectical relation between non-site and site and the fictitious
trips it facilitates opens up a gap for the spectator or visitor to become
active, producing, as Smithson notes, “material devoid of natural mean-
ings and realistic assumptions” (Smithson 1996, 364). Instead of fill-
ing the emptiness of the stage with imaginary worlds that negate the
darkness as their condition of being, Bel exposes it. The visible rela-
tion between non-site and site as a consequence puts the actual act of
signification on display. It puts it on display as an oscillation between
what the non-site materialises as leftovers (bodies, gestures, words) and
72  G. Siegmund

the re-signification the material triggers by references to the original

site (the culture it is taken from). Again, the ugly head of theatricality
that Michael Fried dreaded so much raises its head. Putting the act of
signification on display engages the body and mind of the spectator in
the lived time-space of his actual visit to the non-site that is the theatre
and his imaginary visit to the site that is in its largest sense the realm of
culture. Showing the act of signification is a theatrical act that takes place
between the signs of representation that code the body and its move-
ments and the actual, literal site and its material dimensions of the mute
and nude body itself. In the process, signification de-materialises the site
by re-signifying it, while at the same time signification is shown to be
inadequate or never ending, since the material site or body is inexhaust-
ible becoming material for future possible non-sites.
The act of signification that shows itself drawing attention to itself
while it is underway has implications for the notion of subjectivity that
emerges as a consequence of this operation. Art critic Lawrence Alloway
pointed out the similarity between Smithson’s concept of the non-site
and language. “The relation of a Nonsite to the Site is also that of lan-
guage to the world: it is a signifier and the Site is that which is signi-
fied” (Alloway 1975, 42). Thus, language is a non-site just as the theatre
is a non-site. Both are non-human, machine-like abstract structures or
apparatuses that facilitate subjectivity by offering the subject-to-be a site
that it can occupy and speak from. It is worth pointing out here that
gender theorist Judith Butler in her theory of subjectivity calls the sub-
ject precisely that, namely a “site”: “Individuals come to occupy the site
of the subject (the subject simultaneously emerges as a ‘site’), and they
enjoy intelligibility only to the extent that they are, as it were, first estab-
lished in language” (Butler 1997, 10–11). Thus, the empty theatre is the
equivalent to a linguistic proposition that hails the subject and provides a
space for the subject-to-be. The subject assumes its place in language as
it does in the theatre. In doing so, it is first of all the retroactive effect of
a discourse, a conceptual non-site that simultaneously enables and sub-
jugates it. Throughout his career the connection between language and
the empty theatre as non-sites and the dancing and performing bodies
they produce is crucial to Jérôme Bel’s work. By emphasising the con-
ceptual side of the operation of subjectivation in the first phase of his
work from 1994 to 2004, Jérôme Bel’s subjects are foremost subjects
of discourse. As in Nom donné par l’auteur, they are carriers of thought
rather than agents in their own right. The dancing subject is a subject
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  73

of discourse, negating the idea of a natural kinaesthetic communication

between bodies.

Xavier Le Roy (2000): The Author-Function

The failure of conceptual art to eliminate the sensual dimension of art-
works is also the failure of the artist or author as controller of mean-
ing. The rupture between the artist’s intentions, which for Kosuth is
the work of art, and their material manifestation sets meaning adrift and
makes its processes of production visible by staging them. The process
of reception of a work of art, which for Barthes is theatrical, is in prin-
ciple always open, unbound, and never ending. Whereas conceptual art,
at least in Kosuth’s terms, tends to strengthen the figure of the artist as
author, Jérôme Bel has a different concept of authorship. For him an
author is not a God-like controller of meaning, but a figure in the dis-
course of dance. How this notion of authorship can be described is the
topic of the following section.
The question of the authorship of his pieces and, moreover, of what
it even means to be an author in the field of dance is directly discussed
in Xavier Le Roy. While it is Jérôme Bel’s piece, it was realised by his
colleague and friend, Berlin-based dancer and choreographer Xavier Le
Roy. Like Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy is also named after a choreographic
personality, who, however, is not the author of the piece but its chore-
ographer. The piece premiered on 26 April 2000 at the Time Festival
in Ghent, Belgium. The performance begins while the stage is still dark
with Bernard Hermann’s music for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. After
a few minutes, a spotlight illuminates a chair and a black screen, before
a figure in running shoes, grey trousers, a blue shirt and a blonde wig,
whose hair covers its face, suddenly storms onto the stage. It runs, its
hands excitedly pressed on its cheeks, criss-crosses the playing field and
finally falls to the floor behind the screen with a scream. Shortly after-
wards, it runs off again and crashes into a chair that falls to the floor
with it. Just like the way that poor James Stewart suffers a breakdown
in Hitchcock’s classic film after his sudden, uncanny encounter with
the doppelgänger of a woman he is supposed to be following, for a
long time, the spectators in Xavier Le Roy do not know whether they
are watching a solo or a duo. After the music has subsided, the figure
comes out from behind the wall and exits the stage. The whole course
of events plays out in the following forty minutes on this approximately
74  G. Siegmund

three-metre-long strip, which, from the audience’s perspective, is bor-

dered by the screen on the right and by the chair on the left.
With every repetition, the figure in the blond wig demonstrates
another easily recognisable pose: Charlie Chaplin’s walk, the Nazi salute,
Michael Jackson’s moonwalk, Jesus’ crucifixion, Marlene Dietrich in
the film The Blue Angel, the way that basketball player Michael Jordan
jumps, the way that Napoleon held his hands, Marilyn Monroe above
the ventilation shaft, and the posture of the ape in Stanley Kubrick’s
film 2001: A Space Odyssey, followed by the figure simply walking up
and down, standing, sitting, and lying down—all with its back to the
audience (Fig. 2). With every pose, the figure dares to move further
toward the chair, which it carries onto the stage to sit upon again and
again for the Marlene Dietrich citation. Between Jesus and Napoleon,
it walks onto the stage with its hands in front of its face. This scene,
similar to the ones in which the figure is merely walking or even stand-
ing still, immediately raises the question of whether simple almost eve-
ryday actions such as these are also citations from cultural memory,

Fig. 2  Xavier Le Roy, Strike the Pose! © Katrin Schoof

 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  75

whether they too were performed by famous personalities who turned

them into iconic gestures that we simply cannot identify right now.
But whether or not they are famous, they are all citations, because,
ultimately, every person stands, walks, sits, or lies down every day in
some way or other. In the next scene, the figure uses its feet to meas-
ure the distance between the screen and the chair, but when the dis-
tance is measured the second time, it is no longer the same length. A gap
remains between the chair and the foot, which the figure bridges by sim-
ply pulling the chair toward itself. A third time, one foot is placed right
in front of the other. But this time the distance is too small. Without
further ado, the figure takes off its shoes and socks and attempts to make
the distance fit its steps this way. At the end, it puts its shoes and socks
back on, takes the chair and disappears behind the screen.
To everybody’s surprise, two identically dressed figures then step out
from behind the screen with bowed heads. After the secret has been
revealed, the citation sequence is repeated with smaller omissions and
changes to the order: once with clothing and once naked, although
Frédéric Seguette and Pascale Paoli do not carry out their poses gen-
der specifically. At the end, a figure cloaked in grey appears, a neutrum,
which simply swallows all of the differences that had been unfurled
between the spectators’ first naive and second informed viewing. With
every repetition, additional information about the construction of the
piece is made available to the spectators. Thus, during the first repetition
they know that there are two figures and, during the second, that one is
being played by a man and the other by a woman. They can thus check
what they have seen in retrospect: whether there were already gender-
specific differences in the simple poses and walks or whether they only
construed these differences retrospectively on the basis of new informa-
tion. What Xavier Le Roy stages in Jérôme Bel’s name in Xavier Le Roy
is, of course, just as much a scam as in the case of Vertigo. It is a frenzy
of identities that are only cited from the archives of our cultural memory,
which also stores our everyday gestures. It is also a betrayal of the specta-
tor’s perception, which is constantly made to compare minimal differ-
ences in order to sound out the spaces between them.
The vertiginous thrill caused by the doppelgänger motif in
Hitchcock’s film also underlies Xavier Le Roy. Xavier Le Roy who cho-
reographed the piece functions as the doppelgänger of Jérôme Bel who
claims authorial rights for the production. His name represents the
author in the piece, who remains absent from the scene, in which the
76  G. Siegmund

choreographer Xavie Le Roy, too, is doubled by a performer, Frédéric

Seguette, who in turn is doubled by Pascale Paoli. The fact that they are
all doppelgängers of each other destabilises identities and throws them
into the abyss like the character of Madeleine falls down from the tower
at the end of Vertigo to meet her death. All the players in the field are
stand-ins. They are functions or positions in the field that may be occu-
pied by various individuals. Structurally speaking, the piece in its inner
communications system (the level of the represented, its content) carries
out preciesely the same operation that characterises its outer system of
communication (on the level of representation or discourse). Form and
content are also doppelgängers of each other. The piece plays with the
identity of the figures and it plays with the identity of the author as a
function, as a structural position within the field of dance  that marks the
piece’s transition to social discourse. So how do we understand the way
that Jérôme Bel thinks about the problem of authorship? By negating
any language or style of dance in the sense of an individual forming of
movement, Jérôme Bel takes leave of the parameters of dance modern-
ism, to which the authorship of movement also belongs. Instead, Jérôme
Bel insists upon the absence of the author Jérôme Bel from his pieces as
an orginiator of movement and a biographical person.
For Michel Foucault, the concept of the author is, firstly, “a privileged
moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, and lit-
erature, or in the history of philosophy and science […]” (Foucault
1977, 115). Certain texts and even whole discourses, such as psychoanal-
ysis or Marxism, are attributed as works to certain individuals, who stand
at the origin of texts or discourses as guarantors of their truth. Author
and work form a unity in the classical hermeneutic tradition. Texts can
be interpreted and dark areas illuminated with recourse to the author as a
person, to his or her life, environment, personality, preferences, and even
his or her unconscious desires. Moreover, the term author serves to unite
particular texts as an overall work. “Such a name permits one to group
together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from
and contrast them to others. In addition, it establishes a relationship
among the texts” (ibid., 123).
Within this context, Foucault also differentiates between the proper
name, which names an individual that it also descriptively equips with
certain qualities, and the author’s name, which does not, as in the exam-
ple of a pseudonym, necessarily refer to an individual, but rather to an
ensemble of texts understood as a work. “[T]he link between a proper
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  77

name and the individual being named and the link between an author’s
name and that which it names are not isomorphous and do not func-
tion in the same way” (ibid., 122). Between work and individual lies the
name of the author, which is different to both of them as it fulfils a spe-
cific social function:

It points to the existence of certain groups of discourse and refers to the

status of this discourse within a society and culture. The author’s name is
not a function of a man’s civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the
breach, among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of dis-
course and their singular mode of existence. (ibid., 123)

The author marks the break in a text between the writer as a person and
the narrator. Personal pronouns or proper names in a text, which seem
to function as the author’s place holders, thus do not refer to a real indi-
vidual. The function of the author “simultaneously gives rise to a variety
of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class
may come to occupy”. (ibid., 131)
The individualization associated with the concept of the author does
not apply to the individual who wrote the text, but rather to its function
within a social discourse that obeys certain rules, brings certain materials
to light and comprises a certain sum of utterances, which, in turn, con-
stitute the discourse. The name of the author distinguishes one group of
discourses from another. Michel Foucault defines discourse as a regula-
tory apparatus that determines which utterances out of all the possible
utterances will be acceptable within a certain academic discipline or field
of knowledge (Foucault 1980, 197). By policing what counts as a valid
or true utterance within a “given scientific field,” discourse produces
knowledge by ordering its elements according to certain underlying prin-
ciples. It produces subject positions like the ones of dancer, author, or
spectator. To safeguard the identity of the discourse and its elements,
it produces and implies certain power relations. Because discourse is
unruly, infinite, and possesses many voices it needs to be controlled. In
The Order of Discourse, Foucault distinguishes between external social
forces and internal forces that control discourse. Amongst the social
procedures that control a discourse are the exclusion of certain topics
or statements, taboo topics such as sexuality or power, the control over
who has the right to speak about what at what time, and the drawing
up of the distinction between reason and its opposite, madness. Internal
78  G. Siegmund

protocols of control are mainly concerned with making the discourse

scarce. Procedures of rarification include commentary on texts, which
simply repeat and reinforce what is already known, the establishment
of academic disciplines, which regulate what is a true or false statement
within its parameters, and, finally, the implementation of an author-figure
who controls meaning (Foucault 1981, 52–54).
If ‘Jérôme Bel’ is a discourse on dance, this discourse, too, follows
certain rules and regulations that establish its borders. Thus the discourse
that is called ‘Jérôme Bel’ consists of certain topics, such as the socio-
cultural constitution of bodies in performative acts and their representa-
tion in the theatre, and has a certain relationship to the history of dance
and to mediatised society. At the same time, it excludes manifestations
of original movements and statements of free or improvised movement
and expressive dancing subjects. There might not be a taboo subject, but
there are taboo images of the body that delimit the discourse. Overtly
sexualised bodies as well as aggressive and powerful bodies do not figure
in ‘Jerôme Bel.’ The discourse, however, does include quotations from
popular culture. It also contains certain rules that link the statements in
such a way that they can become the statements of this discourse. Thus,
the material is organised in multiple series without transitions or natu-
ral flow. Finally, this discourse includes a series of statements such as the
pieces Nom donné par l’auteur, which carried out the separation of indi-
vidual and author; Jérôme Bel; Shirtology; Le dernier spectacle; The Show
Must Go On; and, of course, Xavier Le Roy, too. If, as Foucault suggests,
the name of the author can be a kind of collective term for different
individuals, Xavier Le Roy can also situate himself within the discourse
‘Jérôme Bel,’ provided he follows Bel’s rules of discourse. But he does
not appear within this discourse as a person, but rather as a name, as a
title with which he signs the statements made, just like Jérôme Bel signs
the piece on the next, higher level of the discourse as the author.
In Xavier Le Roy, Xavier Le Roy availed himself of the rules of the
discourse ‘Jérôme Bel’ and subjugated himself as a choreographic sub-
ject. Even while describing the piece, it is easy to see that Xavier Le Roy
resembles other pieces by Jérôme Bel such as The Last Performance.
Similar to the function of the screen behind which the two figures dis-
appear in Xavier Le Roy, the black cloth from The Last Performance, is
used to hide the figures and the dancing. The gestures of famous person-
alities are cited as a summons to the cultural memory of the spectators
who are able to read the gestures and bodies. The gestures are repeated
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  79

but with differences with every repetition, until the scenes increasingly
peter out. Using these simple, everyday gestures that everybody recog-
nises, the realisation of the piece is ultimately left to the spectators. The
grey figure at the end, the neutrum lying down on the floor with its back
to the audience like a lump of flesh, also offers itself up as both a projec-
tion screen for remembering certain gestures and as a void, into which
the spectators can place themselves and their own bodies. This grey fig-
ure is also reminiscent of Le Roy’s lifeless body in his own piece Self-
Unfinished, a figure that absorbs all meanings within its lifeless form. The
play with perception exemplarily set in motion here is more of a topic in
pieces by Xavier Le Roy. In the discourse ‘Jérôme Bel,’ this game refers
to the discourse ‘Xavier Le Roy’, a trace of which inscribes itself in the
other discourse. Ultimately, the only rule for the way that the scenes are
enchained is that the scenes are ordered as separate images without cho-
reographing or staging their transitions. By following these rules, Xavier
Le Roy can make statements in the field of the discourse ‘Jérôme Bel’.4
The name of the author is only an empty shape that settles around
the biological-individual body of the choreographer like a second sym-
bolic body. Other artists such as Xavier Le Roy can affiliate themselves
with the choreographic body ‘Jérôme Bel’ and its specific mode of writ-
ing, in order to produce a text that rejects the modernist demand for
the originality and singularity of movement. The person of the author,
which overlaps with the work in dance modernism, is made absent here.
The hallmark of the choreographer as a person is “the singularity of his
absence and […] his link to death, which has transformed him into a
victim of his own writing” (Foucault 1977, 117). In this regard, Jérôme
Bel does not stage the death of the author, but merely the death of the
author as an individual. Together with Xavier Le Roy, he draws attention
to the author function as the initiator of a discourse. He therefore does
not advocate the abolition of the author, but proposes a different notion
of the author instead, which is based upon the social relevance of certain
statements. From the point of view of discourse it is not important which
person says what, but rather what can be or rather cannot be said within
a particular discourse at a given historical time.
Foucault’s text on authorship was written in 1969. Roland Barthes
celebrated the death of the author as a person one year earlier in 1968,
but did not assign his function over to discourse as Foucault did, but
rather to the reader, who for Barthes becomes the actual producer of the
text. This is accompanied by a modified notion of what a text is, which,
80  G. Siegmund

departing from his analysis of Honoré de Balzac’s tale Sarrasine, he no

longer wants to see reduced to a mere structure. Barthes advocates—by
all means revising his own structural analyses, which he had driven to a
high point in 1967 with Système de la Mode—an open text concept.

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theo-
logical’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimen-
sional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend
and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable
centres of culture (Barthes 1977a, 146).

The main momentum of a text, which opens up a space in which

multiple cultural codes intersect, is no longer based on the past of an
author-person who has hidden a secret message within the text. Instead,
the text is aimed at a reader who follows its codes, unravels, and traces
them, without attempting to fix a singular meaning. The reader thus
becomes “the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing
are inscribed without any of them being lost […]” (1977a, 148).
That which applies to the reader in the here and now of the act of
reading, also applies to the writer, who, for Barthes, replaces the tradi-
tional author.

For him [that is, the writer, G.S.], on the contrary, the hand, cut off from
any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression),
traces a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than
language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.
(1977a, 146)

The writer is born at the same time as the text. He creates it as a perform-
ative act, but is by no means able to control or arrest its effects or the pro-
duction of meaning. He becomes, as Foucault writes, “a victim of his own
writing” because he is forced to avail himself of the language that will
make him disappear. It does so by essentially separating him from himself,
his intentions and feelings, by way of its supra-individual structure.
For Jérôme Bel, as a reader of Roland Barthes, this means that he
too writes texts that are woven from multiple cultural codes. Unlike in
the tradition of modernist dance, these texts are not the unique expres-
sions of their creator or the unique mediation of impressions. He is
absent from these texts as an author-person in a specific way, whereby
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  81

the specific nature of his absence grounds his author discourse, his field
of statements that are his productions. In the play of signs, as the fig-
ure ‘Jérôme Bel’, he is just one code among many that weaves itself into
the text and shifts within it. Ideally, instead of ‘Jérôme Bel’ or ‘Xavier
Le Roy’, any other name could also enter the game of the production
of meaning. In the play of signs, of language, props, and costume parts,
which identify the figures presented as certain people, the name of the
author is also just one thread that crosses the text in a reciprocal process
of positing and cancelling out identity. However, the success of this oper-
ation ultimately depends on the market. Foucault argues that a discourse
is primarily an action situated in various social fields structured by binary
oppositions like holy and profane, lawful and unlawful. With the consoli-
dation of bourgeois culture during the 19th century the author became
a legal figure within “a system of ownership and strict copyright rules”
(Foucault 1977, 124–125) with stakes in the market of circulating goods
and values. At the same time, Foucault continues, the element of risk to
speak up inherent in the origin of any kind of discourse was transferred
to the imperative that the auhor’s discourse be transgressive expanding
the borders of what literaure or art can do and say. The author function
therefore is caught up in a paradox or double-bind of law-abiding and
law-transgression. However transgressive or critical of its own rules Bel’s
discourse on dance may be, it is still part of a bourgeois market economy
that attributes value to the author figure. If the author is a function of a
discourse and not primarily an individual person, anybody who partici-
pates as a dancer or, like Xavier Le Roy, even as a choreographer in the
discourse ‘Jérôme Bel’ will still be subsumed under the name ‘Jérôme
Bel.’ This name and discourse, which traverses the field of dance, is a
powerful one with stakes in the market of dance, its programming pro-
tocols, and the gain in cultural capital that goes with increased touring,
visibility, and the discursive medial practices accompanying it. Here, too,
the author function is far from being neutral or purely conceptual. It has
material consequences, which will resurface in my discussions of Bel’s
solo pieces for dancers. I hold that Bel makes these implications explicit
by turning them into the subject of his pieces. He addresses the author
function and lays bare its contradictions while not being able to tran-
scend them completely. Bereft of any kind of imaginary resolution that
would hide them behind a screen of beautiful and inventive movements,
these contradictions become apparent as a structural impasse grounding
his work, or, for that matter, the work of any other choreographer.
82  G. Siegmund

Between Materiality and Signification: Theatricality

The previous discussions of Jérôme Bel’s attempt to formulate a zero
degree of performing and its conceptual implications have all lead to
the notion of theatricality. What the faultlines of Roland Barthes’ rela-
tion between écriture and style, of Joseph Kosuth’s relation between art
and aesthetics, and Robert Smithson’s relation between non-site and site
revealed is the restless transformation of material engaged in the processes
of signification and re-signification that stages itself. Smithson himself
speaks of the site as being at “degree zero (…) where absences become
apparent” (Smithson 1996, 194), absences that are redoubled “in this
dialectic of inner and outer, closed and open, centre and peripheral. It
just goes on constantly permuting itself into this endless doubling”
(ibid., 193). The following section deals with the concept of theatrical-
ity as an operation set in motion precisely by this endless doubling. If the
discourse ‘Jérôme Bel’ produces a certain type of dancing subjects (the
dancer as bearer of thoughts), authors (the author as function in a dis-
course), it also produces certain spectator-positions. Jérôme Bel’s specta-
tor is a spectator that produces theatricality in the process of reception.
British theatre director Tim Etchells once remarked that the perform-
ers in Jérôme Bel’s pieces are perfectly at ease with the fact that they are
being looked at. “No matter what, they somehow appear—as a stran-
ger once said to me—‘comfortable in their skins’, resigned to the act of
being watched.” According to Etchells, Bel “understands that theatre is a
frame (game) constructed so that people can look at other people. He is
good at constructing frames like these; deceptively transparent unfolding
vantage points on the faces, bodies and movements of human beings.”
(Etchells 2004, 12). Tim Etchells’ observation links Bel’s work to the
“performance problem” that Yvonne Rainer had to deal with in her work
as well as to the repetition and showing of movement with Pina Bausch.
Bel’s performers exist because they are looked at. As in Gala, they are
exposed to the gaze of the audience.
The concept of theatricality in theatre and performance studies carries
a multitude of definitions that do not always concur. In a materialist tra-
dition, theatricality becomes a tool for analysing social processes and the
production of knowledge. As is still evident in words like ‘lecture thea-
tre’ or ‘operation theatre,’ theatricality is considered to be instrumental
in the generation and diffusion of knowledge (Sawday 1995). As in the
anatomical theatres of the Early Modern period, knowledge about the
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  83

body is no longer given by the authorities in the field, but is produced by

theatrical procedures such as staging, spatially deploying, and displaying
parts of the body in front of an audience to the effect of producing sen-
sual evidence and affective reactions. Theatricality becomes a metaphor
for (analytical) thinking. In social anthropology theatricality pervades all
kinds of social relations where the term comes to denote coded behav-
iour that aims at achieving certain results in a communicative situation.
As literary scholar Elizabeth Burns and sociologist Erving Goffman have
pointed out, it is composed behaviour that uses rhetorical devices or role
play as authentificating effects (Féral 2002, 6; Carlson 2002, 240). It is
thus linked to what Judith Butler, more than twenty years later in rela-
tion to her theory of gender, named performativity as the inscription of
social conventions in the body by repetition of social norms and conven-
tions. This inscription happens behind people’s backs; performativity is
impersonal and unavoidable. In Butler’s logic, ultimately all bodies are
theatrical, because they are constituted performatively, yet their theatri-
cality is covered up by normalising strategies. Thus, performance, or as
we may add, theatre as a conscious and intentional act (as opposed to
performativity’s all pervasive power), as Butler pointed out, may be help-
ful in uncovering and deferring, of undoing and opening up normalised
behaviour and gender relations (Butler 1993, 234).
For Goffman and Burns theatricality begins to operate every time
human beings stage themselves and their behaviour. As a consequence,
theatricality is constitutive for all kinds of social relations. Bringing
the concept closer to the theatre as a form of art, theatricality denotes
a specific way of using signs that are both culturally and historically
specific. From a semiotic perspective, German theatre scholar Erika
Fischer-Lichte defines theatricality as a shift in the dominant func-
tion of signs: “Theatricality may be defined as a particular mode of
using signs or as a particular kind of semiotic process in which particu-
lar signs (human beings and objects of their environment) are employed
as signs of signs—by their producer or their recipient. Thus a shift of
the dominance within the semiotic functions determines when theat-
ricality appears” (Fischer-Lichte in Féral 2002, 7). This shift towards
signs in the second degree produces a separation of the habitual rela-
tions between signs and the meanings they produce. Theatrical signs are
mobile, they relocate and reconnect to other signs and systems of signs
in unforeseen combinations to once again open up the process of mean-
ing production.
84  G. Siegmund

French-Canadien theatre scholar Josette Féral, on the other hand,

clearly locates theatricality on the side of the spectator and the gaze. For
theatricality to become productive, it has to be recognised by the specta-
tor. It has to be seen. If he or she does not make it operative, it does not
exist regardless of the mise-en-scène. In order to make sure that the spec-
tator recognises it, theatre directors employ a range of signs, the most
obvious of which is the curtain that opens at the beginning of a perfor-
mance. For Féral theatricality is already in operation on a deeper level
on which it appeals to the subject’s ability to imagine and to transform
reality. As with Elizabeth Burns and Judith Butler, theatricality is clearly
linked to subjectivity. It plays an important role in the production of
subjectivity and therefore involves not only signs and their play of mean-
ing. It also involves the subject’s desire to see, to play, to project, and to
imagine thereby transforming reality into potential sites and sights.
Féral’s shift away from the sign to the gaze of the spectator implies
that theatricality is instrumental in the production of space. The gaze of
the spectator carves out another space within everyday space. The gaze
splits everyday space and makes everything that occurs in it happen in a
different space. The gaze frames actions and bodies thereby lifting them
out of the everyday into a potential, imaginary space that, as in dramatic
theatre, is the space of fiction. Dependant simply on the gaze and its
accompanying complex cognitive operations needed to be able to dis-
tinguish between the real and the imaginary, theatricality can take place
inside a theatre building or outside on a market square. It can pop up
everywhere. Thus, theatricality is the result of a split in and a doubling
of space that produces a transformed space. This spilt is repeated within
the second potential space. Here, the action that takes place is also at the
same time real action performed by living bodies in front of an audience
as well as action at one remove. Between the actual and the fictional,
the real and the imaginary performing bodies are the same while being
not the same. “The body gives itself over to the other,” as Féral says,
[and] “is aware of itself as other, while remaining the same. Theatricality
emerges from it as a play of ambivalence, which makes theatricality scan-
dalous—a scandal seen both at the level of language and of the body”
(Féral 2002, 9). Thus theatricality produces duplicity of spaces, bodies,
actions, language. “It replaces uniformity with duality,” as Féral says,
operating in the gap between real and possible worlds superimposing the
mutually exclusive (2002, 11). Going back to Bel’s piece Nom donné par
l’auteur, this transformative and therefore theatrical duality lies at the
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  85

core of its functioning. With the two dancers being objectified to the
point of rigidity, choreography may not be detected in their movements
but in the way the objects are rearranged. Their bodies remain mute and
mundane, signifying nothing in particular. They are neutral doers to the
point that even their doing as doing is not particularly interesting. And
yet with every object they relate to, they bring choreography alive as an
assembly of lines and diagonals, figures and traces that transfigures their
bodies into choreographic elements changing in shape and size with very
move they make.
Féral’s notion of theatricality is not confined to the level of signs
and their mobility. It includes the body and its drives, which she calls
the performative level of performance. Thus, theatre performances re-
introduce the living, the visceral that eschews the subject’s consciousness
into the symbolic act of theatre to “demystify” the identity of the subject
(Féral 1982). The duplicity of bodies and spaces necessary for theatrical-
ity to be set in motion implies that their non-identity must be apparent
at all times. The transformative powers of the imagination then operate
between the two poles to write and re-write the empty or blank space
from which the subject emerges. To corroborate her point, in her intro-
ductory essay of her edited volume on theatricality (2002) Féral makes
a brief reference to Roland Barthes’ idea of theatricality that I will pick
up and discuss in this chapter. My argument here is that Barthes’ notion
of theatricality emerges from the problem of representation that is the
driving force behind Barthes’ entire project of writing. Since the 1950s
his texts ceaselessly and relentlessly circle the problem of representation
in Western culture approaching it from ever new angles and points of
view. Theatricality, as I will argue in this section, results from the break
down of representation. It accompanies it and makes the crisis produc-
tive. Theatricality and the crisis of representation are connected with the
first resulting from the collapse of the latter. When Bel suspends contem-
porary dance practice to conceptually inquire after the nature of dance,
he, too, operates from within the rift that the crisis of representation
opens up. With Roland Barthes, his work can therefore also be read as
being theatrical. In the previous section I have already pointed to the
duplicity inherent in Bel’s appropriation of Barthes’ notion of writing or
performing at degree zero. While the neutrality of the performance style
allows for the dancers’ bodies to become carriers of thought, their bod-
ies remain an integral part of the performance. I will continue reading
Bel’s work as an artistic practice that operates between the materiality of
86  G. Siegmund

the body, which remains mute, and the intelligibility of the body, which
is spelled out over the course of the performance. Inbetween the two
poles, the subject of dance emerges as a subject of both knowledge and
pleasure, a pleasure that is the consequence of écriture that disintegrates
the self-identical subject.
As early as 1954 Roland Barthes developed his notion of theatri-
cality based on the duplicity of the body and the absences this double
nature produces. Barthes’ idea of theatricality—it is more of an idea than
a fully worked out concept —is based on absence that unravels repre-
sentation in the very moment it occurs. In the following section I will
develop Barthes’ idea into a concept drawing on his scattered men-
tioning of the term theatricality throughout his writings. If, as I hold,
Barthes’ idea of theatricality is not based on a theory of presence but of
absence, the crucial idea of absence is the opening that is the sign. The
sign for Barthes is a gesture. And a gesture points towards the world
that it discovers in the act of pointing. For him signs do not simply
open themselves to a pre-existing reality they make present by means of
representation. Sings that pretend to do so Barthes easily dismisses as
engaging in the production of contemporary myths. Instead, the sign
that honestly acknowledges that it is a sign stages both its signified and
its signifiers wrenching them apart to produce an opening for meaning
production, critical obsevation, and pleasure. These are the effects of an
absence that the sign both points towards and operates within. Weaving
absence into presence, theatricality comes into play both as the result of
the crisis of representation and as its critical and joyful way of working
through the crisis. In his text on Barthes’ theory of deixis, German lit-
erary scholar Gerhard Neumann, a specialist in modernist literature at
the turn of the twentieth century when the crisis of representation in
the arts became a veritable topos, brought this idea to the foreground
(Neumann 2003, 53–74). The crisis of representation necessitates the-
atricality as a specific mode of knowing and experiencing the world that
is never just ‘there.’ In his in depth-study on Roland Barthes and the
theatre, North American theatre scholar Timothy Scheie focuses on
the problematic status of the living body and the live performance in
Barthes’ work. Rather than critically engaging with actual theatre per-
formances, in his writing after 1960, Roland Barthes uses the theatre
merely as a metaphor for writing. It becomes an abstract reference for
signifying processes, where the visceral and physical aspect of theatre is
missing. Barthes’s central trope, the body, remains a trope whereas the
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  87

actual pleasures of a live performance in his texts only appear masked.

The living body may indeed, as Scheie argues, remain a problem for
Roland Barthes, the semiologist, throughout his career as a writer. Yet
the problem of theatre in Barthes’ writing appears less problematic, if
one does not take live performance as the ultimate materialisation and
realisation of theatre. One alternative to the thinking of the “live” is
Barthes’ very own notion of theatricality. Although he does not relate
theatricality to the actual theatre practices of his time, the 1960s and
1970s, the way he conceives of theatricality is a theory of what a theatre
beyond representation may achieve.
Having said that, in Barthes’ writing theatricality and theatre do not
always go together. Theatricality as a concept and property and the thea-
tre as an institution and a practice are distinct from one another. There
is theatre without theatricality—the bourgeois or hysterical theatre as
Barthes calls it—and there is theatricality—in images for example—with-
out theatre proper. As Barthes wrote in 1965, “I don’t like it when an
actor dresses himself up, and this is, perhaps, one of the reasons for my
quarrel with the theatre” (Barthes 1993, 19, my transl.). In this quote
Barthes refers to his infatuation and critical engagement with the French
theatre of Jean Vilar and his attempts during the 1950s at establishing
a true theatre for the French people, the Théâtre Populaire. Barthes ini-
tially supported Vilar, but disillusioned by what he considered Vilar’s
concessions to the bourgeois taste ultimately turned away from him
and the theatre altogether. For Barthes, the dressing up or masquer-
ade is linked to the bourgeois theatre of psychological realism. Whereas
the bourgeois theatre is a type of theatre that lacks theatricality, Bertolt
Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, which Barthes saw perform in Paris in 1954,
1955, and 1957, is Barthes’ prime example for a good theatre that
draws attention to its very production. For Barthes, there is something
in Brecht’s understanding of the sign and ultimately Brecht’s notion
of the gestus that comes close to his own notion of theatricality. In in
his now famous book Mythologies (1957), Barthes describes the opera-
tion of dressing up in general, and not only as a practice of the theatre,
as the operation of myth. As with the ‘Romans in Films’ (Barthes 2000,
26–28), whose fringes become a sign that connotes their Roman-ness in
a seemingly spontaneous and natural way, the mythological sign aims at
naturalising its process of production. It hides its historicity in order to
produce a specific essentialised message—‘Roman-ness’—which Barthes
calls myth.
88  G. Siegmund

Barthes describes the result of this naturalising procedure as a

“degraded spectacle, which is equally afraid of simple reality and total
artifice” (2000, 28). The sign of bourgeois art, “which is pompously
christened natural” and of which Hollywood films are full of, rests uneas-
ily between two types of signs that are in Barthes' sense more productive
and honest: the intellectual and the visceral sign.

Signs ought to present themselves only in two extreme forms: either

openly intellectual and so remote that they are reduced to an algebra, as in
the Chinese theatre, where a flag on its own signifies a regiment; or deeply
rooted, invented, so to speak, on each occasion, revealing an internal, a
hidden facet, and indicative of a moment in time, no longer of a concept
(as in the art of Stanislavsky, for example). (ibid.)

Whereas the intellectual sign immediately gives away its artificiality and
manufacturedness, the visceral sign is irrepressible and almost acciden-
tally discovered, and is in fact almost not a sign at all. Between Brecht
and Stanislavsky as the two bearers of the intellectual and the visceral
signs, respectively, lies the horrid terrain of the bourgeois theatre and
its masquerades. Barthes makes it clear that underlying the bourgeois
theatre and its forms of representation is an economical contract that,
as became apparent in Raymond Whitehead’s lawsuit surrounding a per-
formance of Jérôme Bel, guarantees that the audience gets its money’s
worth in quantifiable categories of spent energies, of bodies jumping up
and down rhythmically. In his mythology on the two myths of the young
theatre Barthes draws our attention to the flow of sweat and other fluids
from the actor’s body that signifies to the paying audience that he did a
good job that was well worth the ticket price. Jérôme Bel’s proposition
about dance is breach of contract because it precisely avoids these osten-
tations of false theatricality as a display of overwrought virtuosity.
If myth is a bad actor giving a degraded spectacle, what, then, does
the good actor do? The good actor points towards himself while at the
same time pointing towards the situation he creates. The good actor
does not represent reality, but rather evokes it by dint of his intellectual
capacities. Simultaneously being in and out of a situation, observing and
participating in it at the very same time, he throws the seamless represen-
tation of a reality into a crisis. Barthes underlines what is at stake here in
a quote from The Pleasure of the Text (Barthes 1975): “In short, there are
two realisms: the first deciphers the ‘real’ (what is demonstrated but not
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  89

seen); the second speaks ‘reality’ (what is seen but not demonstrated)”
(Barthes 1975, 45–46). Whereas Barthes’ first type of realism obscures
its referent in an endless array of commentary and explications, the sec-
ond can only point towards what is ostensibly there without being able
to say anything else about it but “That’s it! This cry is not to be under-
stood,” writes Barthes, “as an illumination of the intelligence, but as the
very limit of nomination, of the imagination” (ibid., 45). Whereas the
first type says too much losing its object from sight, the second with the
object firmly in sight says too little, thereby missing it, too. There is a
continuous resonance between the Barthes of 1953 and the Barthes of
1973, between Writing Degree Zero and The Pleasure of the Text, that
establishes an echo chamber for the very same problem that Barthes
returns to again and again throughout his entire career: the duplicity of
the body as an irreducible body, its style, and its explication and dissemi-
nation in writing, écriture.
Caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of these two types of real-
ism, both of which miss reality and the body as they articulate it, rep-
resentation for Barthes is always in a crisis. And it is within this very
crisis that Barthes situates his notion of theatricality. As early as 1954
he touched upon the notion of theatricality laying the foundations of its
future operations even in his texts that do not deal explicitly with the
topic of theatre. In his short text on “Baudelaire’s Theatre,” Barthes
discusses Charles Baudelaire’s attempts to write plays. To Barthes,
Baudelaire’s four sketches for the theatre that he embarked on in the
1840s all failed because they lacked theatricality. They are purely narra-
tive in the sense that the impressions the author gives in his dramatic
texts are too general to evoke the stage. Baudelaire’s instructions for
the stage merely represent ideas rather than evoke the specific and con-
crete materiality of objects a truly dramatic text requires. Baudelaire is
content in giving his readers the abstract idea of “pure military pomp”
rather than the specific materiality of “flags or uniforms” (Barthes 1972,
26). Perhaps more significant is Barthes’ criticism that Baudelaire envi-
sions the dramatic scene “with a spectator’s eye,” that is to say, he pic-
tures the stage from an external point of view as a closed-off and static
representation of reality. To Baudelaire the poet, the reality of the stage
is a dream-like double of reality unifying its objects by a vaporous kind
of spirituality (ibid.). By contrast, “true theatre” as Barthes calls it and
that is to say theatre that is theatrical, develops its theatricality from the
unfulfilled, the not yet finished and disturbing qualities that work against
90  G. Siegmund

the daydream of Baudelaire’s visions. Theatricality includes the specta-

tor in “movements of prehension or distancing” (1972, 27), acts that
are at the same time sensorial and reflexive. The theatre is never one or
a universal general. Truly dramatic texts such as the ones by Aeschylus,
Shakespeare, or Brecht are incomplete and gestural in as much as they
point towards the “externality of bodies, of objects, of situations; the
utterance immediately explodes into substances” (1972, 26). The bodies
of the text are incarnated in the flesh by the bodies on stage.
How, then, does Barthes define the central notion of theatrical-
ity? “Baudelaire’s Theatre” includes the famous definition of theatrical-
ity that theatre semioticians like to quote to distinguish the theatre text
from the literary text: “What is theatricality? It is theatre-minus-text, it is
a density of signs and sensations built up on stage starting from the writ-
ten argument; it is that ecumenical perception of sensuous artifice—ges-
ture, tone, distance, substance, light—which submerges the text beneath
the profusion of external language” (ibid.). Thus, theatricality is primar-
ily a way of using signs (“a density of signs”) and reading them. But it
is also a way of perceiving and sensing as an activity, which is related to
the density of signs the theatre produces but which is not identical to the
meaning these signs produce. The phrase “that ecumenical perception
of sensuous artifice” already points into another direction that exceeds
the frame of traditional semiotics with its focus on constructing meaning
from the combinations of signs.
Despite Baudelaire’s falling short of successfully writing for the thea-
tre, Barthes discovers two instances in Baudelaire’s sketches in which
the potential of theatricality is realised. One is related to the body of
the actor and the other concerns the fact that theatricality involves what
he calls a “sensory transmutation” on the side of the spectator (1972,
28). Fascinated by the “actor’s disturbing corporeality” (1972, 27) that
in Baudelaire’s vision takes on an altogether artificial nature, Barthes
conceives of Baudelaire’s theatre “as the site of an ultra-incarnation, in
which the body is double, at once a living body deriving from a triv-
ial nature, and an emphatic, formal body, frozen by its function as an
artificial object” (1972, 27–28). Thus costumes and make-up as well
as the actor’s sex in relation to the role he or she plays (Barthes cites
the example of Don Juan’s son being played by a girl, ibid.) all add to
the exposition of the actor’s body as the site of theatricality. The body
in its duplicity between nature and culture, between its biological there-
ness and its cultural transformation, opens up an intermediate space
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  91

of uncertainty and torment where things are knowingly not what they
appear to be.
Barthes also sees this disquieting sentiment that such an artificial site
provokes in Baudelaire’s poems. Baudelaire, the poet, achieves what
Baudelaire, the dramatist, fails at. His peotic language, his images and
metaphors endow the phonomenon they describe with a glow and an
“emphatic accent.” This “radiant perception of matter, amassed, con-
densed as though on stage, glowing with colors, lights, and cosmetics”
to Barthes is “of the same nature as theatrical perception” (1972, 28)
because it appeals to our senses. Theatrical perception is a heightened
perception of the matter presented, that by being exposed, isolated and
singled out draws attention to itself. Because “matter” is in excess of
itself, these perceptions produced at the same time make the spectators
or readers reflect on their conditions of perceiving. Therefore, theatri-
cal perception is also reflexive and analytical. The spectators are thrown
back at their own acts of perception focusing on their functioning in a
moment where the seemingly natural order of perception is interrupted.
The things presenting themselves in a theatrical way exceed any kind
of fixed meaning, thus inviting us to imagine situations, relations, and
connections between the isolated phenomenon on stage or on the page.
Between seeing and hearing of what is actually there on stage and what
is only imagined to be there, acts of “sensory transmutation” take place
that draw the spectator along with it, transforming the subject and its
judgments, sensible impressions, and emotions. In his 1971 text “From
Work to Text” Barthes compares the reader-writer of a text to some-
body strolling aimlessly “on the side of a valley” (Barthes 1977c, 159).
With all its vivid and glowing details “coming from a disconnected, het-
erogeneous variety of substances and perspectives” like “lights, colours,
vegetation, heat, air, slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds,
children’s voices from over on the other side, passages, gestures, clothes
of inhabitants near or far away” (ibid.) this walk in the countryside
owes much more to the description of a site-specific performance than
to the reading of a text. Perhaps one can say that for Barthes reading
indeed becomes an act of theatrical perception when it picks up of the
traces of perceptions in a text transforming them in an act of writing and
re-writing of the subject.
Theatricality, therefore, is what happens between what is called reality
and its representation, between the object and its semiological explica-
tion. Theatre thus is not simply a representation of reality, a seemingly
92  G. Siegmund

transparent window onto the world, but it emerges at the breaking point
between reality and representation, or, more generally, between, reality,
perception, and our modes of making sense of them. Even more pre-
cisely, what emerges out of this rupture is not theatre but “theatricality,”
which is simultaneously indicative of this gap or inbetween space and
a way to bridge it, to work in and with it. Moving within the gap, the
emptiness or absence, it produces gestures towards reality, which must
forever remain a-representable. Thus, art’s attempts to come to terms
with what is our social reality are inevitably bound to working on the
limits of representation. With everything it does, with every sentence
written, every splash of paint on a canvas, with every gesture of the body,
the work of art always touches on the a-representable. In fact, the a-rep-
resentable can be considered the very result of the coming into existence
of the work of art since its very existence is the futile, yet infinitely pro-
ductive attempt to come to terms with that which lies outside or beyond
representation.
The distinction between theatre and theatricality indicates that theatri-
cality is much more than a property of theatre, a feature that defines the
genre of theatre. Rather, it is a tool for analysing the underside of repre-
sentation, its material tissues and sensory upholsterings, its erotic sensa-
tions and fleeting physical gestures, their ways of intersection and modes
of interaction. It can therefore also be found at work in paintings, photo-
graphs, films, or works of literature. Although Barthes does not use the
term theatricality in the context of his analyses of the paintings and draw-
ings of Cy Twombly or the films of Sergej Eisenstein, his notions of the
corporeal gesture and the third meaning owe much to his earlier concept
of theatricality.
To make such a strong claim for theatricality also means to ascertain
its critical function. Precisely because the absent and a-representable real-
ity is not a mythical one but man-made and historically produced, the
very features of its production are the subject and object of theatrical-
ity. Theatricality thus becomes the tool for a critical analysis of reality,
which in itself is constituted by theatrical processes. Therefore, all art is
theatrical, as Michael Fried put it derogatively, because it relies on the
spectator to produce meaning by supplying a potentially endless num-
ber of contexts, which prevent the meaning of a work of art to forever
close. It is theatrical, as Josette Féral put is, because it splits our gaze and
carves out potential, fictional spaces for people to behave differently and
to be seen differently. Touching on the idea of the split gaze, art is also
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  93

theatrical, because it analyses the coming into being of a world, of our

world and our subjective engagement with and in it, by foregrounding
a specific dimension of the sign that weaves absence into presence and
presence into absence.
Barthes sees theatricality at work everywhere but in the illusionis-
tic bourgeois theatre of his day. The prime example of this in his early
writings is Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre; one of the main examples of his
later writings is his book on Japan, The Empire of Signs. Brecht’s notion
of the gestus and the empire of signs—that is Japan—communicate with
each other. For Barthes, both Brecht’s theatre and Japanese culture are
engaged in a semiological practice that draws attention to the process of
meaning production rather than the representation of meaning. What I
am interested in is the connection between Barthes’ interest in both the
Brechtian notion of gestus and Japan’s empty signs with his idea of the-
atricality. Theatricality depends upon the artificiality of the sign expos-
ing itself and the sensuous transmutation of perceptions that engage the
viewer’s body and subjectivity in the process of reception. By following
up this lead, I draw attention to the way theatricality operates between
the two poles of absence and presence.
In his essay “What is Epic Theatre?” Walter Benjamin defines the task
of epic theatre as the presentation of conditions rather than the unfold-
ing of an action. The social and historical conditions that define the
characters and their actions on stage draw attention to themselves in a
theatrical way. In order to achieve this presentation, the action must be
suspended. Once the action is interrupted, the spectator is “confronted
with the situation as with a startling picture” (Benjamin 1982, 153).
The gestures of the protagonist are frozen, available to be studied and
“weighed” as they present the social relations of the protagonists at one
glance. “Epic theatre,” Benjamin writes, “is by definition a gestic the-
atre. For the more frequently we interrupt someone in the act of act-
ing, the more gestures result” (ibid.) Like Barthes’ intellectual sign, the
gestus does not hide its artificiality brought about by the interruption
of the action. Isolated from its context and suspended in the hiatus of
the action, the gestus becomes quotable. The sign as gestus is an exposed
sign, hyper-visible because everything else that might distract from it is
being subtracted from the scene, leaving the gestus to appear in a void,
a disconnected space that highlights its contours and density. In “The
Rhetoric of the Image,” Barthes describes such isolated messages or con-
notations of the image as concepts cut off from a syntagm. Signs without
94  G. Siegmund

a syntagm expose their meaning as evidence, which corresponds to what

Barthes calls “a theatrical state of meaning” (Barthes 1977b, 48). The
meaning made evident is a social relation that opens up towards the spec-
tator to be re-written, changed, and transformed. Likewise Bel’s perfor-
mances consist of quotes as physical gestures. In The Last Performance
these are the typical gestures of an avant-garde choreographer who in the
piece is called “Jérôme Bel” (looking at the watch to time an action), of
a sports star called André Agassi (playing tennis against the back wall of
the stage), of a character from a play, Hamlet (in a typical costume speak-
ing the typical lines “to be or not to be”), and finally of a choreographer
named Susanne Linke (dancing the beginning of her piece Wandlung).
They all appear out of context, isolated from their original syntagm to
point towards themselves as being quoted. Placed next to each other,
they do not build up what looks like an organic narrative or movement
phrase. Instead they stage a theatre of meaning. Isolated from each
other, they enter into the play of self-reflection, which offers insights into
the construction of meaning that in the performance is almost entirely
handed over to the spectator’s imagination. Turning the entire stage into
the site of a rupture, they expose the underside of representation merely
pointing towards or indexing their world beyond the stage and discov-
ering connections between them. Thus, the duplicity of the actor and
the Brechtian gestus alike are theatrical because they are ways of show-
ing. The gestus is an indication that reality is not directly accessible in
representation but a performative construct subject to change. Any form
of representation must inevitably fall short of its aim of representing a
world prior to representation. The gestus points towards a socially and
historically produced reality, a reality that does not naturally exist as such.
As such it points towards the real that is deliberately not made present in
the theatre but which the gestus introduces into the frame of the prosce-
nium theatre as absent. Both Brecht and Barthes value the proscenium
stage for the very reason that it allows for ruptures to appear as gestus
instigating the possibility of change. The gestus firmly belongs to Barthes’
second type of realism, the almost tautological cry of “That’s it!”
Introducing the outside (the ‘real’ world) into the inside (the world
of theatre) which, as a consequence ceases to be an inside, the gestus
operates as a trace, tracing the ever-elusive reality as an absence made
present and a presence verging on an absence. It functions in the same
way Barthes imagines Japan’s culture of sings to work. In Empire of
Signs, Roland Barthes invents, as he frankly admits, a fictitious empire
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  95

called Japan. For Barthes Japan is not a country but a system of signs
that points him towards the very limits of our Western systems of signi-
fication. “Japan afforded him a system of writing,” as Barthes explains
writing of himself in the third person, that circles via sharp and often
witty observations around the “emptiness of language” (Barthes 1983,
4). In the empire of signs that is Japan, signs are empty as opposed to
our Western understanding of signs as always being meaningful. The
sign operates within a hiatus of meaning that Barthes often calls satori,
a concept he borrows from Zen philosophy. The sign is this very inter-
ruption of meaning that gives rise to an “occurrence” (ibid.) as Barthes
defines the term. The sign is the occurrence of an absent, an emptiness
made present as an emptiness. Given the consistency of Barthes’ think-
ing from the 1950s onwards, a consistency that is firmly anchored in his
concept of theatricality, it comes as no surprise that Barthes’ discovery
of the sign system Japan owes a lot to his concept of theatricality devel-
oped in his text on Baudelaire and his writings on Brecht. Barthes’ very
own empire of signs is an altogether theatrical empire. Japan, too, inter-
rupts actions and meanings to produce gestures that trace emptiness.
The empire of signs is full of Brechtian gestures. Being confronted with
this strange system of signs produces “a more or less powerful (…) seism
which causes knowledge, or the subject, to vacillate” (ibid., my empha-
sis). The seismic action that destabilises the reading and writing subject
is the result of a seismic shock within the sign itself.5 The seism is a loud
and noisy disturbance that displaces both reality and our habitual relation
to it. Producing repercussions, the seismic shock functions as a repetition
and re-production of elements that are liberated like citations from their
original context, displaced and offered to us to read to construct new
meaning.
Thus, the gestus like the empire of signs is the result of this trembling
within the sign itself, a seismic shaking of the ground that prevents sign
and referent from seamlessly becoming one. In his two short texts on
Bunraku theatre in Empire of Signs, “Animate/Inanimate” (Barthes
1983, 58–60) and “Inside/Outside” (1983, 61–62) this seism is best
explained by the separation of voice, body, and action. In Western thea-
tre, the actor’s work is based on the illusion of an integration of voice,
body and action. From this unity the “‘person’ of a character emerges”
(1983, 59) that gives the impression of “life,” or the confinement of
“beauty, truth, emotion within the living body of the actor” (1983, 58).
To Barthes this obviously is a lie, a myth that covers up the construction
96  G. Siegmund

of both the actor’s body and his work. It favours an inside (the soul)
that determines the outside, and turns the visible form of acting into an
expression of the inside. As opposed to this, Bunraku theatre does not
hide anything and above all it does not hide its constructedness behind
a shield of naturalness and life-like acting. In Bunraku “the agents of the
spectacle (…) are at once visible and impassive” (1983, 61). The text is
recited by a figure called the Tayu sitting to the side of the stage. The
three puppet players dressed in black operating the head and limbs of the
puppet work efficiently and effectively without any pretence to character
or meaning. The puppet acts not as an animated piece of the living body
but becomes an abstraction of qualities and values like “clarity, agility,
subtlety” (1983, 60) instead.
Thus, the almost deconstructive spacing out of the (Western) actor
into voice (the chanter), body (the puppet players), and action (the pup-
pet) produces space between them that remains visibly empty while the
elements of theatre circle in it, pointing and referring to each other with-
out, however, becoming one and closing the void. To the Western eye
and ear, or at least those not familiar with the codes of Bunraku, within
this emptiness lies an emptiness of meaning that causes the established
Western links between body and soul on the one hand and animate
human being and inanimate objects on the other hand to disappear:
“work is substitute for inwardness,” and “the inside no longer com-
mands the outside” (1983, 62).
In a similar vein Jérôme Bel spaces out the components of a dance
performance, making them operate independently from one another
across the empty plateau of the stage. In Jérôme Bel music (the dancer
singing Stravinsky’s Sacre), light (the dancer holding up a single light
bulb), as well as the male and the female bodies are each accorded a
specific place on stage from which they operate. What they have to say
does not emanate from the phantasmatic image of an integrated dancer
expressing or articulating meaning through movement and gesture.
Words, objects, and bodies visibly interact with each other to draw the
spectator’s attention to the process of constructing and deconstructing
meaning. When the signifying process gets exposed, we witness signifi-
cation at work. In the reversal of cause and effect, it is the process of
signification that articulates the bodies and not the bodies that articulate
meaning.
This “disturbance of the person,” or, in Bel’s case, the disturbance of
the traditional image of the dancer as the source and origin of meaning,
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  97

caused by “a shock of meaning lacerated, extenuated to the point of its

irreplaceable void” (1983, 4) has two consequences. It sets the subject
and its stabilising beliefs and reference points adrift in the midst of an
open sea of significance. The signs trace meaning as absently present,
making it disappear at the very same time that it emerges. The isolated
and exposed appearance of the sign that opens up a void and that takes
place within that void, however, produces a desirable effect. The signs,
as Barthes points out, never cease to be desirable (1983, 4). They urge
the subject to follow their sensual and erotic play of hide and seek, of
appearing and disappearing, of being there and gone, ‘Fort-Da,’ absent
and present at the very same time.
Yet the insight into the production of the spectacle does not abol-
ish the spectacle, which nonetheless takes place between voice, body,
and action. Barthes’ notion of theatricality that, by implication, follows
Brecht’s view and the Bunraku, is linked to the idea of mise-en-scène.
In the staging of its elements, a changing and mobile combination and
constellation of the elements takes place that allows them to connect,
disconnect, and re-connect. The fragmentation or artificiality of the ele-
ments that gives them their intensive sensuous glow, a glow that indi-
cates and is produced by their being cut off from a snytagmatic order,
on the other hand produces an active combination of seeing and hear-
ing, of imagining and remembering the things exposed. What occurs
within the hiatus or interruption between the sign and within the signs
is movement. Moving to and fro, approaching meaning, yet being unable
to fully grasp it, the gesture, as with the painter Cy Twombly becomes a
corporeal gesture, trembling, vacillating, never being able to come to a
point or a stand still (Barthes 1995a). Seen from Barthes’s fictive Japan,
Brecht’s understanding of gestus as a break with illusion caused by aliena-
tion that reveals the historical contingency of the action takes on a differ-
ent meaning. While Brecht’s gestus certainly breaks with the illusion of a
closed reality in representation, at the same time it creates a heightened
fascination for the gestures produced. Thus, the gestus may very well
interrupt the illusion of a seamless reality represented on stage while its
theatrical nature creates another kind of illusion. The isolated gestus func-
tions as a kernel that guarantees our access to the world, which because
of the gestus comes to be seen as possible. The gestus by its very gesture
of interruption betrays a desire for ‘reality’ or the ‘real’ to be different,
other, changeable. Without the fascination for the glow and the height-
ened awareness the gesture produces, there would be no desire for the
98  G. Siegmund

world, reality, or something real. The gesture points to that which on

stage must remain absent, negating any sense of an unmediated presence
of that other reality. But as a gesture it nonetheless provides keys for con-
structing a world, for pointing towards what is absent, yet invested with
desire and therefore worth our while to explore.6
For Roland Barthes, theatricality emerges out of the failure of the sign
to represent. It operates between the two poles of the body’s duplicity
or artificiality: its meaningless materiality, its thereness and thusness, and
the signifying practices of its articulation. Moving to and fro without
ever coming to a standstill, it describes and rewrites the space between
always pointing towards an a-representable reality while it transforms
what is given on stage. To link theatricality with the conceptual thinking
from above, one can say that every manifestation of the concept, which
must fail the concept in its purity, is a theatrical act. Thus, theatricality
is also the effect of the failure of conceptual art to shake off the spectre
of aesthetics. Working in the in-between space or empty space between
the sign and its referent, Jérôme Bel leaves the void visibly open. The
empty stage, which takes everything that materialised on it back into
non-existence, remains visible throughout all the sites and spaces it pro-
duces. Thus, at the dialectical pivotal point of non-site and site, body and
discourse, materiality and signifiying practice, an opening remains that
prevents the closure of the world represented on stage.

Notes
1. I thank Rebecca Lee and Sandro Grando from the association R.B./Jérôme
Bel for making the video recordings of all the pieces available to me
for supporting my memory and my notes of all the live performances
I attended since 1998.
2. The collapse of the market for contemporary dance in the old style has
been noted or, depending on personal preference, lamented by event
organisers in the field of dance since the end of the 1990s. In this context,
the switch to that other mode of writing, of which Jérôme Bel is an early
example, is often understood as a cul-de-sac from which dance must liber-
ate itself once again (Schmidt 2002, 434–436).
3. In the tradition of conceptual art, art historian Miwon Kwon links the
site to the idea of the work where site becomes “a discursive vector—
ungrounded, fluid virtual” (Kwon 1997, 95). For Nick Kaye, Smithson’s
non-site describes the “restlessness” between mind and matter where “site-
specificity is an effect of this contradiction, in which the work and the site
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  99

threaten to occupy, and be defined in, the same precise place” (Kaye 2000,
99).
4. Le Roy even used Bel’s dancers to realise the piece. Alongside Frédéric
Seguette, who is on stage in all of Bel’s earlier pieces, Claire Haenni was
supposed to take on the second role once again. However, because she was
pregnant during the rehearsals and therefore not available, Pascale Paoli
took over the female part.
5. Coming back to Brecht as late as 1975 in the text “Brecht and Discourse,”
Barthes holds that what one should keep of Brecht is not a semiology but
a seismology. Brecht’s use of signs as gestures disrupts the soft and thick
fabric of our natural world and its discourses to set its constituent elements
in motion (Barthes 1995b, 265). In this sense, Barthes’ own fragmentary
style of writing can be considered as a production of gestures by means of
interruptions of a closed text with the aim of exposing sense. His writing
is, according to his own concept, highly theatrical producing theatricality
in the process of reception.
6. In the terminology of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis the gestus functions
as an objet a mediating between the original void and the world that
emerges in its place.

References
Alloway, Lawrence. 1975. Topics in American Art Since 1945. New York:
Norton.
Alphant, Marianne. 2002. A propos Roland Barthes. In R/B-Roland Barthes,
ed. Marianne Alphant, and Nathalie Léger. Paris: Édition Seuil-Éditions du
Centre Pompidou-Imed.
Barthes, Roland. 1968. Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin
Smith. Boston: Beacon Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1972. Baudelaire’s Theater. In Critical Essays, trans. Richard
Howard, 25–31. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller. New York:
Hill and Wang.
Barthes, Roland. 1977a. The Death of the Author. In Image-Music-Text, trans.
Stephen Heath, 142–148. London: Fontana Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1977b. The Rhetoric of the Image. In Image-Music-Text, trans.
Stephen Heath, 35–51. London: Fontana Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1977c. From Work to Text. In Image-Music-Text. trans.
Stephen Heath, 155–164. London: Fontana Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1983. Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill
and Wang.
100  G. Siegmund

Barthes, Roland. 1993. Témoinage sur le theatre. In Oeuvres completes, Tome I,

1942–1965, ed. Éric Marty, 1530–1532. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Barthes, Roland. 1995a. Brecht et le discours: contribution à l’étude de la discur-
sivité. In Oeuvres completes, Tome III, 1974–1989, ed. Éric Marty, 260–267.
Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Barthes, Roland. 1995b. Cy Twombly ou ‘Non Multa sed Multum’. In Oeuvres
completes, Tome III, 1974–1989, ed. Éric Marty, 1033–1047. Paris: Éditions
du Seuil.
Barthes, Roland. 2000. Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage
Books.
Benjamin, Walter. 1982. What is Epic Theatre? In Illuminations, trans. Harry
Zohn, 149–156. Bungay: Fontana Press.
Bauer, Una. 2008a. The Movement of Embodied Thought. The
Representational Game of the Stage Zero of Signification in Jérôme Bel.
Performance Research 13 (1): 35–41.
Bauer, Una. 2008b. Jérôme Bel. An Interview. Performance Research 13 (1):
42–48.
Bel, Jérôme, and Gerald Siegmund. 2002. Jérôme Bel. In Hall of Fame. Jahrbuch
Ballettanz 02, ed. Arnd Wesemann, 24–31. Berlin: Friedrich Verlag.
Bel, Jérôme, and Boris Charmatz. 2013. Emails 2009–2010. Dijon: Les presses
du réel.
Bel, Jérôme. 2005. Nom donné par l’auteur. Directed by Daniel Crétois. Paris:
Centre National de la danse.
Bel, Jérôme. Xavier Le Roy. No credits.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London
and New York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Carlson, Marvin. 2002. The Resistance to Theatricality. SubStance 31 (2/3):
238–250. Special Issue. Theatricality, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Etchells, Tim. 2004. More and More Clever Watching More and More Stupid:
Some Thoughts Around Rules, Games and The Show Must Go On. Dance
Theatre Journal 4: 10–20.
Ette, Ottmar. 1998. Roland Barthes. Eine intellektuelle Biographie. Suhrkamp:
Frankfurt a.M.
Féral, Josette. 1982. Performance and Theatricality. The Subject Demystified.
Modern Drama 25: 170–181.
Féral, Josette. 2002. Foreword. SubStance 31 (2/3): 3–13. Special Issue.
Theatricality, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. What is an Author? In Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry
 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE  101

Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, 113–138. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. The Confession of the Flesh. In Power/Knowledge.
Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, 194–
228. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Foucault, Michel. 1981. The Order of Discourse. In Untying the Text. A Post-
structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young, 48–78. London and New York:
Routledge.
Kaye, Nick. 2000. Site-Specific Art. Performance, Place and Documentation.
London and New York: Routledge.
Kosuth, Joseph. 1999. Art After Philosophy. In Conceptual Art: A Critical
Anthology, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, 158–185. Cambridge,
MA and London: MIT Press.
Kwon, Miwon. 1997. One Place After Another. Notes on Site-Specificity. October
80: 85–110.
Neumann, Gerhard. 2003. Roland Barthes’ Theorie des Deiktischen. In Die
Medien der Künste. Beiträge zur Theorie des Darstellens, ed. Dieter Mersch,
53–74. München: Wilhelm Fink.
Osborne, Peter. 2013. Anywhere or Not At All. Philosophy of Contemporary Art.
London and New York: Verso.
Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator, 1–23. London and New
York: Verso.
Sawday, Jonathan. 1995. The Body Emblazoned. Dissection and the Human Body
in Renaissance Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Schmidt, Jochen. 2002. Tanzgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts in einem Band.
Berlin: Henschel Verlag.
Siegmund, Gerald. 1998. Im Reich der Zeichen: Jérôme Bel. Ballett
International/Tanz Aktuell 5 (4): 34–37.
Smithson, Robert. 1996. The Collected Writings. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
 Subjects of Knowledge

Absence as a Critical Category

Landscape artist Robert Smithson relates his activity of extracting con-
ceptual non-sites from sites to, as he writes, “what Roland Barthes calls
‘the simulacrum of the object’” (Smithson 1996, 96). The non-site that
comes about by an activity of “taking apart and reassembling” the site
that in the process has become a concept (1996, 192) functions as a
model of the site that is being made absent in the process. The non-site,
or by extension, the theatre as a non-site, analyses its constituent parts by
reassembling them and holding them up for inspection and perception
thereby producing associations, emotions, fictions, and meanings that
have gone previously unnoticed. This operation that Smithson describes
with explicit reference to Roland Barthes is what Barthes himself calls the
“structuralist activity” of “dissection and articulation” (Barthes 1972,
216). The structuralist activity as a scientific methodology to produce
knowledge thus stands in a long line of methodologies originating with
the anatomical lecture theatre where knowledge production depended
above all on the dispositio, the order and ordering of dissected organs and
elements. The dispositio as a staging of the elements is inherently theatri-
cal since it produces sensual and factual evidence by putting knowledge
on display. The body is re-articulated in a different way, a second-degree
order that analytically betrays the functional mechanisms of its object by
making them evident. With Jérôme Bel the conceptual non-site that is the
stage becomes a lecture theatre where the constituent elements of a dance

© The Author(s) 2017 103

G. Siegmund, Jérôme Bel, New World Choreographies,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55272-3_4
104  G. Siegmund

production are dissected and spatially and temporally deployed to pro-

duce bodies of evidence. In the wake of this activity the theatre becomes
a laboratory for knowledge production and transmission. For Roland
Barthes the relation between production and transmission is inherently
theatrical. Between the things seen and heard, their banal materiality and
their possible significations, transformative processes set in that de- and
re-articulate the subject in the process. Whereas the theatricality of the
lecture theatre depends upon the dispositio of elements, the theatricality
of the subject results from an active engagement with the order proposed.
In the wake of Nom donné par l’auteur, Jérôme Bel’s proposition
about dance is to dissect and articulate the constituent elements of a
dance production. In the terms of Barthes and Smithson, he produces
theatrical simulacra of dance productions that re-assemble and put on
display its parts. While Nom donné par l’auteur extrapolated the codes of
choreography and Xavier Le Roy played with the function of the author,
the five remaining pieces of his first work cycle are dedicated to vari-
ous other features of a dance performance. Jérôme Bel tackles the analy-
sis of the dancer’s body, while Shirtology explores the costume. The Last
Performance tries to come to terms with the implications of movement
in a dance production and its relation to history, while The Show Must Go
On sheds light on the role of the audience. Together these performances
are statements that constitute the discourse Jérôme Bel, which, in this
chapter, is considered to produce knowledge about dance. The pieces
make you see and hear the elements of a dance production dissecting,
exposing, and assembling them. They also make the audiences experi-
ence them in a different way, thus instigating reflections on dance. They
make you know dance otherwise. The piece Jérôme Bel, which bears the
name of the author like a business card, sets and achieves its objective of
opening up the discourse ‘Jérome Bel.’ His discourse produces subject
positions that are understood to be subjects of knowledge production.
As the discussions of the previous chapter have shown, theatricality
and its related concepts of gestus, signification, and sensual transmutation
depend on an absence as the site for change and production of both sub-
jects and knowledge. In the following analyses, which cover the subjects
of cultural production in the five pieces Jerôme Bel, Shirtology, The Last
Performance, The Show Must Go On, and, finally, The Show Must Go On
2, I will therefore take the notion of absence as the productive “empty”
space that drives the pieces. Since the exact meaning of absence changes
with every shift of theoretical paradigm (each theory has its own idea of
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  105

absence and what it tries to achieve within the parameters of the theory),
I will pair each piece with one theory. Thus, this chapter can also be read
as a meta-theoretical chapter that produces insight in the respective mod-
els of thought that are phenomenology, semiotics, deconstruction, and
psychoanalysis. The aim is to establish the concept of absence as a critical
tool for the analysis of performances.

Jérôme Bel (1995): Absence and Phenomenology

At the degree zero of the mode of writing, the choreographer is con-
fronted with the absence of a natural body. “The body is neither the
sanctuary of truth”, writes Jérôme Bel, “nor authenticity, nor the guar-
antor of personal identity. It is deeply subject to the cultural, the politi-
cal, and the historical” (Bel and Siegmund 2002, 27, trans. Lydia
White). In order to play out this subjugation, Bel stages a paradoxical
degree zero of the theatre and dance performance by isolating and pre-
senting its constitutive elements.
Undressed is the empty stage, undressed are the four bodies that step
onto it. Three naked women and one naked man enter the stage one by
one. None of the four are classic beauties; they have quite normal, typical
female and male bodies of differing ages, neither fat nor thin, neither too
muscular nor even identifiable as dancers’ bodies. An older woman (Gisèle
Tremey) holds in her hand a bare light bulb attached to a cable, the only
source of light for the entire piece, and writes “Thomas Edison” on the rear
wall in chalk, before she takes a few steps back facing the name, her name,
that she wrote down. Later, she will go to the front of the stage and lie
down on the floor, light bulb in hand, shedding the entire stage in a golden
glowing light. Yseult Roch appears after her from the back right (seen from
the audience’s perspective), takes the piece of chalk from her hand and adds
“Stravinsky, Igor.” She then stands beneath the lettering and softly sings an
impeccable rendition of the full score of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps
for the rest of the performance. The dancers Claire Haenni and Frédéric
Seguette write their names to the left of the centre and provide informa-
tion about their ages, heights, weights, bank balances, and telephone num-
bers underneath, as if they are trying to communicate with the audience as
private individuals and not as stage characters. Together they are nothing
less than the four basic principles of a dance performance: light, music, one
male body, and one female body within a space. They will shed light upon
and examine one another over the course of the next 50 minutes.1
106  G. Siegmund

One essential element of the performance is the duplicity of the per-

formers’ bodies. They present themselves as insignificant matter and naked
flesh at degree zero that gets captured in a net of signifiers, which con-
stantly changes what they are. Their skin serves as a surface for inscriptions
while their nudity constantly draws the audiences’ attention to their specific
materialities. Corporeal reactions are overridden by language, which define
and redefine the physical marks without, however, making them disappear.
Claire Haenni sits on the floor, her left leg raised, and retrieves a tube of
red lipstick from inside her oral cavity. She writes “Christian Dior,” the
name of the lipstick manufacturer, on her left leg and does not forget to
note the price on her right leg. She stands up and begins to draw the out-
lines of a corset on her waist and chest, which Frédéric Seguette does up
for her by drawing a red stripe up along her spine. He writes his birth date
on his navel, she the date of the first time she had sex on her pubic area.
Even immediate corporeal reactions such as pain or the laughter caused by
tickling are translated into linguistic signs. Frédéric Seguette writes “Aie,”
(“ow”) into the palm of his hand and hits Claire Haenni with it, so that,
instead of calling out, the word is impressed into her skin. A little later he
tickles her by writing the word “Ha” on the soles of her feet. He paints an
anatomic heart on the left side of her back, which begins pumping when
he pulls on her chest from behind, invisible to the audience. She paints the
constellation of the Big Dipper on the right side of his back (Fig. 1).
After this, Gisèle Tremey moves toward the rear wall with the pale yel-
lowish light that had been illuminating these scenes and envelops the front
half of the stage in darkness. While Claire Haenni is protected by the dark-
ness, Frédéric Seguette remains visible to the audience during the next
sequence. Both urinate on the stage, dip their hands in the urine and use it
to begin wiping off their information from the rear wall. Yseult Roch wets
her hands in her own underarm perspiration. She too then dips her hands in
the puddle to transform “Stravinsky, Igor” into “Sting.” The name of the
British pop singer has barely appeared on the wall before she begins singing
his song “An Englishman in New York.” A man named Eric, who remains
entirely clothed, steps onto the stage and places himself beside her.2 Once
Haenni and Seguette have formed the lettering “Eric chante Sting,” (“Eric
sings Sting”), he takes over the song. The piece finishes when he finishes.
Similar to Nom donné par l’auteur, Jérôme Bel is a piece that lives on
the combination of few elements. Nothing is added to the closed system
under scrutiny on stage. Change is only brought about using elements
that—like the lipstick and the urine inside the bodies of the dancers—are
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  107

Fig. 1  Jérôme Bel, Frédéric Seguette and Claire Haenni © Herman Sorgeloos
108  G. Siegmund

already present on the stage. By inscribing their bodies, Bel relates the
dancers to different cultural and social fields that shape, mould, and ulti-
mately also produce the body. From medical discourse to astrology to
fashion, the body is exposed to different spheres of knowledge whose
practices create their own specific bodies. Christian Dior, the fashion
icon who created an uproar after the Second World War with his wasp-
waisted dresses, is thus for Bel merely one more inventor of body images
that we retrieve from our cultural memory. Bel’s body, which is pro-
duced again and again in any number of new forms depending on the
sphere of knowledge that it is set in relation to, is located between all of
these images, which are stored medially and are infinitely combinable.
Unlike in Nom donné par l’auteur, however, the absence of a dance
vocabulary in Jérôme Bel does not lead to the presence of choreogra-
phy. Rather, the piece suggests the concept of a performatively produced
body, a body that—before it acts and interacts on the stage—is created by
social practices of inscription. It is these inscriptions of overlapping pat-
terns and their repetition that Bel stages in Jérôme Bel. This means that
the bodies of his dancers become a legible palimpsest, the traces of which
are partially hidden or wiped out like the red of the lipstick, although it
still leaves noticeable traces behind. When Jérôme Bel says that Jérôme
Bel is a critical discourse “about the body using the means of the body”
(ibid., 27), he is making issue of its dependence on a culture’s symbolic
order. The body is appropriated and brought about by cultural systems,
norms, and experiences; it is no longer the self-contained stronghold of
an unambiguous identity. It becomes a battlefield of languages and cul-
tural practices that come into conflict with each other. Historically in the
field of dance, choreography is considered to be analogous to a written
text, the notation of postures, movements and their oriantation in space
and time; Jérôme Bel makes the spectator aware that the dancing and per-
forming body is also an open book that begs to be deciphered. But in
Jérôme Bel, Jérôme Bel plays a twofold game. Behind the almost Baroque
rhetoricity of the body as a cultural figure lurks the naked body of the
dancer, which remains mutely, yet insistingly present throughout the per-
formance. The body is, scene by scene, written and rewritten, which begs
the question what the body actually is?. The repeated acts of inscription
imply that each act of writing of the body also misses the body, for it can
be transformed to mean and be something else all the time. Thus, on the
level of the imaginary, the body does not just function as the depend-
ent, but also as the producer and agent of meaning. Constantly drawing
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  109

attention to the body and its materiality, in Jérôme Bel the duplicity of
words and bodies, of meanings and the physicality of the body, is played
out to a maximum. Between the simple thereness of the body, its style
and comportement, and the body as an intellectual sign or écriture, the
body always only appears ‘as’ something, but never as itself. Theatricality,
which re-writes the body by linking the imaginary dimension of the body
and what it can be to its mute materiality transforming it in the process,
thrives on a moment of absence that with the piece Jérôme Bel may best
be described by recourse to phenomenology. Within phenomenological
thinking the body is not primarily linked to meaning but is considered
to be an appearance in its own right. With phenomenology we are enter-
ing the realm of sense rather than the realm of meaning. Bodies show
themselves as something before they may be perceived to be signs for
something. Despite the common notion that phenomenological thinking
insists on presence and the thereness of things, it also produces its own
theory of absence that I will highlight in relation to Jérôme Bel in the
following paragraphs. Phenomenology argues with a notion of absence
that reckons with the experiental dimensions of bodies.
The basic question phenomenological theory, in the tradition of the
German philosopher Edmund Husserl, founder of modern phenom-
enology during the first half of the twentieth century, tries to answer is
how the world or its objects are given to consciousness. To answer that
question, the phenomenologist cuts through the natural standpoint or
natural attitude with which we move and operate in our surroundings,
the lifeworld. Phenomenology cuts through our pragmatic acceptance
of things as existing independently from a subject perceiving them and
makes the world strange again. Although the aim of phenomenologi-
cal reduction is to produce insights into how pure consciousness works
and not into the material nature of things, it is based on the correlation
between the existence of objects and their presentation to consciousness.
I perceive things that are truly present to my senses. What we are dealing
with in perception is “the embodied self-presence of an individual object”
(Husserl 2012, 73). Consciousness in all its modalities therefore is always
consciousness of something. Consciousness is intentionally directed. It
is about something and only comes about when it directs itself towards
an object to be apprehended. Intentionality means that I perceive some-
thing as something meaningful—a knife as a piece of cutlery or as a
weapon, an animal as a pet or as live stock. This includes not only knowl-
edge about the object perceived, its determinations, uses and meanings,
110  G. Siegmund

but also the sensory data and sensual dimensions that are essential to
perception.
If we accept the premises from which phenomenology operates, the
things we perceive are given to consciousness from a relative point of
view. It is here that we encounter a first notion of absence specific to phe-
nomenological theory. Perception never constitutes the object in one sin-
gle act as a whole. Husserl gives the example of someone walking around
a table making a full circle with the object in steady view or, for short
instances, even closing their eyes only to find when re-opening them that
the same table still in front of them. With every move of my body, the
perspective on the table changes. It presents itself from a different point
of view, displaying other sides and maybe even other qualities. “I have,”
as Husserl says, “continuously the consciousness of the bodily pres-
ence out there of this self same table, which in itself remains unchanged
throughout. But the perception of the table is one that changes continu-
ally” (2012, 76). Thus what I perceive is only given because at the same
time that I see a certain aspect of the table I do not see other aspects.
There is a perceptual blindness inherent in every act of perception that
prevents perception from closing. The German word for this process is
Abschattung which literally means “putting in the shade.” Older English
translations of Husserl’s use the verb “to adumbrate,” thus retaining
something of the original connotations in the term “umbra,” shadow.3
More recent translations render the concept as “perceptive manifesta-
tions” or “variations,” thus missing the implications of something that is
not-given within perception (2012, 77). Seeing produces shadows, or for
that matter, absences of things I cannot perceive in the very act of perceiv-
ing. Absence therefore is inherent in perception. With every perspective
that I physically realise, orienting myself in space towards the object, oth-
ers will be occluded. In fact, that the object assumes a spatial dimension at
all depends upon the structure of perception as one of adumbration.
If perception on the one hand is forever missing the bodily self-pres-
ence of the object, my experience of the object, on the other hand, is
complete. After all it is the self same table that I see. That which I can-
not actually perceive because of the perspectival nature of perception,
consciousness being complete itself, will add to perception. In the pro-
cess of what is called apperception, consciousness perceives along with
what is actually being perceived and fills out the empty bits. Due to prior
acts of perception and their memories, apperception unifies what, in its
nature, may not be unified but only exist in ever-changing clusters of
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  111

sensations. Thus, phenomenology relates absence to the partiality of per-

ception. Absence denotes that which lies in the shadows of that which
I see or perceive. Lying in the shadows means that it can become pre-
sent any time I change my perspective on and my orientation towards
the object, that is anytime I move. With every quality of the object given
to consciousness there are other absent-present qualities that potentially
negate that which has become present. The body thus becomes a mute
but active agent in the process of perception.
What Husserl’s notion of adumbration affords the perceiving subject
in general and the spectator of a performance in particular is a play of
presence and absence, of appearing and disappearing, of now-you-see-
it/now-you-don’t. Thus, as Bert O. States has pointed out, there is an
inherent theatricality to the phenomenological notion of perception
(States 2007, 28). Theatre can be considered phenomenology’s privi-
leged object or field of study, as the principles that govern phenomeno-
logical thinking or the phenomenological attitude—as States calls it—are
the very same principles that guide theatre. The play of presence and
absence each time implies a change of perspective leading to the uncov-
ering of different, hitherto unforeseen dimensions.
The somewhat peaceful picture Husserl paints of consciousness,
its intentional acts and its unifying force begs the question if there can
be such a thing as strangeness, otherness, or alienness at all. After all,
if the starting point of the phenomenological venture is to make the
world strange by bracketing our natural standpoint in the world, what
kind of strangeness is this when everything I see or hear will be unified
and thereby explained by our “harmoniously presentive consciousness”?
(Husserl 1983, 91). Bernhard Waldenfels, the most prominent German
philosopher in the field of phenomenology today, whose writings have
been widely received in the German-speaking context of theatre and
dance studies, revises Husserl’s notion of intentionality by supplementing
it with the notion of responsiveness.4 In his Phenomenology of the Alien,
Waldenfels questions the transcendental position of both consciousness
and the subject from within the field of phenomenology itself. While he
keeps the perspectival structure of our perception with its acts of being
oriented towards something, he emphasises its “potential for conflict”
(Waldenfels 2011, 23). For Waldenfels the conflict is already inherent
in the basic phenomenological assumption that “something appears as
something” (ibid., 22), which is the key phrase to designate intention-
ality. On the one hand, something as something means that an object
112  G. Siegmund

“appears only in this and not in another way” (ibid.). On the other hand,
if we take the endlessness of perspectival variations or adumbration into
consideration, there is always a moment of contingency in apperception’s
unifying operation. Everything that appears “as” may, like Jérôme Bel’s
bodies, also appear as something else.
Thus, the phrase “something as something” does not mean that
something is something. Rather it means that something becomes some-
thing. “It becomes something by obtaining a sense and thus becomes
sayable, approachable, repeatable” (ibid., 24). The copula “as” joins
sensations and experiences that before their being joined did not exist
“as such.” Thus “something as something” reckons with the fact that
“something comes into play that does not have a sense” (ibid.), but
which happens to become sensible only because of the joining “as”.
Therefore, the notion of absence ceases to be mere latency. What lurks
in the shadows of perception may not be something sensible at all, it
remains alien to our attempts to identify and qualify it. In this sense, we
are affected by something that precedes our attention and our intention,
something that Waldenfels calls “pathos” (ibid., 26). Pathos depends
upon the openness of both the subject and the body. Neither con-
sciousness nor the body are complete in themselves. The body is split;
it ex-ists, because it can only become aware of itself in reflection from
hindsight, thereby missing its presence. Whereas ordinary objects can be
given to us in their “embodied self-presence,” as Husserl has it, our liv-
ing body can never be entirely present to itself. To describe this “alien-
ness in the flesh,” Waldenfels borrows a phrase from Jean-Paul Sartre,
who calls it an “absence in flesh and bone” (ibid., 43). This absence is
precisely what keeps us living and makes experience possible. Experience
thus consists of two components: First, it depends upon the fact that we
see something as something (otherwise there would be nothing to see at
all); and two, “absence in flesh and bone” gives rise to desire that looks
for something in something that it lacks. To describe how consciousness
reacts to pathos, Waldenfels develops the notion of responsivity (ibid.,
35). Responsivity is the result of the impossibility of self-presence of
both consciousness and the body. It depends upon a “temporal diastasis”
(ibid., 30), an opening that produces an absence between “the anteced-
ence of pathos and the deferment of response” (ibid., 31). Responsivity
thus always comes too late: It is always more and less than the call of
the other demands from us. Whereas an answer meets the question, a
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  113

response at the very same time also misses it, because the circumstances
we respond to exceed our understanding.
As an exploration of one of the instruments of a dance performance,
namely the dancer’s body, the body in the piece Jérôme Bel is meticu-
lously scrutinised. In order to keep the gap between seeing and recog-
nising open as long as possible, each single action on stage takes time.
Jérôme Bel takes time, the time it takes us to see how the body becomes.
The bodies on stage are not presented as meaningful as such, but the
spectator is engaged in watching them acquire meaning. Take the begin-
ning of Jérôme Bel as an example: Into the darkness of the stage four
bodies enter, vaguely lit from behind by a single ray of light from the
light bulb that the fourth dancer holds in her hands. As they cut through
the darkness the light shakes and changes with every move the dancer
makes. Walking up to the back wall the light changes the space visibly,
turning the walls and the floor upside down. Couched in semidark-
ness, covered and uncovered at the same time by the single light bulb,
the appearance of the dancers changes. They are either brightly lit as
they come closer to the front of the stage where Gisèle Tremey lies on
the floor, her back to the audience still holding onto the light, or they
are standing in the twilight towards the back, where Yseult Roch sings
Stravinsky. The texture of their skin changes relative to their position to
the light. Until they identify themselves by writing their names and other
personal data on the back wall, we have time to look at them, to com-
pare their height, age, stature; we have time to get to know them, before
they become a person engaged in doing something. We get to know
them more intimately than in other dance performances where the speed
of movement carries the dancers away and draws our attention to their
physical prowess in executing a choreography rather than allowing us to
remain with them and their singular bodies.
The beginning of the performance thus establishes the stage as a
field of perception with zones of darkness that both literally and meta-
phorically play with shadows and light, visibility and invisibility. This
structured field of perception does not only appeal to our vision, but it
links our gaze to the skin of the bodies. Our gaze is tactilely touching
the bodies as it moves across their surfaces discovering hitherto unseen
marks, crevices, and shapes as the dancers knead their skin. The gaze is
out there amongst the things of the world, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty
writes, whose phenomenological reflections explicitly take the body’s
114  G. Siegmund

situatedness amongst the things of the world into account. The gaze
allows me to be absent from myself, until it returns to me affecting
myself and making me re-flect the unfathomable world (Merleau-Ponty
1993, 146).
In a scene relatively near the beginning of the piece, Claire Haenni
comes forward and pulls up the folds of her belly. Shortly afterward
Frédéric Seguette pulls his scrotum over his penis. Both search their
bodies for birthmarks and moles that they point out using their fingers.
Frédéric Seguette rubs the hair on his arms and legs into small circles
using his saliva. A slap on the buttocks turns their skin pink. This is
where acoustic and tactile stimuli come into play that can be attributed
to the materiality of the body and not to its inscription. In moments
like this, the ambiguity of the piece comes to light. The physical reac-
tions of the dancers’ bodies are simply stimulus-response patterns located
this side of any possible signification, which suspend the legibility of the
body in favour of a sensory effect. These physical reactions, however, are
always doubled by, for instance, the signs for rubescence or pain (the red
lipstick that is used to mark the skin, pain in the form of the word “Aie!”
that is slapped onto the skin). It is in this way that language visibly occu-
pies the body, although this process is unable to erase the dancers’ cor-
poreal reactions. The thereness and thusnesss of the material body is put
in relation to processes of signification that engage and transform the
body without being able to exhaust it or make it disappear. In the open-
ing, between what appears to be nature on the one hand and culture on
the other, representation is suspended by our responsiveness to what we
see and feel. We are responsive to the materiality of the skin before we
perceive what the body appears as and, as a consequence, which meaning
it takes on before our very eyes. In an interview, Bel himself describes the
effect of these scenes as follows:

I want spectators to transform from voyeurs into accomplices, for them

to feel comfortable with the nudity of the bodies on the stage and there-
fore with their own bodies too. If I stroke my skin on the stage, it triggers
a reaction in the spectator. It’s funny when Claire puts her hair between
Frédéric’s legs, because it plays with the idea of masculinity and femininity.
But when she pulls her hair back again, I hear the people in the auditorium
gasp, as if they can feel her hair on their own skin. (Siegmund 1998, 37,
trans. Lydia White)
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  115

Perhaps the most paradigmatic scene in regard to the body being given
in aspects or points of view is one in which Seguette marks the soles of
his feet, the lids of his eyes, the inside of his hands, the armpits, and
finally the underside of his penis with a red cross. By doing so he high-
lights zones of the body that are highly sensitive and that go unnoticed
both in a standard dance performance and in an everyday social situa-
tion. What is more, he draws our attention to aspects of the body that
are forever engaged in their own disappearing as they become invisible
with each footstep or each bat of the eyelid. After having marked them
sitting down, Seguette stands up. He lets his arms dangle and tries not to
blink so as to make the marks disappear from view.
André Lepecki reads this scene as an emblem of the ontology of dance
performance producing its own disappearance (Lepecki 1999). Lepecki
points to the proximity between many contemporary choreographies and
the performance art and body art of the 1970s and their explicit bodies
on stage. For the first time in its history, dance is facing the constitutive
problem of its own ephemerality. The difference to body art, however, is
the semiotic character of the experiences being played out. While per-
formance artist Marina Abramović in her 1975 performance Thomas Lips
cuts a five-pointed star into her belly with a razor blade, Claire Haenni
simply draws a constellation of stars on Frédéric Seguette’s shoulder.5
Another imaginary order takes centre stage and it is not interested in
injury and pain and their consequences for the symbolic order, but rather
in the never-ending cultural production of images and movements that
pulverises the concept of the self-identical subject.
In our context, the stigmata scene becomes an emblem of the way
our engagement with the world and our perception works as a perspec-
tival structure of adumbrated aspects that are forever disappearing and
appearing as something. The marks on the body highlight aspects of it
that we did not perceive before. Making them disappear again draws our
attention to the limitations of our perceptions, its orientation towards
the body that as such and in its entirety is never a given, but always
escapes us. Each turn of the body, each change of the light, and each act
of drawing and writing changes how we perceive and what we perceive
of the body. Our senses and our sensibilities are transformed in what
Roland Barthes calls the operation of theatricality. In the phenomeno-
logical sense light, body, movement, and writing therefore are not pri-
marily considered to be signs that produce meaning. They are bearers
116  G. Siegmund

of perspectives that are responsible for the various ways in which the
body is given to us. The painstaking clarity with which the dancers per-
form the actions, together with the equanimity of execution that refrains
from producing a dynamic that would create a hierarchy of importance
between the various scenes, produces moments of indeterminacy where
the spectators do not know what the action will result in, let alone what
it means. Being indeterminate, our response to these bodies can only
be an approximation in a process of becoming that entails the bodies as
changing bodies. What has settled as meaningful in one scene becomes
uncertain again in the next. The names and figures on the one hand and
the materiality of the bodies on the other will never meet to coincide and
match.

Shirtology (1997): Absence and Semiotics

Shirtology, which Bel developed for the dancer Miguel Pereira in Lisbon
in 1997 and which, since then, has been danced by Frédéric Seguette,
is Jérôme Bel’s third piece. Co-commissioned by Victoria in Ghent,
Belgium, a production company for theatre productions with young peo-
ple, it was originally also performed by 17 children and young adults in
a group version. The production is probably the most reduced perfor-
mance by Jérôme Bel, where the corporeality of the one dancer Frédéric
Seguette is indeed reduced to a bearer of signs and messages. After having
explored the nude body in Jérôme Bel, Shirtology goes on to playfully ana-
lyse the role of the costume in bringing the body about. As in his previ-
ous piece, Bel is particularly interested in the cultural construction of the
body that takes place between the body as a carrier of signs, the t-shirts
sporting slogans or images, and the spectator reading them, engaging in
a dialogue with them, thereby making sense of the single body on stage.
Standing in front of the audience with downcast eyes, Seguette looks
down at his body taking off t-shirt after t-shirt in a measured pace, given
the audience time to read the slogans on the shirt, dropping them off to
the floor next to him. The t-shirts are grouped into three series: in the
first section, all the t-shirts sport numbers such as “1992 Eurodisney”
or “99% Angel.” In the second section, the slogans are more directly
related to the body, its gender, and aspects of dance, while in the third
the organising principle is the display of different colours ending with a
t-shirt whose slogan reads “United Colors of Benetton.” The slogans are
either brand names or markers of a lifestyle that root the subject firmly in
contemporary consumer society (Fig. 2).
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  117

Fig. 2  Shirtology, Ftédéric Seguette © Herman Sorgeloos

118  G. Siegmund

Shirtology visibly plays with the disappropriation of the body by cap-

italist consumer society, which sells prefabricated slogans as markers of
individuality and a lifestyle that depends on consumer goods. But the
piece also plays this disappropriation back to society by stealing and
resignifying its signifiers. A variety of advertising slogans are printed on
the t-shirts, which, on the one hand, once again mark the body as a leg-
ible body, but, on the other, also have the conceptual character of get-
ting us to imagine the wearer as a particular subject. “Just do it,” “New
Man,” and “Chanel” have an appellative character, which is emphasised
in that the people that these slogans call upon are absent from the per-
formance text and must therefore be imagined by the spectators them-
selves. Consumers use the signifiers in their own way and construct their
own history along the way. They are engaged in their own practice of
signs, which always exceeds the normative character of the subject’s
interpellation by the signs. “The way that it works is that the t-shirts,
whose advertising slogans actually demonstrate the triumph of capital-
ism, allow the wearer to produce a very personal discourse that under-
mines the dominant ideology when you arrange them in a certain order”
(Bel and Siegmund 2002, 27, transl. Lydia White).6 The slogan’ printed
on the t-shirts appeal to the readers’ imagination to invent a context,
a situation, or even a story that would define the body on stage. The
body’s actions, movements, and relations are almost entirely dependent
on the spectator’s imagination. The body is both a carrier of signs that
may be read and, by extension, for it to assume an identity as some body,
it is dependent on the codes it reproduces. At the expense of its kinaes-
thetic potentials and dancerly prowess, it is exposed as and reduced to
being a bearer of cultural meaning. By being turned into a sign, the body
as material with potential in itself is made absent. It merely expresses
and communicates meaning that is exterior to the body’s own produc-
tive capacities to communicate, relate, and affect. The logic behind this
thinking is the logic of semiotics as the theory of signs.
Like Nom donné par l’auteur before, Shirtology, too, takes its cue from
Roland Barthes’ semiological research, this time his study on the system
of fashion. In Shirtology, Bel refers to Barthes’ distinction between “cos-
tume” as the system of clothes in general, “clothes” (habiliment) denot-
ing the individual classes into which “costume” may be divided into, and
“clothing” (vêtement) as the individual act of choosing from both the
system and its classes to dress the body (Barthes 1993, 746). As Charles
Sanders Peirce’s basic definition of signs says, a sign is something,
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  119

which stands for something to somebody. It is, therefore, a mechanism

of replacement. Viewed from a structuralist perspective, a perspective I
want to follow in this section, the dancing body in Shirtology is replaced
by signs that designate the body as a product of culture. In my reading
of semiotic theory I will focus on the aspect of absence underlying semi-
oticts as it strives to eliminate all traces of materiality and the body from
its system of thought. 
In his series of lectures held in Geneva between 1907 and 1911, lin-
guist Ferdinand de Saussure undertakes the radical attempt to establish
structural linguistics as a discipline on the basis of phonology. One of his
starting points for his new theory was to eliminate all traces of material-
ity from the sign. The material dimension of the sign is explicitly banned
from the study of language as a structure. Thus, the sign for Saussure is a
“two sided psychological entity” that combines a concept, the signified,
with a “sound-image”, which he calls the signifier. Surprisingly the signi-
fier, too, is conceived of as being an image, a mental representation of
the actual sound being articulated by a speaker.

The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a
sound-image. The latter is not the material sound, a purely physical thing,
but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression it makes on our
senses. The sound-image is sensory, and if I happen to call it “material”, it is
only in that sense, and by way of opposing it to the other term of the asso-
ciation, the concept, which is generally more abstract. (Saussure 1966, 66)

Saussure explains this absence of materiality of the sound-image by giv-

ing the example of reading. Without moving one’s lips, that is to say,
without actually guiding air through the larynx and the vocal chords
to physically articulate sound, the sounds are imagined as psychological
entities in the consciousness. Already Saussure’s basic definition of the
sign implies a double absence. First, the actual “thing” the sign in its
basic function refers to, is replaced by the sign. It is neither part of the
sign nor does it need to be present when the sign is uttered. The sign is
only a sign when it can be repeated in different contexts and situations
independent of the presence of the thing it stands for. Second, although
language is conceived to be the articulation of thought within the raw
material of sound, the material is only a vehicle to the concept and the
thought. It disappears once the undivided cloud of thinking has been
divided into distinct parts to actually generate thought. The signifier is
120  G. Siegmund

made absent by the signified, which becomes apparent in Saussure’s the-

ory of “value.” Just as the sign is arbitrary in its connection of concept
und sound-image, it is also pure negativity. Its components are com-
pletely meaningless in themselves. Their value depends solely on their
position within the system of sings. Thus, their value is produced by dif-
ference. They are something because they are not something else.

The important thing in the word is not the sound alone but the phonic
differences that make it possible to distinguish this word from all others,
for differences carry signification. (…) In addition, it is impossible for
sound alone, a material element, to belong to language. It is only a sec-
ondary thing, substance to be put to use. All our conventional values have
the characteristic of not being confused with the tangible element which
supports them. (1966, 118)

Strictly speaking, the sign in the Saussurean sense does not represent the
thing that is absent. It creates thinking as particular thoughts, which
did not exist prior to the sign’s clarifying intervention into the cloud of
thoughts and the cloud of sounds. In the realm of thinking the object
signified simply does not figure or play any role.
In Shirtology, Jérôme Bel subjects the body to the production of
meaning through the t-shirts. He chooses from the system of clothes,
which is analogous to Saussure’s concept of langue, a class of signs: the
t-shirt. The t-shirt functions as a paradigm, which is explored by pro-
jecting specific t-shirts from the class of costumes into a syntagmatic
order. The sequence of t-shirts with their individual slogans are analo-
gous to an individual act of speaking that Saussure calls parole. During
the second part, Seguette is at his most active, reading the words aloud
or responding to the instructions to “Dance” with his casual sway of the
hips. Singing to the partition of Mozart’s Kleine Nachtmusik, pointing
out note after note on the t-shirt with his finger, he ends up combining
the instructions on the t-shirts. He continuous singing while “Dance or
Die” wants him to add some dancing. “Replay” makes him repeat the
series, “Shut up and Dance” makes him dance without singing, until
“Stay Cool” brings him back into his neutral position from the begin-
ning. The value of each t-shirt, like “Replay,” is entirely dependent on
the t-shirt preceding it (“Dance or Die”) and following it (“Shut up
and Dance”), without which it would not acquire its specific meaning.
Likewise, in the first and third statement, the numbers on the t-shirts
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  121

and the sequence of colours enter into a secret dialogue with each other.
By speaking the t-shirts one by one, Séguette forms a meaningful sen-
tence. He develops a series of actions that combine to make sense. By
reading and acting, his body is defined as a dancing body. Shirtology
speaks about the dancing body, producing it while speaking. Ultimately,
neither the specific materiality of the slogans printed on the t-shirts nor
Seguette’s particular body are of any importance. His body is designated
by signs and subjected to their movement, vanishing in the act of mean-
ingful transformation.
Viewed from a semiotic point of view, Shirtology engages in a differ-
ent kind of absence that emerges as a process of creative re-signification
of signs and their uses. Rather than being operative in perception or in
the temporal rift that triggers responses, absence here is firmly inherent
in the concept of representation. The logic behind representation, as
French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard criticises, is one of a double
absence. In a lecture given in 1972 at a roundtable in Venice, Italy, on
the semiotics of theatre, Lyotard criticises this representational logic of
the sign in regard to the theatre. In his intervention “The Tooth, The
Palm,” which one year later was included in his essay collection Les dis-
positifs pulsionnels (1994), he accuses representational theatre as being a
theatre of absences. To illustrate the logic of absence, Lyotard refers to
an example that the Surrealist German-born photographer Hans Bellmer
gives in one of his essays. “Hans Bellmer has this example: I have a
toothache, I clench my fist, my nails dig into the palm of my hand. Two
investments of the libido. Shall we say that the action of the palm repre-
sents the passion of the tooth?” (Lyotard 1976, 105). For Lyotard the
answer obviously is no. First representation assumes that the action of
the palm, term B, is nothing in itself since it only exists for term A, the
toothache that it stands for. A in turn is also not there or not visible,
since its truth can only be deduced from the action of the palm. “B is
turned into nothingness, as an illusion of presence, its being is in A; and
A is affirmed as truth, that is to say absence.” (Ibid.) Thus, the binary
relation between A and B prioritizes one term over the other and estab-
lishes a hierarchical relation between what Peggy Phelan calls the marked
and the unmarked term. Lyotard seeks to replace the representational
logic of the sign with a conception of the sign as a shifter of energies that
pulsate between terms A and B without substituting one for the other. It
is a theatre of affirmative fullness or plenitude, where terms A and B are
of equal importance, thus avoiding the pitfalls of the metaphysical logic
122  G. Siegmund

of representation and dematerialised meaning. Rather than a critical one,

absence here becomes a purely negative term equivalent to nihilism.
If Saussure’s course on structural linguistics does away with the mate-
riality of the signifier turning language into a pure play of differing men-
tal images, aspects of Saussure’s earlier work hold on to the positivity
of the letter. Saussure’s studies on the anagram, unfinished and unpub-
lished during his lifetime, allow us to re-think the sign in terms of the
materiality of the signifier, that in the context of dance would be anal-
ogous to the body. Before delivering his famous course on linguistics,
Ferdinand de Saussure conducted research into the nature of discourse
(Jean Starobinski 1979, vii). Because language only exists in relation to
it being spoken, how can one describe and analyse the operations of dis-
course as opposed to the abstract system of language? To Saussure dis-
course was more than just isolated words or syllables that make up the
system of language. Discourse builds on a combination of words, on sen-
tences. Saussure’s question is, under which conditions is this combina-
tion of words brought about and how does it operate? Discourse thus is
a mise-en-scène or mise-en-ouevre of language that in the process will be
materialised. The signifier is modified with each mise-en scene giving rise
to the production of discourse. The combination of words is subject to
rules and contexts and may be modified. Saussure’s point in relation to
the anagrams is that the combination itself in its specific material nature
or quality becomes the modifier. Thus, there are always more and other
words behind the actual words, the hypogram, that may be revealed by
changing the order of the letters. There is always text behind text that is
produced by the letters themselves and not by the author of a discourse.
When the letters change their order, another meaning is produced. It is
not the genius author of a poem that is responsible for the text’s produc-
tion of meaning, but the word itself with its possibilities to reveal differ-
ent combinations of signifiers. Saussure calls these other words anagrams.
In his commentary on Saussure’s anagrams, Jean Starobinski, Swiss
historian of ideas who in 1964 made Saussure’s studies on the anagram
public for the first time, considers Saussure’s move to treat the abstrac-
tions of language as raw material for discourse as his prime move (1979,
3). To analyse texts would therefore not mean to ask for authorial inten-
tion or to treat the text as the discourse of a speaking subject. It means
to reveal the latency within the words themselves that also speak the sub-
ject before it knows what it wants to say (ibid., 121). Contrary to his
later studies in the General Discourse on Linguistics, materiality in the
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  123

discourse of anagrams plays a significant role in producing and deferring

meaning. The materiality of the letters transforms them into something
opaque that relates and shifts to other letters. The sign ceases to be a
transparent entity that disappears behind the meaning it conveys. Instead
of being a window to meaning it insists on the materiality of its signifiers,
the letters that build a network of relations amongst themselves, forever
deferring one stable meaning. Absence here does not refer to the nega-
tion of the signifier but to the opposite: the negation of meaning as truth
and its referent by the materiality of the signifier.
If, as I suggested above, the materiality of the signifier is analogous to
the body, how can we make productive use of Suassure’s theory of ana-
grams in realtion to Jérôme Bel’s pieces? Such a thinking entails divid-
ing the body up into various parts or signifiers the order of which may
be reassembled. In his famous photographs of puppets, surrealist artist
Hans Bellmer, to whom Lyotard refered in his vision of a theatre beyond
semiotics, provides an artistic example for such a body in parts. In his
photographs Bellmer reassembles the limbs of his puppets so as to cre-
ate a whole new anatomy that goes against the grain of the body’s eve-
ryday functionality. The puppets create a new image of the body based
on the re-configuration of its constituent parts that engages the view-
er’s imagination. What can you do with a body that has four legs but no
arms? How can you reach out to other people with your arms stuck to
your back? Bellmer writes: “The body is comparable to a sentence that
invites you to disarticulate it, for the purpose of recombining its actual
contents through a series of endless anagrams” (Bellmer 2004, 37–38).
Bellmer equates the body with language that contains other truths or
possibilities than the one it habitually speaks. Krassimira Krushkova,
Viennese theatre and dance scholar and head of the theory department
of the production house Tanzquartier Wien, where Jérôme Bel’s pieces
are programmed regularly, takes up Bellmer’s idea of the body as ana-
gram. She argues that when dealing with anagrams, meaning is sus-
pended and deferred (Krushkova 2004). Tying in with my argument
about the separation or doubling of the body in Jérôme Bel’s work into
its material and significant side, the body does not function as the stable
referent to the meanings it produces by moving. Rather, the body and
its organs such as skin, hair, legs, feet, arms are re-configured to produce
other meanings and bodies. The body is forever opaque, infinitely read-
able or, which is the same thing, not readable at all. It stages a tension
between its materiality and density and the meanings it helps to bring
124  G. Siegmund

about and erase. For Krushkova the body therefore is as much disfigured
as it figures as something in the constellations into which it enters. With
Paul de Man she argues that the result of such an anagrammatic way of
conceiving of a performance is the “determined elimination of determi-
nation” (ibid.) that opens up the body and the stage to an infinite num-
ber of readings that are at the same time always misreadings.
As pointed put in the previous chapter, Bel stages a discourse on
dance as an ensemble of variable elements constitutive of a dance per-
formance. They speak in the language of a dance performance about
the performance. This discourse unfolds from within the system itself
by moving its material elements into new constellations. Authorship or
intentionality of meaning count less than the possibilities of production
the system offers. As has been pointed out in relation to Jérôme Bel, the
transformation of bodies and their meaning are solely brought about by
elements being already present on stage that change their position. The
body is one feature next to other features such as light, music, and space,
unfolding in ever changing constellations of the constituent elements of
the system. As with the t-shirts in Shirtology, the pieces are signification
machines that are put into operation by the permutation of its limited
number of elements.

The Last Performance (1998): Absence

and Deconstruction

In Jérôme Bel, the dancer singing the score to Starvinsky’s Le Sacre du

printemps provides the performance with a historical dimension referenc-
ing not just dance modernism in general but what is perhaps the most
iconic moment in its rupture with tradition. No dance event shaped the
concept of modernity in dance to the same extent that the premiere of
Vaslav Nijinnsky’s Le Sacre du printemps did on 29 May 1913 at the
Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. With its complex rhythmic struc-
ture and the dancer’s stomping movements that were then considered
to be wild and primitive, the premiere of the piece caused a veritable
scandal with its contemporary dance audiences.7 Including Le Sacre as
a code or textual strand into his piece, Jérôme Bel places himself within
the modernist tradition of breaking the rules of what is considered to be
the legitimate form of concert dance, the compositional structures and
theatrical framings of which his project tries to unravel and lay bare. At
the same time, quoting Le Sacre immediately begs the question whether
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  125

Jérôme Bel aimed at a similar scandal or at least a similar impact of his

own piece that would cast him as a dance innovator. With his fourth
piece, The Last Performance, Bel’s concern with dance history takes cen-
tre stage as he questions the originality of movement the creation and
development of which in dance modernism is considered to be the task
of the choreographer. After having examined the codes of choreogra-
phy in Nom donné par l’auteur, the dancing body in Jérôme Bel, and the
function of the costume in Shirtology, in The Last Performance Bel turns
to an analysis of movement itself. Rather than developing original move-
ment phrases, Bel, however, takes recourse to an already existing chore-
ography: the beginning of Susanne Linke’s piece Wandlung from 1978,
which serves as material for Bel’s analysis. Bel repeats the beginning of
Linke’s choreography, thereby revealing the performative mechanisms
that underlie any approach to dance history. Contrary to the discourse
of dance modernism, Bel des not develop and choreograph his own
movements. Rather, he quotes already existing and for that matter his-
torical movement. This operation opens the question of what is origi-
nal movement, if it exists at all, or whether as the production of Xavier
Le Roy discussed in the previous chapter suggests movement in general
is always already quoted. The Last Performance, which premiered at the
Kaaitheater in Brussels on 12 November 1998, has occasionally been
read as a discussion of theatre mechanisms, in which the dancers func-
tion as “demonstrators of a discourse about representation,” as Viennese
critic Helmut Ploebst writes (Ploebst 2001, 199). Peter Stamer inter-
prets the piece as a “theatrical representation machine” that presents the
mechanisms involved in the constitution and deconstruction of theatrical
characters (Stamer 2000, 148). Contrary to these readings in what fol-
lows I consider The Last Perfomance to be a piece that stages the crisis
of representation. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance I
link the production to the theoretical paradigm of deconstruction and its
notion of absence that destabilises meaning and identies.
The stage is hung with beautiful black theatre curtains. The Last
Performance begins with a man dressed in trousers, a t-shirt, and a red
tartan jacket, who steps onto the stage in front of the microphone and
says, “Je suis Jérôme Bel.” Afterwards, he sets the alarm on his watch,
waits until it beeps 60 seconds later and then exits the stage. A second
man in white tennis attire steps into his place and says, “I am André
Agassi.” The curtain in front of the rear of the stage is pulled back to
reveal a wall, against which so-called André Aggasi then skilfully hits a few
126  G. Siegmund

balls before he too exits the stage. A young man (Antonio Carallo) identi-
fies himself as Hamlet “I am Hamlet,” before a woman (Claire Haenni)
with long blonde hair appears, wearing a white dress. She claims to be
Susanne Linke, lies down on her back and begins to dance the opening
of Linke’s solo Wandlung to Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. The four
characters introduce themselves in the native tongue of the person they
represent. In the first four scenes of the piece, as Peter Stamer notes, our
focus is directed toward the basic theatrical situation: X purports to be Y,
while Z watches (2000, 148). Seen from the perspective of a theatre per-
formance it is, in fact, insignificant whether it is Frédéric Seguette playing
Jérôme Bel or it is Jérôme Bel himself, who, in turn, is actually playing
André Aggasi—in the theatre, characters are constituted by their linguis-
tic designation, their costumes, a few props and a particular activity, such
as playing tennis or dancing. We believe that these characters are who
they say they are for the duration of the performance. When Antonio
Carallo as Hamlet follows his “To be,” which he speaks while still on the
stage, with a “or not to be” from offstage, he links the problem of being
on the stage to being seen by a third party. Only those who are visible
exist in the world of the theatre. Those who are invisible are dead.
A second series of appearances then negates these theatrical positings,
cancelling out the characters’ linguistic denominations and individual
attributes. The structure of the scenes stays the same, but the performers
have changed. Jérôme Bel now appears and says, “Je ne suis pas Jérôme
Bel.” Claire Haenni in a tennis dress says, “I am not André Agassi” and
Frédéric Seguette denies that he is Hamlet. In contrast to Haenni, who
still hits a couple of balls against the rear stage wall, Seguette is consist-
ent and takes off his Hamlet costume. Dressed only in a pair of white
briefs, he now claims to be Calvin Klein and says “Obsession” into the
microphone and exits, only to call “Escape” from behind the stage. He
comes back, thus contradicting his exit, and then says, as the logical
consequence, “Contradiction.” But he then leaves the stage once more
and calls “Eternity” from offstage. All four of these words are the names
of perfumes by Calvin Klein, which, in this scene, are equated with
Hamlet’s utterances. His “To be” is his “Obsession,” “or not to be?”
is his flight (Escape), his return (“That is the question”) is his inconsist-
ency (Contradiction), and his exit is his perpetuity (Eternity). Seguette
denies the figure of Hamlet the costume allocated to him within the sys-
tem of the performance; he is transformed when he puts on a different
one. Likewise, Jérôme Bel denies Susanne Linke the activity of dance.
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  127

Wearing a white dress, he says, “Ich bin nicht Susanne Linke,” while he
loudly hums Schubert’s melody wearing headphones.
Immediately after Claire Haenni’s first appearance as Susanne Linke,
three other scenes follow in which Jérôme Bel, Antonio Carallo, and
Frédéric Seguette, all in white dresses, dance Susanne Linke’s solo, one
after the other. We see the first seven minutes of the emotionally charged
solo a total of four times. Each time we see a body with the highest level
of tension, see how, lying on its back, it contorts into fragile balancing
positions with legs and arms outstretched, how it rolls to and fro and
turns away and protects itself, before swinging around with momentum.
Four times we are exposed to the same solo as a citation; we see four
bodies go through the same dance. But by the fourth time at the latest,
it does not matter if this choreography was actually created by Susanne
Linke or not. The copy unfurls its own fascinating existence, which
makes knowledge of the original irrelevant.
I attribute a certain vulnerability to Claire Haenni’s version, while the
same moves performed by Frédéric Seguette seem more powerful and
thus more antagonistic. While watching his solo I cannot help but think
that a man probably would not have invented movements like these,
which to my signify seduction and surrender just as much as they do
fear, helplessness, and resistance. So when do we read the movements in
which particular way? When do we ascribe feminine or masculine attrib-
utes to them? Bel is also making reference to the cultural constitution of
spectators’ interpretative patterns.

In Le Dernier Spectacle, I am explicitly referring to the history of dance

by quoting Suzanne [sic!] Linke’s 1978 solo; by historicizing this dance,
I am not trying to kill the father as a young choreographic artist might be
tempted to do. I say: Let’s look for the origin. But in the end, by repeat-
ing it in a series, I perceive what has been moved around, the impossible
reproduction, that the original does not exist, that the question of origins
cannot be posed in these terms. The project was to say: there is history,
there is a lineage, and then suddenly, the fact that that which was danced
twenty years ago is repeated several times at thirty second intervals demon-
strates the very opposite: history is pulverised. (Goumarre 2001, 16, trans.
Lydia White)

But the pulverisation of history during the performance that Jérôme

Bel describes also has a positive side. It produces difference and new
meaning. The Last Performance stages the production of difference,
128  G. Siegmund

which builds on yet another understanding of absence. In his reading of

Saussure and Rousseau, Jacques Derrida arrives at an understanding of
absence that is located inbetween the signifier and the signified. Derrida
radicalises Saussure’s groundbreaking insight that language is a system of
differences, the constituent elements of which only gain value because
they exist in opposition to other elements they are different from.
Saussure considers the relation between the signifier and the signi-
fied to be stable, like the two sides of a sheet of paper (Saussure 1966,
113). However, as Saussure himself concedes, just how the relation
between the two constituent parts of the sign is established, is somewhat
of a mystery: “the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that ‘thought-
sound’ implies division, and that language works out its units while tak-
ing shape between two shapeless masses”(1966, 112). How then does a
sign become a sign? As Derrida argues, a foundational principle must be
in operation that separates the shapeless masses of sound and thought
into distinct units that then unite to form signs. For thought to be a dis-
tinct thought and therefore thought at all, the principle of difference has
to operate not only between established units of a linguistic system but
must already be in operation before the sign becomes a sign. Difference
must already operate in the realm of the signified thereby producing the
signified in the first place by separating it form itself. Difference produces
an opening or an empty space thats sets the signified and the signifier
in motion. Derrida calls this operation “arche writing,” which institutes
signs by spacing, by producing an opening and a separation for connec-
tions between signifier and signified, a connection that is at the same
time a separation. Derrida calls this double principle différance: “an
economic concept designating the production of differing/deferring”
(Derrida 1974, 23). The term différance implies the production of dif-
ference and therefore meaning while at the same time it designates the
deferral and delaying of meaning, thus making the presence of mean-
ing impossible. Although différance may not be articulated as such, it
is responsible for language being a system of articulations. In Derrida’s
understanding the signified “is always already in the position of the signi-
fier” (ibid., 73); that is, it differs from itself and bears the traces of other
signifiers and their signifieds. Meaning is ever only the trace of mean-
ing shifting and changing, appearing and disappearing along the chain
of signifiers that produces and defers it. Instead of establishing the self-
presence of the subject, the re-appearance of writing within the system of
language bars the subject from ever gaining access to itself by means of
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  129

the spoken word. It is not only meaning that differs from itself, but it is
also the subject that becomes spaced out, put at a distance to its mean-
ingful intentions. As Derrida explains:

Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious

of the subject. By the movement of its drift/derivation [dérive] the eman-
cipation of the sign constitutes in return the desire of presence. That
becoming—or that drift/derivation—does not befall the subject, which
would choose it or would passively let itself be drawn along by it. As the
subject’s relationship with its own death, this becoming is the constitution
of subjectivity. On all levels of life’s organization, that is to say, of the econ-
omy of death. All graphemes are of a testamentary essence. And the original
absence of the subject of writing is also the absence of the thing or the
referent (ibid., 69).

The consequences of the “economy of death” are twofold. First, it des-

ignates the figural logic along the lines of which deconstructive criti-
cism operates. If Saussure wants to exclude writing from his system of
linguistics, deconstruction shows that that which is excluded operates
from within the very system it was excluded from, thus opening up its
borders and making the distinction between inside and outside impossi-
ble. Second, it creates a radical understanding of the notion of absence
as spacing that forever separates presence from itself. It gives rise to the
desire for presence, the starting point of which is the lack of presence.
Thus, absence is not only the absence of the material signifier and the ref-
erent or the thing. Nor does it only refer to the absence of stable meaning
that is forever deferred. In a more radical sense absence indicates an inar-
ticulable space that may not be lived and that Derrida equates with death.
Thus, the dancing body is neither absent as in gone nor present in
the sense of self-possession. Rather it appears as a trace, a moving trace
originating from the original absence that is différance. Understood as
a trace its presence is always barred, made impossible by the shifts of its
movements. It is not surprising that the dancing body almost literary
becomes a metaphor for Derrida’s notion of the trace, forever disappear-
ing, vanishing in time and space thereby debunking any fixed meaning.
For Derrida, the dancing body and its traces are a kind or writing: they
write their own absence. As it moves along, the body changes places. It
leaves traces, which in its wake can no longer be recuperated. As numer-
ous dance scholars have pointed out, Derrida is not interested in the
historical and culturally specific materialities of the body. He is also not
130  G. Siegmund

interested in individual choreographies and the way they work through

sets of representations to change or affirm their meaning. Instead, his
idea of writing approximates dance’s ontological status as immaterial
and disappearing. “Derrida’s notion of writing as difference offers dance
studies a set of ‘signs’ as elusive as those dance steps to which they refer,”
André Lepecki sums up the discussion. “Both writing and dancing
plunge into ephemerality” (Lepecki 2004, 133). Forever approaching
but never arriving, forever becoming but never being, writing and dance
are in harmony sharing an ontological status of non-being.
In his attempt to value the specificity of dance as an embodied prac-
tice, Mark Franko criticises Derrida’s notion of writing as a disappear-
ing trace. For Franko dance is not immaterial and therefore its steps and
the movement they engender do not pass into nothingness. He invokes
performance as an act that “can materialize, and therefore ‘retain’ what
is not, re-call it” (Franko 1995, 211). Being a form of repetition, per-
formance enables the body to remember movement and re-perform
it. It can return onto itself, thereby becoming reflective in an attempt
to recuperate what has gone on before. Thus, the mimises to a former
movement or spacing is not a copy of what has been performed before
but a return to an “uncertainty” that needs to be readdressed. Franko’s
material traces also refer to an absence: they are “forceful action taken
on behalf of what is not” (1995, 212). Where Derrida invokes dance as
a metaphor for the original absence that is spacing, Franko refers to the
results of this spacing, namely writing as re-writing. Thus, the notion of
absence is transferred from its paradoxical status on the ontological level
to the level of memory. The fact that the body is forever severed from
embodying a fixed meaning does not, therefore mean that the body and
its movements disappear. Instead the body becomes a supplement to the
original absence. It replaces absence by being added to it thereby includ-
ing it into its being with the result that the body and its movements
cease to be identical with itself. Each movement is a memory of another
movement effacing and remembering the movement at the same time.
Movement turns in on itself thereby missing itself because of temporal
spacing, which as a consequence, produces difference while retaining and
remembering something of that which is repeated. Through the series
of repetitions and “the performative difference that comes into effect in
it,” as German dance scholar Gabriele Brandstetter writes in relation to
Jérôme Bel’s piece, the “difference of repetition itself” is played out and
becomes visible (Brandstetter and Sibylle Peters 2002, 18).
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  131

Franko’s re-reading of Derrida has consequences for the conception

of dance history. If the dancing body is only ever a supplement to the
original absence that returns to an uncertainty, as Franko has it, any
claims to an original piece must be given up. Neither is there a self-iden-
tical original piece nor is the identity of the dancers secured in the pro-
cess of performative repetition. Thus, any attempt at recovering historical
or lost dance pieces from the past must be conceived of as a re-writing
that misses its object at the same time that it recuperates it. To narrow
Derrida’s general philosophy down to a specific piece, Jérôme Bel’s The
Last Perfomance serves as a case in point. At the time of its premiere
the piece was widely read in the context of the increasing number of re-
enactments, re-stagings, or re-constructions of historical dance pieces—a
wave that only today, 20 years later, is beginning to wane.8 It posed the
question of the relationship of a new generation of dancers to dance his-
tory. In Bel’s statements about his own dance education, dance history
was barely taught to emerging dancers. As Jérôme Bel pointed out in
an interview, all he did in The Last Performance was to copy movement
(Alphant 2002). All the movements from the setting of the alarm on the
wristwatch, the movements of a tennis player to, most prominently, the
excerpt from Susanne Linke’s Wandlung, are citations of movements.
They are cultural material that the choreographer uses to build his per-
formance. In the structure of the performance they quote themselves as
they are passed on from dancer to dancer, from body to body thereby
losing all claims to originality. These movements travel as they are
repeated or, more precisely, iterated. One after the other, the four danc-
ers dance the beginning of Linke’s solo while the fifth time, it is danced
behind a black curtain. Each time the dance is introduced by the per-
formative speech act “Ich bin Susanne Linke” (“I am Susanne Linke”).
Since it is a speech act uttered in the context of a theatre performance,
as Derrida notes, Austin would have excluded it from his speech act
theory that accounts only for utterances that the speaker is symbolically
entitled to make and that he or she intends to fulfil (Derrida 1988, 16).
Obviously none of the four dancers are the “real” Susanne Linke, but
they are Susanne Linke in the context of the piece. Thus the same speech
act that constitutes the reality of the scene, refers to four different bodies
that regardless of their gender produce four different versions of Linke’s
signature piece. All versions are the same, as the choreography remains
identical, yet they differ as the audience notices differences in articula-
tion and execution. The three male bodies differ in stature and weight,
132  G. Siegmund

so that the impression of lightness that the female dancer gives makes
way for various degrees of heaviness and compactness. The orientation
of the limbs in space varies according to the length of arms and legs of
the individual dancers. Unmoored from the body that both created and
danced the solo, the iteration of the dance produces difference that with
each iteration traces behind memories of the previous renditions of the
dance that becomes effaced and remembered anew each time.
While the series of repetitions could be considered to be a parody
of Linke’s original or an ironical statement about the meaning of the
piece, the dance is performed each time with great precision and care.
During the time of its creation Linke herself worked with the dancers
on the solo. Despite the comical effect produced by the female costume
that the male dancers wear or the blonde wig that quotes the haircut
of the original Susanne Linke, the spectators quickly accept the charac-
ter created by signs as a ‘real’ theatrical figure to believe in. The ‘false’
or infelicitous speech act produces a reality that we accept as such. The
citational practice Bel instigates draws our attention to the fact that even
Susanne Linke may not claim to be in possession of the original chore-
ography nor of her subjectivity as a dancer as it emerges when she dances
the piece. Thus, were Susanne Linke to dance Wandlung again today,
even she would be deferring the meaning of her own dance because
her body in space-time has moved on and is not the same as before.
Conceptually speaking, Bel and Linke’s dance is another materialisa-
tion of the concept Wandlung, which as a work remains decentred. Such
a reading is supported by the fact that the piece Wandung itself has a
split origin. The solo was originally part of a group piece called Der Tod
und das Mädchen, Death and the Maiden, from 1976. It was not danced
by Linke, but was created for and danced by the dancer Frances Carty.
Later, when Carty was no longer available, Linke for practical reasons
separated the solo, set to Schubert’s music, from the original piece and
turned it into a solo for herself. Thus, Wandlung, as the new version was
now called, is itself a quotation taken out of context and grafted onto
another body that inflected its meaning (Norbert Servos 2005, 35). The
piece does what its title, Wandlung, Transformation, suggests: it is in
permanent transition. But such a reading is true for all dances, which in
this radical and general sense of absence can never make claims for origi-
nality (Fig. 3).
More specifically, what the quotation of Linke’s piece in the context
of The Last Performance suggests is a change in our cultural situation. It
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  133

Fig. 3  The Last Performance, Dancing Susanne Linke’s Wandlung © Herman

Sorgeloos

describes a loss just as it opens our eyes to a new freedom. Wandlung is

a solo by a German female dancer who during the mid-1960s was edu-
cated by the German expressionist dancer Mary Wigman in Berlin and
by Jean Cébron and Hans Züllig at the Folkwang-Hochschule in Essen.
This links her firmly to German modern dance and to what, from the
1970s onwards, became known as Tanztheater, which was characterised
formally by its radical break with the then dominant ballet tradition in
West-Germany. Wandlung is the solo of a woman who places herself in
the centre of attention to speak about female experience. It may be read
as a piece of self-assertion as well as a piece that communicates a state
of being between life and death with a body that spirals from the floor
upwards using extreme bodily tension to create the impression of light-
ness and weightlessness (Katja Schneider 2005, 159). Lightness, as Linke
describes it, is an energy that exudes from the body. The body takes it
in by the feet touching the floor and she lets it travel through the legs,
the centre, back and shoulders up to the head and beyond. Her body
grows into space by working on the vertical line (Servos 2005, 35). It
134  G. Siegmund

is this transcendent quality that critic Norbert Servos considers to be

the central topic of her work (ibid., 47). Linke ‘links’ transcendence to
women in their capacity to join together opposites and extremes (rooted-
ness and transcendence, lightness and weight, softness and tension, life
and death) whereas the men in her pieces work differently with weight to
create heaviness with an energy that renders apart (ibid., 35). Wandlung
gives this topic an explicit religious context. The solo is a kind of danse
funèbre that thematises the transition from one life into another (ibid.,
33). As the title of Schubert’s music suggests, death is calling her and
Linke stages the moment inbetween life and death, rising upwards and
sinking to the floor again. Photographs of Linke dancing the piece show
her with shiny eyes wide open staring into the distance in fervent antici-
pation of what is to come (ibid., 58). They also reveal the softness of her
meticulously sculpted body full of tension lying on the floor couching
and opening up at the same time with arms and feet tentatively stretched
outward from the drawn-in centre.
Inserted as a quotation into Bel’s The Last Performance, Wandlung
becomes part of the discourse ‘Jérôme Bel’ and its critical turn against
dance modernism and postmodernism. This means that Linke’s subject
position as a female dancer in Germany in the 1970s as well as the femi-
nine qualities she articulates in the piece are de-essentialised. They no
longer articulate and denote the self-assertion of a woman but a loss of
an identical self with genuine experiences considered to be essentially
feminine. The experiences Linke articulated and abstracted in her dance
are cut loose from their origins to be passed onto much younger danc-
ers, most of them male with different cultural backgrounds and different
dance educations. Thus, the quote no longer speaks about a specific life
and its experiences. The essentially feminine is shown to be an illusion
that gives rise to the desire for presence where there are only performa-
tive speech acts that produce the female by repetition of the choreog-
raphy. Whereas Linke focuses on the articulation of a state of being
assumed to be there, Bel draws our attention to the making and making
up of this state of being by choreographic writing.
The absence Bel stages in accordance to and in extension of Derrida’s
notion of absence as différance makes a strong claim for the possibil-
ity for bodies and their movements to appear. It is here that the gen-
eral critical aspect of the concept of absence emerges. If everything
were given and present, nothing would appear. If nothing can appear,
nothing gets noticed and nothing will be set in motion. Appearing needs
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  135

withdrawing, thereby splitting the coincidence of bodies and their mean-

ings to give rise to our desire for presence. Appearing as withdrawing
creates an event that challenges our perceptions and our understanding
making our physical, emotional, and intellectual engagement with the
bodies appearing possible. Ultimately what absence as différance achieves
is the possibility for bodies engaged in signifying practices to appear in
the first place thus making us understand, see, and hear. At the same
time, absence prevents the closure of the scene allowing performers and
spectators alike to display and to discover a myriad of possibilities, often
contradictory ones, of meaning, being, seeing, and perceiving.
If every performative act is accompanied by the repetition of a preced-
ing act as citation (Derrida 1988) or even by a cultural and social norm
that operates behind the back of the subject’s intentions, it means that,
in principle, this norm can be changed with every act. The productive
impact of the piece is derived from the ontological absence of an original
or a first act. Every body that dances it and every dancing repeats the
space of potential, carved out by Susanne Linke, as well as the gestures
and movements that belong to this space, which survive because, once
created, they can be repeated infinitely, at least in principle. They sur-
vive in the memory of a culture and its people, where they can be used
in and taken from this memory—as a summons and as a performativum
that keeps them alive as forever non-recuperable. The Last Performance
safeguards the absence of Susanne Linke’s dance by repeating the cho-
reography and a dance, which only cites hers. This presence, paradoxi-
cally, preserves it as an absent dance. The Last Performance was originally
meant to include other choreographic citations too, from works by, for
instance, Pina Bausch, to demonstrate performative becoming and the
fact that the constitution of the identity of subjects and movements is
never complete. Unfortunately, this was not possible due to copyright
reasons.9
Alongside this series of repetitions, The Last Performance features a
third series of scenes that plays the issue of absence into the hands of
the spectators. After setting up and cancelling out the figures and their
dances in the first two rounds, there are five further scenes that are all
played by Antonio Carallo wearing the red jacket of the Jérôme Bel char-
acter. Carallo only sketches out scenes; he sets his watch without saying
a word, but exits before it beeps. He hits a couple of tennis balls against
the wall and then grabs a perfume bottle to spray ‘Eternity’ by Calvin
Klein twice in the direction of the audience. He then picks up a black
136  G. Siegmund

cloth and holds it in front of his body with his arms outstretched and,
in doing so, alludes to a preceding scene in which he danced the begin-
ning of Wandlung wearing a Susanne Linke costume behind the curtain,
which was being held by Seguette and Haenni, thus making his dancing
invisible to the audience. The scenes continue to thin out; action and
attributes are only touched upon; the characters are cheerfully shuffled
around until they exist only in our memory and imagination.
With the scent of perfume, all of the imaginative achievements waft
from the stage to the auditorium to engage the audience’s memories.
Thus, the piece moves away from the architectural stage into the men-
tal theatre of the imagination. Carallo, wearing the costume associated
with Jérôme Bel, can be understood as the disappearance of the character
Jérôme Bel and thus as the disappearance of the author-person Bel. The
repetitions mean that we can complete the scenes, can realise them for
ourselves, in front of ourselves. Once the figure of Bel the author has
disappeared, we can even become the authors of the piece. In the end,
Antonio Carallo returns to the stage once more to lay the small Walkman
that Jérôme Bel had used in the scene “Ich bin nicht Susanne Linke” on
the floor. Once he has gone, in an eerie scene, the Walkman reads out
the spectators’ names taken from the list of ticket reservations at the box
office before the show, which echo across the empty stage and drift out
into the rows of spectators, where they meet their owners.
Jérôme Bel explains that for him this scene underlines the indispensa-
ble presence of the audience for the theatre performance to take place.
“That is why it was important to me,” he says, “in a piece in which we
name all of the people on the stage—Jérôme Bel, André Agassi, Hamlet,
Susanne Linke and Calvin Klein—to name the other authors too: the
spectators” (Bel and Siegmund 2002, 30, trans. Lydia White). With the
naming of their names, the spectators transform into characters in the
piece who only become aware of their roles once the protagonists and
the action on the stage have been made absent. Only when there is noth-
ing left to see, when the performance has disappeared from the stage,
do the spectators become aware of their function as the authors of the
piece that they have just watched. Thrown back upon their singularity,
they recognise themselves as the producers of the performance and its
meaning.
But one can also read the scene differently, contrary to Bel’s own con-
ceptualisation—because the spectators are by no means made present
on the stage with the naming of their names. Quite the opposite: What
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  137

the reading of the names creates is an awareness that I as a spectator am

not in the place from where I am being summoned. The scenic reality of
the theatre does not substitute the dancers with members of the audi-
ence but rather holds this substitution in suspension. The spectator who
has been summoned only sees him- or herself as someone who is absent
from the stage, where he or she too dies at the end of the performance
because for the spectator there is nothing left to see. As such, the list of
the living coming from the Walkman rapidly becomes a list of the dead,
whose obituaries are being read out. The spectators also enter into this
play ​of signifiers that have a testamentary character as Derrida points out
while they uncannily testify of the present absence of the spectators on
stage. They become part of a choreography “where the bodies return to
mark a presence that they revoke and an absence that is made visible”
(Buffard and Le Roy 1999, 31). With the empty stage in front of them,
they hear their names, for which—unlike in the case of ‘Jérôme Bel’,
‘André Agassi’, ‘Hamlet’, ‘Susanne Linke’ and ‘Calvin Klein’—there are
no costumes, props or actions that would represent them on stage. Most
of all: there are no bodies to match these names; the platform remains
empty.
What Jérôme Bel here calls into play is the authorial voice of the sym-
bolic order of language.10 We are hailed by language asking us to assume
a subject position as members of the audience who are constituative for
the performance to come into being. Because language is ubiquitous,
it cannot represent itself as a whole. It appeals to us, summons us, and
forces us to take our place within its order. Our name designates this
place that has not (yet) been filled out by a body that could give it vol-
ume. The acousmatic voice from the Walkman demands that we give its
incorporeality a body, which is what would happen if we stepped onto
the stage. What The Last Performance does instead is to literally dem-
onstrate the space between the signifiers of my name and my body as
the signified that remain separate. The spacing, différance as original
absence, makes us miss each other, summoning other bodies to take my
place to defer meaning and being. At the end, the stage remains a place
where I am not, in which I am absent, but which I can fill with my ideas
because I am physically absent from it. Between here and there, body and
language, auditorium and stage, theatricality begins to operate, re-writ-
ing the things seen and heard. The notion of absence as différance, as a
spacing that forever separates signifier and signified, meaning and its ref-
erent, is close to Roland Barthes’ notion of theatricality, since both pitch
138  G. Siegmund

absence as a site of production of and for the subject and its meanings.
For this reason, The Last Performance is first and foremost the story of
how cultural production and the reception of identity function when the
media forces the archives of our cultural memory wide open and every
instance of remembering simultaneously means an instance of forget-
ting or death.

The Show Must Go On (2000/2001): Absence

and Psychoanalysis

The Last Performance closed by asking the spectators to under-

stand themselves as the authors of the piece, and therefore to enter
into the game as subjects interpellated by the authorial voice of thea-
tre. The Show Must Go On picks up where The Last Performance left
off. Dramaturgically speaking, the play had actually ended with a ‘cliff
hanger,’ was still in the balance as it were, before the empty stage
could truly be populated. It is now continued in The Show Must Go On,
where Jérôme Bel indeed addresses the spectators as the co-perform-
ers of the show. The sequence of Bel’s performances since 1994 allows
us to construct a meta-story just by looking at the titles of the various
productions, which reveal Bel’s conceptual relationship to the thea-
tre. Inaugurating his project as a discourse on dance with Nom donné
par l’auteur and subsequently naming the discourse Jérôme Bel, he
announced the disappearance of Jérôme Bel in The Last Performance.
Suggesting that after the run-through of analytical questions relating
to choreography, the body, costumes, and finally movement, his dis-
course on dance had come to a close in what was to be indeed The Last
Performance; the following piece, Xavier Le Roy, allowed Bel to survive
as an other. Bel survived his own death as an author-function without
having anything to do with the performance as such. In The Show Must
Go On, his intention to stop making pieces and leave the production
of choreographies to the spectators leads to a resurrection of the the-
atre as representation. The Show Must Go On is an ironic revocation of
the last performance: theatre after the death of the theatre. Once again,
the dancers perform on an empty stage, but they perform in a certain
way that dissolves the traditional relationship between performers and
spectators.
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  139

The Show Must Go On first premiered in September 2000, played by

the ensemble of the Deutsche Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, before it had
its premiere at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris on 4 January 2001, played
by Bel’s own company.11 At the beginning of the evening, the stage is
bathed in darkness. For a long time, nothing happens on the empty stage
while we wait in anticipation of what is to come. In front of the prosce-
nium a disc jockey has taken his place behind a desk with a CD-player
and pile of CDs stacked on top. We soon learn that he will be responsible
for changing the CDs during the course of the evening, playing a total of
19 well-known pop songs that form the structure of the piece. The songs
are its musical and dramaturgical score that also stipulates the dancer’s
actions. Following is the sequence of songs:

1. “Tonight” (West Side Story), by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen

Sondheim
2. “Let The Sun Shine In” (Hair), by Galt MacDermott, James
Rado, and Gerome Ragni
3. “Come Together,” The Beatles
4. “Let’s Dance,” David Bowie
5. “I Like to Move It,” Reel 2 Real
6. “Ballerina Girl,” Lionel Richie
7. “Private Dancer,” Tina Turner
8. “Macarena,” Los del Rio
9. “Into My Arms,” Nick Cave
10. “My Heart Will Go On,” Céline Dion
11. “Yellow Submarine,” The Beatles
12. “La Vie en Rose,” Edith Piaf
13. “Imagine,” John Lennon
14. “The Sound of Silence,” Simon and Garfunkel
15. “Every Breath You Take,” The Police
16. “I Want Your Sex,” George Michael
17. “I’m Still Standing,” Elton John
18. “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” Roberta Flack
19. “The Show Must Go On,” Queen.12

As becomes apparent form the list of songs, The Show Must Go On, like
all of Bel’s other pieces, follows a serial dramaturgy. As was the case with
140  G. Siegmund

his previoius pieces, the serial quality of the clear cut individual epidodes
does not suggest that their order is random or even interchangebale.
Although during the performance the scenes are strung together and
image follows image, the piece has a stringent structure that follows a
precisely calculated arc of suspense.The Show Must Go On, too, develops
a line of thought that is logical and coherent right through to the very
last scene or sentence of the performance. As the music progresses and
song follows song, it soon becomes clar that Bel’s show spins a tale of
creation and death: the creation of an entire world on stage that signi-
fies the world. From darkness to light, from life to its ultimate death and
even beyond towards resurrection: The Show Must Go On develops very
clear religious overtones. Although the individual episodes do not con-
nect to make up a conclusive narrative, the piece still has a beginning,
a middle, and an end. In the beginning, as in the Bible and the story
of God’s creation of the world, there was the word. The Show Must Go
On creates its entire world with words as its premise. The story begins
with the promise Jim Bryant and Marni Nixon from the original cast
recording of the musical West Side Story make, namely that tonight the
stars will shine brightly on what is to become their love story while the
stage remains bathed in darkness for the duration of the entire song.
We do not yet know what we are going to see nor what this love story
with the theatre that Jérôme Bel is setting up will be like. At the begin-
ning, there is just the word “tonight” and the promise it makes to all of
us who have come to theatre tonight to see the show. The promise it
makes is the promise of every theatre evening before the curtain rises.
It is the promise of a lovely, interesting, exciting, or entertaining even-
ing, the promise to show us a world up there in front of us on the stage.
Leonard Bernstein’s song gets us in the mood and makes us wonder
what might follow. Like the original creator, Jérôme Bel introduces the
means he will use to build up the world of the stage one after the other.
For the next song, Let the Sunshine In from the musical Hair, light is
introduced that separates night from day. The lighting becomes brighter
and brighter, until it has reached its maximum strength and luminosity
at the end of the song. But the stage is still empty, there are neither ani-
mals nor people that would populate it. There are no people that would
interact with each other and with us, sitting in the auditorium waiting
for something to happen. This changes courtesy of The Beatles and their
song Come Together. When the chorus sounds, the performers step onto
the stage in their own street or rehearsal clothing and form a semi-circle.
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  141

They examine the audience almost inertly, face the gazes of the specta-
tors who see and acknowledge them, which is tantamount to their birth
as actors on the stage that means the world. The next song reveals what
they intend to do up there. Let’s dance, David Bowie challenges, and this
is exactly what the people on stage do. Informally they start to move,
dancing as if they were in a discotheque, moving along to the bass line
of the song until the chorus fades out and the action once again comes
to a stand still. If the songs are the musical score of the piece, the lines
of their choruses are the dancer’s actions. They do exactly what the lyr-
ics tell them to. Hailed by language, they assume their subject position
within its structure, which allows them to act (Fig. 4).
Although their actions are always limited to the duration of each of
the songs, the emerging constellation of dancers continues in the next
song creating links between the distinct phrases. In this way, the danc-
ers walk across the stage in search of a partner they can hold during Into
My Arms. During My Heart Will Go On one of the partners falls for-
ward, body stiff and arms outstretched like the actress Kate Winslett in
the film Titanic, which featured Céline Dion’s song in its soundtrack.

Fig. 4  The Show Must Go On, Come Together © Musacchio e Lanniello

142  G. Siegmund

But we all know that the Titanic ultimately sinks. In theatres with lifting
platforms, like the Deutsche Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, the stage floor
sinks toward the end of the song. It takes the group down to the lower
stage, where they metaphorically perish at the bottom of the sea. In thea-
tres without lifting platforms, the performers simply exit the stage. But
in an ironic twist, Jérôme Bel lets them live. Yellow light penetrates the
stage from the bottom of the sea, and we hear the performers singing the
chorus “We all live in a yellow submarine” offstage once the song has
faded out.
Afterwards with the stage empty, Edith Piaf’s La Vie En Rose marks
a break. The auditorium is bathed in pink light that fades away towards
the end of the song. The entire theatre hall remains pitch black during
John Lennon’s Imagine, so that the spectators, too, can imagine a more
peaceful world. During The Sound of Silence, the chorus is blanked out so
that the silence actually becomes audible while we mentally fill in the gap
of the song’s well known title. After this, the dancers return from their
lengthy exile from the stage to form a row at the front. They immedi-
ately and quite challengingly begin to watch the audience, because “Every
breath you take, every step you make, I’ll be watching you” tells them to.
The quality of their gazes changes for George Michael’s I Want Your Sex,
during which the dancers attempt to establish direct eye contact with peo-
ple in the auditorium in order to “hit on” them. During Killing Me Softly,
they all slowly sink to the floor dying, only to rise up again in The Show
Must Go On. The Show Must Go On describes the birth of a world using
words and the bodies that follow them until their death and resurrection,
which as its dramatic climax marks the end of the piece. This end is not
reversible, nor can it be placed at any different point in the piece. The
list of songs may be continued, however, as encores given after the actual
drama is over. But, as with every theatre performance, the piece may be
played again. For with every performance the show will indeed go on.
The relationship between language and body that The Show Must Go
On establishes is unilateral to the extent that there are only text bodies
left on the stage. Jérôme Bel does away with the affect-laden body of
modern dance and replaces it with a body that only comes into being
through linguistic interpellation. At all times, his bodies are bodies that
have already been acknowledged by the symbolic order of language.
When Bel places the DJ booth in front of the stage, he makes it clear—as
he does using the Walkman at the end of The Last Performance—that
language is is an all pervasive phenomenon. It exists prior to the world
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  143

created and presented on stage, engulfing it, permeating its bodies, and
facilitating action and interaction. Thus the role of the DJ is a crucial
one. As the originator of language in the piece, he is indeed a god-like
figure giving words and allowing for communication. He plays the role
of the divine puppeteer who makes the puppets on the stage dance to the
words that he controls. The DJ obviously also represents Jérôme Bel the
choreographer who is a figure of authority and power directing the danc-
ers according to the will of his words. To subvert the hyperbole implicit
in the equation god-author-Jérôme Bel and to give it an ironic twist,
one could say that—luckily in the production, to quote another popular
song—god is only a DJ. While mostly individual directors and choreog-
raphers are integral parts of the way modern theatre and dance go about
producing works, their role traditionally goes unmarked within the per-
formance itself. Hidden behind the result, which is his or her work with
the actors or dances, the process of creation disappears behind the prod-
uct. Jérôme Bel, on the other hand, makes this figure of authority visible
as an integral part of the performance. In an abstracted and one could
perhaps say conceptual form, he includes something of the production
process in the final result, with the performance laying bare its mecha-
nisms of authority along the way. The author-as-god function is made
visible even climbing onto the stage and dancing alone to Tina Turner’s
Private Dancer, and as a consequence also debatable as part of the con-
tent of the production, which, becoming self-reflexive in the process,
exposes and reflects on its own conditions of being.
Despite the harmonious interaction between language, the words of
the pop songs the dancers follow and enact, and the dancers’ docile bod-
ies, it is obvious to even those who have only seen the performance once,
that The Show Must Go On does not necessarily unfold its story without
a conflict. The dramatic conflict has left the closed universe of the plat-
form and is now being enacted between the stage and the auditorium.
Reports are myriad where spectators during the show storm onto the
stage, play or sing along, interrupt the show with irritated heckling, or
leave the auditorium slamming doors. What kind of resistance does the
piece encounter? “In The Last Performance, I demanded that the specta-
tors themselves become choreographers,” Bel says in an interview.

In The Show Must Go On, I don’t make any demands on them, apart from
telling them to remain themselves and to play “being a spectator”. One
of the starting points for making the piece was not wanting to dominate
144  G. Siegmund

the spectators. The performers carry out actions that, really, anybody can
perform. They do not make use of any special knowledge and even less do
they showcase any particular skill. The whole thing was supposed to create
equality between the performers and the spectators. But it is precisely this
equality that has elicited extremely aggressive reactions from the specta-
tors, as it seems that they would rather identify with some kind of hero
than with the actors in The Show Must Go On. To cut a long story short: If
you don’t try to be in command of the audience, it will try to kill you. (Bel
and Siegmund 2002, 31, trans. Lydia White)

The piece allows the spectators to put themselves on the same level as the
dancers. They, too, know the words of the songs, can identity the cultural
references brought into play; they, too, can disco-dance. Raising the audi-
ence to the same level as the performers in turn means that they watch
dancers that have put themselves on the same technical level as the specta-
tors. From that it follows that the dancers’ expertise and technical prow-
ess, which the audience has paid to see matching its financial expenditure
with the dancers’ expenditure of energy and sweat, as Roland Barthes
reminds us, is not being exhibited on stage. The dancers do not present
anything extraordinary or spectacular, which a dance audience has come
to expect and see. Instead, the piece is meant to accompany the spectators
in all of its calmness and casualness. It builds on their tacit understand-
ing that everything that happens on stage could be done by the specta-
tors themselves, were they actually invited to come on stage, rather than
being asked to perform as spectators. The production aims at an equality
between dancers and spectators as being part of the same culture repre-
sented by the pop songs. Therefore, any possible dramatic conflict does
not take place on the stage, but rather in the symbolic social and financial
contract between the stage and the auditorium. This contract implies that
since the early modern period in our Western cultures we have handed
over dancing to our substitutes on the stage, namely the professional
dancer who dances in our place and, because of his or her technical prow-
ess, even has the right to do so. Only those who have become specialists
through training and technique can be sure that the mere physicality of
their bodies is transcended into a meaningful corporeality, which, lifted
up to a spiritual domain as has been pointed out in the chapter on dance
modernism, is able to actually communicate with the audience.13
In The Show Must Go On, Jérôme Bel dissects dance’s vertical align-
ment with the transcendental promise of ballet and modern dance in
favour of a horizontal alignment with its social function. Jérôme Bel’s
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  145

conceptual proposition about dance clearly operates on the level of

dance’s symbolic investments in and relations to the social. Working on
the symbolic codes of the theatre as a representational apparatus comes
with the cost of losing the imaginary dimension from sight the theatre
offers. The worlds he creates are analytical rather than imaginary, avoid-
ing the complex techniques that turn dancers into specialists in order
to be able to produce and to present an imaginary, other body through
movement. We are thus left with watching ourselves in all of our eve-
ryday banality and joie de vivre. This, in turn, means that we too are
both allowed and able to dance. We too can compose our own pieces
and make statements in the field of dance. Because, ultimately, it is the
spectators who carry out the piece in The Show Must Go On. This is
pointed out to us again and again in the specific way that the piece stages
the relationship between listening and seeing. There are no images for
songs such as Imagine or Yellow Submarine; the images emerge in the
voices we hear, whose bodies are also absent. During I’m Still Standing,
we see what is not shown and hear what cannot be heard. The cast of
dancers all wear headphones holding a mini player in their hands.
Listening to Elton John’s song, they sing out the title aloud while for the
rest of the time they remain absorbed in silence. The scene is suspended
and our imagination steps into the void filling in the gaps.
The well-known pop songs that are so easily recognised play with
the collective and individual memories of the audience a cultural mem-
ory that aligns them with the performers. They are us and we are them
engaged in an act of looking at each other and communal regognition.
The episode that supports this reading is the scene depicting the sinking
of the Titanic during Céline Dion’s My Heart Will Go On. The figure-
heads start by leaning forward facing the front of the stage and therefore
the audience. But the couples turn slowly during the course of the song
so that turning their backs toward the audience the audience ends up sit-
ting behind them. The spatial arrangement turns the auditorium into the
ship with the dancers occupying its bow. The bow/stage is the extension
of the ship/auditorium; both belong together. While we might forget
the proscenium in this scene, its existence very strongly makes itself felt
once the dancers start to acknowledge its existence staring into the audi-
torium. The stage persists as a presentation and projection space that is
separated from the auditorium with the audience sitting in the other des-
ignated part of the ship called theatre. This minimal difference maintains
the show in the sense of a presentation and thus as theatre. The show
146  G. Siegmund

would, in fact, not go on, as the title demands, if the spectators left their
roles as spectators and entered the stage. Accepting one’s role as specta-
tor also preserves the reflective distance between the audience and the
scene and keeps the audience engaged in the thought process unfolding
in front.
What comes to light in Bel’s work on theatrical representation, within
the limits that it has set itself, is a different relationship between dancers
and spectators. The stripping away of conventions leads to a strength-
ening of the social aspect of an encounter—the circle that cuts through
line that I discussed with regard to the photographs of theatres in the
piece Gala. Clearly dancers and spectators are different, yet they are the
same in their cultural expertise and knowledge. They are even the same
to the extent that underlying all individual and cultural differences their
bodies are all culturally formed and informed. Again and again, Bel gives
the spectators enough time to calmly look at the dancers on the stage,
to select one or the other, to identify with him or her, and to share the
duration of the performance with them in a reciprocal process of giv-
ing and taking. The Show Must Go On clearly aims at another mode of
exchange between members of the audience and the dancers. Rather
than valuing the extraordinary or imaginary, the forever out of reach
bodies of dance that promise us perfection, audiences are invited to value
the company of others and their own creative part in the encounter. The
Show Must Go On gives time: the gift of simply spending time together. 
In his reading of Marcel Mauss’ idea of the gift, Jacques Derrida
emphasises the unpredictability of this gift, which can only function as
a gift if one does not expect it and expects nothing from it, and conse-
quently cannot give anything in return.

For the gift to exist, it is essential that the receiver of the gift does not give
anything in return, does not settle or pay off a debt, does not conclude a
contract and never enters into a contractual obligation. […] Consequently,
if there is no gift, there is no gift, but if there is a gift, held or beheld as
gift by the other, once again there is no gift; in any case the gift does not
exist and does not present itself. If it presents itself, it is no longer present.
(Derrida 1992, 15)

It is as the radical Other that the gift becomes interesting in the context
of Bel’s performance. Following Derrida’s suggestion that we receive
nothing in The Show Must Go On, at least nothing that we can expect
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  147

within the scope of a dance performance, is what constitutes its gift char-
acter. The Show Must Go On requires from its audiences a different atti-
tude towards spectatorship. Almost passively, audiences are invited to
open up to the ordinary that in the course of the performance develops
an immense power transforming individual spectators into a commu-
nity that falls apart again once the show has finished. Taking the idea
of cummunity into account, we can understand why Bel insists on the
separation of stage and auditorium, why we have to acquiesce in play-
ing spactators. The difference between dancers and spectators forecloses
any presumption that this community, however short-lived it may be, is
based on the identity of its members. The proscenium line, the barre,
first of all introduces the very notion of difference into the equation of
stage and auditorium. What smells of a false universalism Bel’s piece
might propose, can actually be read as an attempt to find and make vis-
ible a level of communality that precedes subjective differences and, as a
consequnce, identities, while all the time insisting on them. This paradox
structures Bel’s work from the very beginning of his engagement with
Roland Barthes and the linguistic premisies of his work. The paradox
gets more and more outspoken in the latest phase of his work I will dis-
cuss in the chapter on “Subjects at Risk”. The show gives us time, which
becomes tangible during the uniform succession of scenes as time—time
that we waste by watching without being offered anything extraordinary
or virtuoso in return. In order to continue the game, the dancers have
to give themselves to the spectators without the protection of a fictive
role or a virtuosic technique and the spectators must give themselves to
the dancers by helping them to carry and realise the song texts of the
piece. Like every performance, it gives us the gift of a memory once it
has disappeared and become absent, so that we ourselves can become the
protagonists of our own cultural text in reciprocal substitution with the
performance.
The chorus of Roberta Flack’s song Killing Me Softly underlines the
give and take of a mutual exchange within the performance itself. In this
song, the narrator tells the story of her encounter with a young musi-
cian whose song influences her and her own life so profoundly that she
almost falls ill. “He was singing my life with his words,” she sings and
Jérôme Bel’s dancers strive for nothing other than just this. They sing
and perform our lives with their words quoted from popular culture.
The goal of the performance may lie in its attempt to recreate this bal-
ance between performers and spectators—who can themselves become
148  G. Siegmund

protagonists of the piece—every evening and outside the theatre every-

where for everybody. The crucial step in this act of emancipation is the
reversal of the order of body and language. As The Show Must Go On
suggests, a body is never a natural body but a body produced by culture.
Bodies are always already inscribed in language that brings them about as
human bodies. The bodies of the dancers are the letters and words that
write on the stage as if it were a piece of paper. They make their thoughts
scenically visible in a way that people sharing the same cultural back-
ground in principle can understand. While it is language and its symbolic
codes and contracts that brings the body about, language is never able to
secure the body a safe place within its structure of difference. The body
is always and materially so more or less than difference. I have described
Jérôme Bel’s pieces up to now as operating from within this gap or rift,
calling it absence. The tool to operate the duality of the materiality of
the body and its linguistic capture, the paradox of the one being actually
two, is theatricality. What is important here is that Bel’s gift to the spec-
tator draws attention to the duplicity involved in any kind of represen-
tation in order to emancipate the spectator. Theatricality also becomes
a tool for learning and the production of knowledge about what it is
that governs our lives. Being subjugated and subjectified by language is
not a one way street. Watching The Show Must Go On you cannot miss
the immense enjoyment and pleasure the spectators get once they have
shifted their expectations and handed themselves over patiently to what
is being offered by the dancers. Both performers and audiences learn
how to play with the cultural signifiers that produce them thus exceed-
ing thier functionality. Both parties, in fact, steal something back from
the dryness of the concept, a theft that turns them into living human
beings. Thinking on and with the stage enables the audience to become
knowledgeable subjects ready to become directors of their own lives. The
following quote by Bel emphatically celebrates this notion:

Dramatic play is an effective way to represent death and to enjoy its effects.
Play your games, everything is great! Play, lie, make theater, cheat, betray,
as I do with mundane arguments, false reasoning and erroneous citations.
Look like another noble, the important thing is to participate. Maybe
this is one of the challenges of the theater, or maybe it’s new, I’ll admit it
[…] The ontology of theater as a modus vivendi, a “means of existence”.
Use the theater, don’t make it, the theater is only a means, not an end in
itself, but use theater to play life (regardless of whether you an actor or
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  149

a spectator). Become a director of your own life, that is to say: knowing

what happens in the end. (Bel 2002)

What it means for the dancers themselves to use the stage as a tool for
emancipation, Bel explores in the second phase of his work, from 2004
to 2009. The above quote, as with the production of The Show Must Go
On, emphasises once more the notion of death, the play with death that
is bound to the use of theatre to play life. In the next section I will look
at the notions of death and disappearance that ground Bel’s first cycle of
work. With death, another aspect of absence comes to the fore that this
time I will reframe by using psychoanalytic theory.
For deconstruction, absence as spacing that makes meaning possible
is an opening. As such it is the result of a purely logical operation within
the sign: Absence as an opening has no phenomenological or corporeal
dimension. It is in this sense that Derrida sees it as the tomb of the sub-
ject. For theories of phenomenology, absence emerges together with
the things perceived as something: it is the incongruity of perspectives,
the space of shadows and latency that opens up within perceptions and
the orientations towards the world they facilitate. Absence furnishes all
the things perceived with a negative double that crosses out the totali-
tarian closure of any perception, opening it up to other possibilities of
perceiving. For semiotics absence is inherent in the operation of signs
that represent and replace the things they stand for. Thus, semiotics is
built on an operation of exclusion or, as Lyotard sees it, of transcend-
ence and nihilism, that opens an absence within representation itself. The
phenomenological tradition casts absence as latency waiting to be uncov-
ered. It is part of our being in the world. Psychoanalysis, on the other
hand, casts absence as the limit or even the beyond of our being in the
world. It is that which cannot be lived and remains forever inaccessible
but affects our lives. Ultimately, the conflict here is what Sigmund Freud
in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” speculatively calls the death drive
and its entanglement with life. That which cannot be lived is, of course,
death. Yet, we only know of our not knowing of death because death is
inevitably engaged with life, language, and their representations.
In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” Freud describes the game one of
his grandchildren played: throwing all the little things and objects with-
inhis reach as far away from himself as possible. Once the task had been
achieved, the child accompanied his mother’s search for the objects with
the sound of a long “o-o-o-o.” One day, Freud himself was witness to
150  G. Siegmund

this game. Sitting in his cot, his grandson threw away a wooden spool
attached to a piece of string and made it disappear behind the closed
curtains of his little bed. It then pulls the string and makes it reappear,
greeting it with “Da!” (there) (Freud 2001b, 14–15). The standard
interpretation of the well-known ‘Fort-Da’ game that Freud initially
offers himself is one of empowerment (ibid., 16). The child symbolizes
the traumatic loss of the mother with the spool. The child is engaged
in a theatre of representation in which the spool plays the role of the
mother acting as if it were the mother. Instead of passively suffering her
disappearance, the child makes itself an active agent of the situation by
playing out her going away and coming back at its own will. As a result,
the child learns to deal with absence and to cope with fear. Where once it
was anxious, it now reigns triumphantly. Such a reading, however, closes
the scene and draws the final curtain over a stage that at closer inspection
is much more complicated and ambiguous. For Freud goes on to suggest
that even within the pleasurable realm of play there are unpleasurable
things that may point beyond the pleasure principle, which are repeated
and worked over by the subject (ibid., 17).
Although one should assume that the coming back of the object cre-
ates the most pleasure to the child, Freud observes that the going away
part of the game is staged much more often and independently of its
closing counterpart. What the child thus acts out is the absence of the
object on which, as Freud proposes, it takes revenge. There is a certain
aggression inherent in the scene that underpins the appropriation of the
scene by the child, an aggression that taints the relation between the
child and the absent object. Apart from the ambiguity and complexity
of emotions involved in the game, another ambiguity is inherent in the
scene. In a curious mixture of activity and passivity the child is both the
doer or performer and its own spectator. It looks onto the very scene
it has staged. Shielded off and protected by the bars of its cot as soon
as he throws the spool, a stage opens up in front of him that casts him
in the role of spectator. As a spectator the child is involved in his or her
own scene that is invested with emotions and fantasy. What is this fan-
tasy? What does the child throw away when it does not throw the repre-
sentation of the mother away to gain agency? In short: the fantasy is the
fantasy of death, the throwing away is the coming into life, and the spool
is the life line that saves the child from dying.
In his Lacanian reading of Freud’s ‘Fort-Da’ game, Slovenian philos-
opher Slavoy Žižek stresses the importance of the emotional ambiguity
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  151

of the scene between pleasure and aggression. Žižek interprets the

compulsive repetition the child displays when throwing the spool away
as the emergence of the child’s subject position: a primary scene the
child needs to revisit again and again. In order to do so the child takes
recourse to an object that is not just a simple object, but an object that
is operative within the emotional duplicity the scene is grounded in. In
Lacanian terminology this object is called ‘object a,’ which can be zones
of the body or actual objects that are instilled with pleasure and desire.
It emerges after the split with the mother and serves as the kernel for the
emergence of both the child’s (independent) subject position and his or
her world. For Žižek rather than the mother, the spool represents the
child itself, or, more precisely, it represents that part of the child, which,
as Slavoy Žižek says, is more itself than itself (Žižek 2003, 64–65). By
moving, it presents itself as the object a of desire, the object that only
the mother sees and desires without the child knowing what this object
is that causes the mother’s desire for the child. The spool plays the part
of that in the child that the mother desires and which, apparently, has
to disappear before the child may not only be the passive object of her
desire but its own active agent. The child throws its emerging desire at
the mother to get rid of it and to retrieve it at the very same time. Like
Jérôme Bel’s performers who risk their own death as performers, the
child risks its own death because it needs to live. Thus, in an interest-
ing reversal, it is not the absence of the mother that is being compen-
sated for while playing. Rather it is her presence that causes the problem.
Presence, here, inhibits becoming. The child enjoys and dreads the
absence; it produces it again and again in order to carve out that con-
flicting space of love and hate, need and loss where its own desire may
emerge. By throwing the object away, the child repeats its own conflict-
ual coming into being as a subject.
What is thus repeated is the absence of the mother. What is created
is a space where she is not so that I can be in the future. The movement
of the spool carves out a space for the subject’s desire that must remain
open for the subject to come into being. Absence thus enables the desire
for the (m)other’s desire, a desire that would be smothered if the space
was narrowed down by the presence of the (m)other. There is an inher-
ent danger in the unmitigated presence of the desired object. If she and
all the desired objects of which she is the blueprint remained forever pre-
sent, we would be forever engulfed by sensual data that would prevent
the emergence of a subject. Without separation, loss, and absence there
152  G. Siegmund

would be no subject, because subjects need distance to become agents of

their own desire. Movement creates this distance while at the same time
filling it with imaginary bodies like the spool. Absence therefore carves
out a space for the subject to be, to develop a relation towards the world,
to perceive, to imagine, to speak, and to act.
The object a moves between the child and the mother: Both of them
by the very nature of desire do not know what it is they ultimately desire.
The object a thus represents a nothing that is something, an absence that
is a spectral presence operating in the very rift that the original separa-
tion by the signifier produced. The child weaves itself in its own scene
that is theatrical precisely because it undoes and establishes the separa-
tion of actor and spectator, of stage and auditorium and, by implication,
of death and life. The ambiguous qualities of the object a are also due
to its origins. As the ‘Fort-da’ game implies, objects a come into play in
the process of separation from the mother during which the child devel-
ops his or her own desire and, by extension, his or her subject position.
In this process the child is again and again threatened with annihilation
since it can never be sure whether the caring person due to changing
demands from the environment on the child still provides the necessary
care and presence. In order to (psychologically) survive, the child retains
something of that original presence to make sure that the world and
itself are still alive. These little somethings are what Lacan calls the object
a. They are the child’s lifeline emerging on the outset of a primary state
of oneness that will forever be lost once the child has acquired language
and a consciousness. In psychoanalytical terms objects a are the result
of the signifier hitting the body, forever dislocating the subject from
itself. The incarnation of the signifier in the flesh situates the emerging
subject at the juncture of nature and culture, of materiality and spiritu-
ality. This junction, however, is specific in the sense that nature and cul-
ture are mutually exclusive while at the very same time they are forever
intertwined without ever being able to appear together. In fact, this very
dislocation at the impossible juncture that is always also a separation is
the subject. The subject is the result of what in psychoanalytical terms
is called castration. The lack or rift castration produces allows the sub-
ject to be drawn into the cultural sphere by signifiers and their effects of
meaning.
Thus objects a hold a relation to the register of what Lacan calls the
real that remains inaccessible to the subject. Positing the real as absent,
yet effective, these objects may be understood in two ways that differ
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  153

in their relation to this absence. One, they are the result of an absence
while at the same time covering it up, shielding us from it while all the
while pointing towards it. Two, they bear this absence themselves as they
are the distortion that is the real, i.e., death. Object a therefore is not
the object as such, but that which is distorted and therefore fascinating
and disturbing with the object. The two ways of relating the notion of
absence to objects a also entail two different understandings of a psy-
choanalytic Urszene, or primary scene, from which the subject emerges.
In the first reading, one remains faithful to the Oedipal structure of psy-
choanalytic subject formation, claiming that with symbolic castration
(by the father) a realm appears (a realm of the mother) retroactively and
phantasmatically that remains forever inaccessible, lost; that is, absent.
These objects come into being at the very site of the lack enabling the
subject. In the second reading, which Slavoj Žižek distills from the later
writings by Lacan, the real is the very impasse or stumbling block in our
perception. Once the signifier hits the body, it will forever be inaccessible
as such. Surprisingly, his claim that the real is nothing but the parallac-
tic structure of perception forever missing the object brings him close
to traditional phenomenological writings on the perspectival structure
of human perception. Whereas with phenomenology the shadows that
create the object in perception belong to the object giving it contours
and dimensionality, with psychoanalysis they create a rift in the object
or situation that may never be bridged. For Žižek absence is not a gap
or spacing that occurs between two states, the primary state of oneness
and the later sate of being cut into two. His notion of absence is built
into the very structure of the symbolic. It is the inherent contradiction
of the symbolic order itself that it is founded on, as Saussure has shown,
nothing. Nothing or emptiness is the other side of language. Objects a
remind us of this other side; they are the origins of memory. Both read-
ings—the object covering up the loss of an original unity or oneness and
the object as objectivation of a contradiction that is the real—emphasise
the subject’s coming into being at the very site of its alienation.
How can we then employ the idea of absence as it is laid out by psy-
choanalysis to think about Jérôme Bel’s performances? Given Jérôme
Bel’s fascination for empty stages (think of the beginning of Gala, or
the ending of The Last Performance), his preoccupation is basically also
one with absence: the absence of bodies on stage and the presence of the
symbolic structure of the theatre. The performers emerge from within
a visible emptiness and after they have taken their course sink back into
154  G. Siegmund

the void that is the stage. Tim Etchells, in text on The Show Must Go
On even links this strategy directly to The ‘Fort-Da!’ game: “Fort Da.
This, essentially, is the game of The show must go on. The game of bring-
ing them [the performers, G.S.] on and taking them away again. The
game of filling and emptying the stage” (Etchells 2004, 20). The thea-
tre as a highly symbolic structure creates an absence within the symbolic
itself. The theatre frame is the result of a double negativity that turns the
framed absence into something positive. Within its structure it withdraws
from the audience, opening a separate space for the action to unfold.
This separation of stage and auditorium takes place within a second sep-
aration: that of theatre and the outside world. Theatre excludes twice:
the outside reality and parts of the participants designating to them the
role of audience. Like Robert Smithson’s non-sites, the stage demarcates
a limit that produces a room within a room where bodies, objects, and
situations are staged.
Rather than representing a world, psychoanalytically speaking, thea-
tre reopens the process of the coming into being of a world oraganised
around the ‘Fort-Da’ game. Seen from the perspective of psychoanaly-
sis the frame of the stage doubles the original phantasm that covers up
the separation and the void it produces to enable the construction of a
sensible and intelligible world we call reality. Given the utterly phantas-
matic nature of object a, the world whose kernel it is, is ultimately always
also fictional in nature. Our reality is built on a fiction without which,
however, reality as an intersubjective exchange would not emerge at all.
Contrary to popular opinion it is not by stripping the subject off all its
symbolic codes that we arrive at the truth of the subject as his or her
authentic being. Rather, it is the doubling of the symbolic that allows us
a glimpse of the real and the coming into being of subjectivity. Jérôme
Bel’s work is involved in this very operation of doubling, a doubling that
produces an opening for us to see and think about the possibilities of a
world. He redoubles the apparatus of the theatre by laying its foundation
bare while at the same time making his dancers perform as cultural sig-
nifiers. The original phantasm makes us believe that there is something
out there that supports our being in the world, something positive we
can cling to in order to build our world around it. It entertains a close
relation to what Lacan calls the real as the breakdown of signification.
Outside the frame there is just unordered chaos that is structured by
repetition compulsion, and the movement of the drive. As our analysis
of the ‘Fort-Da!’ game has shown, the space that prepares the ground
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  155

for (our) reality is a highly contested and conflicting space. It allows

drives and impulses to circulate and connect to representational frag-
ments, thus producing affects and emotions as well as consciousness and
thought. The four basic objects that Lacan identifies as blueprints for this
operation—gaze, voice, breast and faeces—reveal a deeper connection
between theatre and psychoanalysis (Evans 1996, 134–135). They both
deal with the same objects and the emotions and concepts related to
them. For what else does theatre in the broadest sense of the term stage
but gazes and the desire to be seen and acknowledged? Gazes that meet
and miss each other, gazes on bodies and their parts? Bodies that interact
and expose themselves as in dance? What else does an audience want to
hear but voices speaking or even better: singing to us as in opera? And
what, finally, threatens to bring the house and its representational strate-
gies down but working with blood, sweat and tears, with bodily fluids
and excrements so dear to body art and other types of performance art?
The different theatrical genres thus organise themselves around a privi-
leged object in order to reopen and renegotiate the subject’s relation to
this object and the social world that it entails. The body between lan-
guage, cultural codes, and impulse; the voice between language and
body, the voice between imaginary desire and symbolic authority; the
gaze between acknowledgement and annihilation of the subject: These
are just a few examples of the relations theatre analyses and reflects by
making us experience them anew.
In the The Show Must Go On all of these relations are present. Once
again, the absence of the flow of movement that would allow movement
in the production to be recognised as (modern) dance movement pro-
duces gaps and absences between the individual sections. Without seem-
ingly natural transitions, each movement, song, or action falls back onto
itself. It stands alone surrounded by nothing but emptiness that frames
and highlights it for inspection. Each action is isolated, cut loose from a
continuum, temporarily appearing in front of us to engage us mentally
and emotionally before it sinks into darkness again. The alteration of
various absences and presences between the songs and within the songs
thus creates a rhythm. The performance as such is built around the idea
of creation and death, spanning a circle from the void at the beginning
that is filled with the word towards the void in the end that will be filled
with the eternal return of a new beginning. Within this overall arch there
is another wave of death and resurrection, of appearing and disappear-
ing only to appear again. It produces two smaller cycles within the big
156  G. Siegmund

one. Towards the middle of the performance, during the Beatles’ Yellow
Submarine, the action plunges into a void again with the dancers disap-
pearing from view and leaving the audience with very little to see. The
yellow light is replaced by an appropriate colour to Edith Piaf’s La Vie
en Rose. With John Lennon’s Imagine the whole theatre is plunged into
darkness, while Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence even reduces
the music and makes it disappear with only the title line to be heard lit-
erally drawing attention to the sound of silence. After that, the dancers
reappear, starting a second cycle by actively seeking out the gaze of the
audience. On a third level there are, of course, the absences between the
19 songs, and with those the alternation between movement and stillness
as the chorus gives way to the verse.
In psychoanalytic terms this technique of separating voice and gaze,
body and language produces a series of objects a. Voice, gaze, and body
parts are cut loose from their meaningful sytagm, which results in the
shattering of representation of a closed world. Having pointed out ear-
lier that these objects are the result of the signifier hitting the body and
are therefore the result of the cut in human nature, it becomes clear that
Jérôme Bel’s entire project revolves around this juncture of biology, or in
terms of dance modernism: the natural body, and on the other hand, cul-
ture, or in terms of postmodern dance: the cultural body. This contradic-
tion—the skin reddening when it is hit and the inscription of the signifier
of pain on the skin with red lipstick in the piece Jérôme Bel—produces
an impasse. Just as there is no direct passage from the symbolic order of
language built on absence to the real with its promise of fullness, there
seems to be no direct or even easy passage from the idea to the body, its
movements and gestures. Body and thought do not mix easily, the purity
of the thought being somehow sullied by the body itself. And yet, Bel’s
bodies speak of nothing else but the inscription of cultural codes and sig-
nifiers into the body that produce it as a dancing body. The purity of
the body, on the other side of the divide, is then sullied by the existence
of the thought. Instead of passing over the incompatibility of these two
realities of our bodies, Bel stages it. Whereas modern dance naturalises
this division with the body-movement bind that produces an imaginary
wholeness of the body being carried away by the uninterrupted flow of
movement, Jérôme Bel draws our attention to the very impasse between
the materiality of the body and its potential meanings. In his pieces he
makes us see the juncture, which, if things ran naturally, would go unno-
ticed. Stretching my point a little further, one can even say that Bel in
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  157

a critical gesture uncovers the unconscious truth of modern or certain

strands in contemporary dance. If modern dance prides itself in shaping
pure energy and in modeling its movements on life itself, the truth of
this gesture is death in the symbolic. Many dance scholars have drawn
attention to the fact that the desire of modernist dancers and theorists
to subtract symbolic codes from dance often lead to another symbolic,
or even worse, to mere symbols in the shape of static gestures and poses
(Šumič-Riha 1997). Psychoanalytically speaking, the reverse is also true:
the truth of the signifying body is its death in the natural body. The rigid
and thorough analysis of the dancing body as a site of signification can
only be undertaken by producing desirable objects and, by extension,
desiring subjects. Thus, the backside or the unconscious truth of the
body as a carrier of thought is its very sensual and affective nature.
This paradox is the paradox of subjectivation as such. The dancers in
Bel’s performances completely hand themselves over to language and
the signifier. They perform what they are told to perform to the point
of stupidity. They sacrifice themselves on the altars of language and cul-
ture. But once they are completely subjected something else happens.
In relation to The Show Must Go On, Bel himself noticed that “[i]nspite
of the constraints I put onto the twenty eight performers, they sweated
out something of themselves which I found very interesting” (Bel and
Charmatz 2013, 42). The act of subjection produces at the very same
time their individuality as performers or human beings. To stay in the
image of sacrifice, which is not completely alien to the subject of theatre:
once the performers have sacrificed themselves and handed themselves
over to thought, they cannot help but sacrifice the sacrifice and steal
something back from what they have given. They instil the thought with
the materiality and physicality of their desire, which accounts for their
being alive and the liveliness of the performances. There is a joy and an
enjoyment in moving, acting, dancing that entirely depends on the danc-
ers being carriers of thought and yet exceeds it at every moment.
In Jérôme Bel’s pieces, the logic of representation of a closed world is
replaced by a different logic: the logic of showing it. He shows us how a
world and its subjects come into being by returning to the point of the
impossible yet inevitable juncture between thought and body. “Showing
it” here also means literally showing the body as an “it,” a material thing
as in Nom donné par l’auteur, as a locus of inscription, projecting it into
the emptiness of the stage, throwing it away and retrieving it as in the
‘Fort Da!’ game. From a psychoanalytical point of view, Jérôme Bel’s
158  G. Siegmund

performances are an analysis of desire at the zero point of its emergence.

At this point, the scene of the subject is highly theatrical rather than dra-
matic. It does not stage the representation of the subject-to-be in lan-
guage but, as in the choreography to the song I Like To Move It, isolates
gazes, voices, and body parts to confront them with language and the
symbolic order that facilitates them. The choreography to the song con-
sists of every dancer maniacally moving one body part (a leg, an arm,
or even a penis) or piece of the costume while grinning brightly at the
audience. The endless repetition of one single movement and object is
brought about by the symbolic order of language, which is the title of
the pop song. Yet by repeating it the dancers cut through its representa-
tion drawing attention to the materiality of the object and movement,
which in turn serves as a source of pleasure that sees the subject emerge.
The dancers double materiality with thought and thinking with desire
and, as a consequence, signification. Even in the carefully controlled,
restrained, and neutral attitude of the dancers as carriers of thought, their
individuality shines through. Their individual approaches to their tasks,
how they physically relate to the material they deal with, prevent the
performances from becoming a dead execution of codes. Theatricality,
which according to Roland Barthes, thrives on the duplicity of the body,
explores precisely this rift between the meaningless, affective body on
the one hand and the culturally significant body on the other. In terms
of conceptual art, this duplicity can be found in Peter Osborne’s state-
ment that all art is conceptual and all conceptual art is always to a certain
degree aesthetical. The result, as Robert Smithson envisioned it, is the
transformation of the material by the spectator. This very movement of
transformation and oscillation is what Barthes claims is theatricality.

The Show Must Go On 2 (2004): Absence and Comedy

One of the most frequent responses to Jérôme Bel’s work is uninhibited
laughter. We may not always laugh out loud, but we at least great the
arrival of a new scene on stage with a smile or a snigger. In doing so, we
acknowledge the arrival of sense or meaning in the scene. We understand
just why it is that the dancers move the way they do in The Show Must
Go On. We gradually identify the lipstick traces on the female dancer’s
naked torso in Jérôme Bel as a corset, the zipping up of which produces
a comical effect because it indeed closes off the scene and the body in a
non-sequitur. Full stop. Along the same lines, Una Bauer describes her
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  159

reaction to viewing Nom donné ar l’auteur again in 2008 as comical:

“the play of signifiers suddenly appeared as an incredibly moving com-
edy of almost animated objects” (Bauer 2008, 42). The laugh for sure
is a laugh of recognition and identification. We are pleased because we
get ‘it.’ Yet it is also the laugh of surprise. Although we have learned the
rules of the game, we do not know exactly just what will happen next.
“The watcher,” as Tim Etchells explains, “attuned to the game, its lan-
guage and limits, becomes sensitised to the smallest variations” (Etchells
2004, 10). Expanding on the interaction of repetition and variation,
Etchells continues: “Each new sequential addition to the list (which, in
performance, occurs as part of a temporal process) either adjusts or con-
firms the watcher’s developing guess about the world of the list” (ibid.,
11).
Etchell’s phenomenological account of a change in perspectives facil-
itated by the flow of time that retroactively changes or confirms what
we had anticipated and imagined before, does not touch on the comi-
cal effects of this operation. While we greet the arrival of meaning with
laughter, we also laugh because meaning is suspended. Bel’s pieces are
too simple to be true and they are simply true. They are self-evident. The
comic aspect is also the result of the conecptual tautology Bel’s dancers
exhibit on stage. Hailed by language, they perform what they are asked
to do literally in a speech act that produces what it says. I want to argue
that there is something comic in the literalness of their performance.
This second cause for laughter may be considered less acquiescent, but
more disruptive than the first one. The literalness on stage visibly con-
fronts and combines two realities normally considered to be mutually
exclusive, namely, following from my argument in the last section, the
materiality of the bodies and their meaning.
Referring back to Jean-François Lyotard’s criticism of representation
as an act of nihilism may help to better understand the point I am trying
to make. For Lyotard, meaning in the theatrical set-up of representation
always takes place elsewhere. It is deduced from the stage where, as itself,
it is not present. Only here to serve an absent, metaphysical meaning, the
material dimension of the performance itself also becomes meaningless.
What happens in Jérôme Bel’s performances, however, is the meeting of
these two separate spheres: the abstract universal meaning and the physi-
cally specific body. Meaning is present on stage: it is shown to be entirely
dependent on the physical work of the dancers. As such, any universal
truth it may convey vanishes in the process because it becomes specific.
160  G. Siegmund

As a concrete appearance tarnished by the specific body, meaning rev-

els in its own stupidity and insufficiency. In the tautology of meaning
and body, meaning loses its sacred or spiritual dimension, becoming
banal instead. It loses its self-identity precisely because it always already
is its other side, that is it is nonsense. Laughter, then, occurs, when the
two worlds visibly collide on stage as incommensurable, yet by necessity
bound to each other.
What binds the two spheres, the immaterial and the material, is that
which normally disappears from view. It is the insistence on isolated
gestures or even individual body parts moving that produce the comi-
cal effect. In Lacan’s terms, what raises its spectral head in Bel’s pieces
are objects a as the cause of our desire. In Brecht’s terminolgy, it is the
appearance of the gestus. Both materially appear on the very same level,
the stage, as the transcendental meaning they produce. Here, one of
the central rules of the discourse ‘Jérôme Bel’ gains full significance. As
we have seen, the discourse ‘Jérôme Bel’ depended upon the rule that
there be no choreographed transitions between the individual actions,
images, and scenes. One has to simply follow the other rather than fol-
lowing from each other. As noted by Roland Barthes, this rule is highly
conducive in producing gestures that uncover the duplicity of the body
as meaningful and meaningless, as sublime and a piece of nothing, a
hoax that tickles our fancy, or, as the famous title of a comical farce by
Feydeau has it, as A Flea in Her Ear, that is highly seductive.
The cut that separates the scenes is the cut that produces the ges-
tures. In The Show Must Go On it is clearly marked as a cut induced by
technology. It is, after all, the CD-player that produces the life of the
bodies on stage. As subjects we are spoken from elsewhere. The source
of our subjectivity is outsourced, coming from pop songs and their lyr-
ics, from objects and cultural artefacts. We are spoken before we speak.
The dancers’ bodies in Bel’s pieces are doppelgängers of language, ridicu-
lously comical and uncanny at the very same time. As the discussion of
the ‘Fort-Da’ game in the previous section has shown, we only gain the
status of subjects by repeating an absence with a distorted and twisted
object that takes its place. In fact, as Slovenian philosopher Alenka
Zupančič underlines, repetition is “constitutive of the comic genre as
such” (Zupančič 2008, 149). Like a child insisting on the story to be
told in exactly the same words as last time, we re-visit the scene of our
emergence as subjects again and again, surprising us each time anew that
against all odds it worked. In Bel’s pieces the gestural movements and
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  161

citations operate as “unary traits” (ibid., 66) that reduce their dancing
and themselves to a sequence of isolated features that are repeated. Thus,
the isolated body parts that the dancers move repeatedly during the song
I Like to Move It are objectified movements that stick out of the body like
the long noses, penises, or butts that typify the comic character (Fig. 5).
Comedy’s relation to the mechanical or inhuman has of course a long
philosophical tradition. Most famously at the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury Henri Bergson based his theory of laughter on man’s inability to go
with the flow of life. We laugh because the flow of things, the stream of
life that keeps man elastic, flexible, adaptable, fluid and open, suddenly
gels and reduces man to a rigid mechanical object. Each stumble or slip
on a banana peel is a crime against the stream of life that bystanders rep-
rimand and correct by laughing out loudly at the inattentive criminal
(Henri Bergson 1999, 82). Bergson’s stumbling man is a failed modern
dancer exposed to social ridicule.
In this sense, Bel’s dancers are failed modern dancers, too. What
their mechanical, unoriginal, and therefore stiffened movements reveal,
however, is precisely the opposite of what Bergson considered mechani-
cal. Instead of being the opposite of the stream of life, something that
is merely added on to its elasticity to harden and prevent its flow, here
the mechanical reveals itself at the very centre of life. In her insightful
Lacanian account of comedy, Alenka Zupančič sums up the mechanism
of comedy by reversing the proverbial ‘odd one out’ in the title of her
book: The Odd One In. Comedy appears when the odd one is kept in
rather than being excluded from the scene. The ‘odd one’ is the third
element, object a, that appears when the signifier splits the natural body.
Instead of being elided in favour of a seamless representation of real-
ity, the ‘odd one in’ becomes visibly active on stage. This third element
appears once the phantasmatic shield of a seamlessly natural world or
a life-like dance is disrupted and interrupted by repeated gestures or tics,
as in the episode form the Show Must Go On quoted above. Life is the
result of a crack, a crack that the mechanical repetition explores as the
very core of life (Zupančič 2008, 118). Both the dancers and the audi-
ence get an immense enjoyment out of the sheer endless repetition of
single movements that disrupt the illusion of a seamless subject interact-
ing on stage. The subject as a symbolic function takes its course form the
subject of enjoyment, which, for the subject to function, must remain
hidden. The comic structure of The Show Must Go On exposes the link
between the two subjects.
162  G. Siegmund

Fig. 5  The Show Must Go On, I Like to Move it! © Musacchio e Lanniello
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  163

Contrary to what Brecht might have intended when he cast the ges-

tus as a defamiliarisation device to break with illusion, a psychoanalytic
reading of the gestus turns it into the very bearer of illusion. It produces
the seductive and pleasurable illusion that a differnt world may be built
around its phantasmatic kernel. With Roland Barthes, Bel can be said to
believe in the glow or shine of the gestures that hold both analytical and
sensual qualities. The effects of subjectivation, however, are not reduc-
ible to their cause: the mechanism of the structure. As psychoanalysis
has shown us, the body with its drives and their vicissitudes will never be
entirely commensurable to the symbolic order however much it depends
on it for its emergence in culture. The result of this, is, as Zupančič
has it, the very crack in life that is the site of the comical. The comi-
cal appears when the abstract, infinite and endless—language as a play of
differences, thought—falls into the material, contingent and finite—the
body—which is not, however, the Other of thought and meaning, but its
very starting point just as thought is not the Other of the body, because
language is the starting point of the body. Mutually exclusive and yet
inseparable, once the two spheres appear together on the same scene—
the stage—comical effects are produced.
Jérôme Bel ended with a re-writing of the words written at the back
wall of the theatre, perhaps the strictest example of the signification
machine of anagrams is the production of The Show Must Go On 2. It
consists of 16 letters displayed on stage, the order of which is rearranged
to produce anagrams that serve as the basis for the action of the piece.
After the success of The Show Must Go On, a sequel with a cast of sixteen
actors, actresses, and dancers was planned with money from arts foun-
dations and several theatres financing the rehearsals. But since rehears-
als did not lead to satisfactory results, the group version was ultimately
abandoned. In October 2004, Bel premiered a version with only himself
and Frédéric Seguette as performers. But even this version did not live
long and was abandoned after a series of performances in only four cit-
ies to satisfy demands of the co-producing theatres. One of the reasons
Jérôme Bel decided against the touring of the piece lies precisely in its
purely linguistic nature. The performative dimension on stage, Bel holds,
added nothing to the information given by the words formed (Bel and
Charmatz 2013, 67). In other words, the action on stage is purely tau-
tological. Yet it is precisely the tautology of words and action, body and
language, that turns the piece into a comedy.
At the very beginning of the performance, the title of the piece,
The Show Must Go On 2, looms large on stage. The fifteen letters and
164  G. Siegmund

the one digit of the title are neatly framed like the letters in a game of
Scrabble indicating that language is the prime actor in the show. During
the whole show Bel is forever trying to form new words with the lim-
ited number of letters, often tilting some over to leave just the appropri-
ate letters standing that make up a new instruction or form a new word.
For example, one typical sequence develops thus: ME, MEN, OMEN,
WOMAN, NOW ME, HOW ME, SHOW ME, SHOW THEM,
SHOWMEN, SHOWMEN 2, 2 STUNTMEN, 20 STUNTMEN,
O2 and, finally, H2O. Whereas in the first part of the sequence Bel as
“ME” is alone on stage, he asks Seguette to join him as soon as the word
“SHOWMEN” is created, which makes them, indeed, two showmen
on stage presenting themselves to the audience. Seguette then starts a
virtuoso number of tap dance that increases in speed and tempo much
to the pleasure of the audience until he stops and exits. Bel then forms
the word “SHOWMEN 2”, upon which Seguette re-enters while the
audience is clapping him on. “2 STUNTMEN” engages both Bel and
Seguette. While Seguette is falling and stumbling backwards pretending
to get shot, Bel blows off the smoke from his imaginary gun. The “20
STUNTMEN” that follow belong entirely to Seguette who goes on to
perform 20 virtuoso stuntmen numbers. His body is flung backwards
across the stage, he robs across the floor like a soldier, he desperately
clings to the proscenium screaming as if he were hanging from a highrise
building until he comes to rest lying near the edge of the stage. O2 hears
him catching his breath and with H2O Bel offers him a bottle of water to
cool down.
In The Show Must Go On 2 what the body does on stage is entirely
dependent on the words emerging from the shuffling and re-shuffling
of the set of 16 digits. Their repeated reordering creates a sequence of
thoughts that physically develop on stage one after the other, as in a
string of sentences that form a paragraph. Rather than on the inspiration
of the author-choreographer Jérôme Bel, what happens on stage depends
foremost upon the logic of the letters and the possibilities they hold and
offer that write both the bodies of the choreographer and the dancer.
There was much laughter during the performance of The Show Must
Go On 2 that I attended in October 2004 in Brussels at the Kaaitheater.
Frédéric Seguette was the perfect mechanical object both in the hands
of the choreographer and puppet-master who appeared on stage to
arrange the letters and of language as the commander-in-chief itself.
But Seguette’s puppet-like character, underlined as usual by his highly
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  165

studied and yet stoic performance mode of expressionlessness, at every

moment exceeded the dry and lifeless performance of the commands the
letters gave. By fulfilling the tasks by the foot of the letter, Seguette at
every moment showed that his body and actions were in excess of lan-
guage, pulling a face at its strictures and gaining life in the process. In
The Show Must Go On 2, we also laugh at the stupidity of the structure
that is incomplete, that is nothing, because the body and its desire to
move will always be in excess of. However much it depends on lan-
guage, the body will make fun of language turning its commands into
banal actions, trivialising their meaning and putting itself on display as
it goes along. Seguette’s comical performance in the piece exposes the
duplicity of the body and language as mutually exclusive yet belonging
together. In doing so he also exposes the order of language to ridicule
because it cannot contain and control his body, which it brought about.
He is clearly also involved in a game of power that underpins the entire
performance.14 For, once again, it is Jérôme Bel who is in command of
language, re-writing the words that serve as performative commands
for Seguette. There is clearly a hierarchy between the two perform-
ers who consciously play out their relationship on stage. According to
Saussure and Lacan it may be language that writes itself, but the writing
on stage visibly depends upon an author-function that sets the machine
in motion. Seguette therefore also laughs at Jérôme Bel as a figure of
authority emancipating himself from his demands by showing with his
actions how ridiculous his commands are. It is not only language that
is insufficient and hollow but also its placeholder in the game: the
author-choreographer Jérôme Bel. It is significant to note that The Show
Must Go 2 was Bel and Seguette’s last piece together, a piece that never
fully developed its impact because Bel considered it to be a dead end.
It ended Bel’s and Seguette’s professional relationship just as it ended
Bel’s engagement with the discourse ‘Jérôme Bel,’ which he had created
in 1994. It was Bel’s farewell piece for Seguette who henceforth ceased
to be Bel’s prime representative on stage: the most prominent carrier of
Bel’s idea of dance. As in The Last Performance or The Show Must Go
On, Bel as an author-figure again is part of the performance of The Show
Must Go On 2 itself. His role is inscribed into its choreography making it
clearly visible for everybody to see and reflect upon. The reduction of the
protocols of theatre and theatrical representation also exposes the role of
the director choreographer as a figure of authority. Rather than hiding or
obfuscating it, The Show Must Go On 2 develops a comedy from it. Like
166  G. Siegmund

the paradox of body and language, the paradox of dancer and choreog-
rapher follows the same logic of mutual exclusivity and dependency. It is
shown to be a comical relationship once the choreographer is exposed to
be merely a symbolic function, which is incomplete and idiotic in itself.
In regard to the structure, we are all equally no-things. We are
mechanical objects depending on tics and repetition compulsion other-
wise we would not be alive. Comedy allows us to step back from the ego
and its imaginary identifications and aggressive fortifications and laugh
at the structure, which is so stupid as to have produced us. This is what
the dancers in Bel’s pieces together with their audiences do. If one of the
aims of The Show Must Go On was not to dominate the audience but to
set up a theatrically divided space of equally distributed and valid roles,
the laughter of complicity surely played a huge part in the togetherness
the performance set out to create.

Notes
1. This piece premiered on 1 September 1995 in Brussels. I saw it at the
Mousonturm Frankfurt am Main in the spring of 1998. All quotations
from the pieces discussed in this chapter are my own translations based
on the texts used in the video recordings of the performances.
2. Over the years, Eric was played by a total of six different performers
whose first names were all Eric.
3. Husserl writes: “We perceive the physical thing by virtue of its being
‘adumbrated’ in respect of all the determinations which, in a given case,
‘actually’ and properly ‘fall within the scope’ of perception” (Husserl
1983, 90).
4. The most elaborate take on Waldenfels’ concept of responsiveness in the
field of theatre is Jens Roselt’s Phänomenologie des Theaters (2008).
5. For a description of the performance see Abramović (1998, 102–109),
Erika Fische-Lichte uses Abramović’s performance to introduce her new
aesthetics of the performative which replace the aesthetics of representa-
tion (2008): 11–23.
6. In this quote, Bel describes a pop cultural strategy similar to the one
developed by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984).
The productive and subjective utilization and re-appropriation (also
in the sense of ‘kidnapping’ or ‘stealing’) of signs marks the subject’s
freedom within the capitalist order. John Fiske (1989) picks up on de
Certeau’s ideas for his theory of the popular and the creativity of the
consumer.
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  167

7. For a chronicle of the events leading up to and surrounding the premiere

of Le Sacre du printemps see Richard Buckle (1998, Chap. 6); for an anal-
ysis of the choreography of Nijinsky’s Le Sacre see Launay (2003).
8. My original review of The Last Performance for the magazine Ballet
International/Tanz Aktuell serves as a case in point; I read the piece as a
commentary on the state of memory in the then only emerging internet
culture, comparing its operations of forgetting and loss of memory and
the battle to remember to Samuel Beckett’s characters (Siegmund 1999);
for an overview of the debates on re-enactment see Christina Thurner
and Julia Wehren (2010) and Mark Franko (2017).
9. Susanne Linke granted Jérôme Bel permission to use the opening of her
solo after she got to know Bel at a workshop during the ImPuls Dance
Festival in Vienna in 1998. At the German premiere of the piece in
November 1998 at the Tafelhalle in Nuremberg, Jérôme Bel read a dec-
laration to this effect and made his motivation for working with citations
public. This scene was dropped after the performances.
10. Freud termed this entity the “super-ego”, which is based on an “identi-
fication with the father in his own personal prehistory” (Freud 2001a,
48–59). As in the case of melancholy, as a judging entity it turns the sub-
ject into the object and empties it. For Freud, the super-ego is primar-
ily bound to words and the voice, which have continuing effects in the
unconscious.
11. The Show Must Go On was originally conceived for the ensemble of the
Schaubühne in Berlin, which in 1999 came under the new direction of
theatre director Thomas Ostermeier and choreographer Sasha Waltz.
12. For a long time during the rehearsals, Johann Strauss’ waltz The Beautiful
Blue Danube was meant to follow La Vie en Rose, during which blue light
was to mark the river on the stage. But the play with colours—yellow,
pink and blue—was ultimately abandoned before the premiere.
13. French lawyer and philosopher Pierre Legendre holds that the Western
split between stage and auditorium is due to our Christian heritage,
which forbade dancing in church and generally marks the body as a post-
lapsarian and fallen body. Thus the original sin of the body can only be
amended when its corporeality is transcended. Therefore in Western con-
cert dance, be it ballet or modern dance, it is never the body that dances,
but the soul (Legendre 2000).
14. For a description of the piece and its staged power relations, see my
review of the Brussels premiere (Siegmund 2004).
168  G. Siegmund

References
Abramović, Marina. 1998. Artist Body: Performances 1969–1997, ed. Toni Stoos.
Milan: Charta.
Alphant, Marianne. 2002. A Propos Roland Barthes. In R/B-Roland Barthes,
ed. Marianne Alphant, and Nathalie Léger. Paris: Édition Seuil-Éditions du
Centre Pompidou-Imed.
Barthes, Roland. 1972. The Structuralist Activity. In Critical Essays, trans.
Richard Howard, 213–220. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1993. Histoire et sociologie du vêtement. In Oeuvres completes,
Tome I, 1942–1965, ed. Éric Marty, 741–756. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Bauer, Una. 2008. Jérôme Bel: An Interview. Performance Research 13 (1):
42–48.
Bel, Jérôme. 2002. Qu’ils crevant les artistes. Art Press 23: 92–98.
Bel, Jérôme, and Boris Charmatz. 2013. Emails 2009–2010. Dijon: Les presses
du réel.
Bel, Jérôme, and Gerald Siegmund. 2002. Jérôme Bel. In Hall of Fame. Jahrbuch
Ballettanz 02, ed. Arnd Wesemann, 24–31. Berlin: Friedrich Verlag.
Bellmer, Hans. 2004. Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious, or The Anatomy
of the Image, trans. Jon Graham. Waterbury Center, VT: Dominon Books.
Bergson, Henri. 1999. Laughter. On the Meaning of the Comic. An Essay, trans.
Cloudesey Brereton and Fred Rothwell. Copenhagen: Green Inter Books.
Brandstetter, Gabriele, and Sibylle Peters. 2002. Einleitung. de figura. Rhetorik-
Bewegung-Gestalt, ed. Gabriele Brandstetter and Sibylle Peters, 7–30.
München: Wilhelm Fink.
Buckle, Richard. 1998 [1971]. Nijinsky. London: Orion Books.
Buffard, Alain, and Xavier Le Roy. 1999. Dialogue sur et pour Jérôme Bel.
Mouvement 5: 29–31.
Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stevan Rendall.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1974. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Signature Event Context. Limited Inc, 1–23. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Camuf.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Etchells, Tim. 2004. More and More Clever Watching More and More Stupid:
Some Thoughts Around Rules, Games and The Show Must Go On. Dance
Theatre Journal 4: 10–20.
Evans, Dylan. 1996. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis.
London: Routledge.
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  169

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance. A New

Aesthetics. Abingdon: Routledge.
Fiske, John. 1989. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Franko, Mark. 1995. Mimique. Bodies of the Text. Dance as Theory, Literature as
Dance, ed. Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy, 205–216. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Franko, Mark (ed.). 2017. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Re-Enactment.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 2001a. The Ego and the Id. The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIX (1923–1925), trans.
James Strachey and Anna Freud, 3–67. London: Vintage The Hogarth Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 2001b. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVIII (1920–1922),
trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud, 3–65. London: Vintage The Hogarth
Press.
Goumarre, Laurant. 2001. Jérôme Bel: La perte et la dispartion/Can’t stop
Losing. Art Press 266: 15–18.
Husserl, Edmund. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenolgy and to a
Phenonemonological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure
Phenemenology, trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Husserl, Edmund. 2012. Ideas. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.
With a new Forward by Dermot Moran, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson. London:
Routledge.
Kruschkova, Krassimira. 2004. Das Alphabet der Vakanz. Wien Modern 2004.
Musik der Gegenwart, ed. Berno Odo Polzer and Thomas Schäfer, n.p.
Saarbrücken: Pfau-Verlag.
Launay, Isabelle. 2003. Communauté et artuculations: à propos du Sacre du
printemps de Nijinsky. Être ensemble. Figures de la communuaté en danse depuis
le XXe siècle, ed. Claire Rousier, 65–87. Paris: Centre nationale de la danse.
Legendre, Pierre. 2000. La passion d’être un autre. Étude pour la danse. Paris:
Éditions de Seuil.
Lepecki, André. 1999. Skin, Body, and Presence in Contemporary European
Choreography. The Drama Review 43: 129–140
Lepecki, André. 2004. Inscribing Dance. Of the Presence of the Body. Essays on
Dance and Performance Theory, ed. André Lepecki, 124–139. Middletowm:
Wesleyan University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1976. The Tooth, The Palm. SubStance 5 (15):
105–110.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1994. Les dispositifs pulsionneles. Paris: Gaillard.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1993. Eye and Mind. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics
Reader, trans. Michael Smith, 121–149. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
170  G. Siegmund

Ploebst, Helmut. 2001. No Wind No Word. New Choreography in the Society of the
Spectacle. München: K. Kieser.
Roselt, Jens. 2008. Phänomenologie des Theaters. München: Wilhelm Fink.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1966. Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally
and Albert Secheheye in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade
Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Schneider, Katja. 2005. Dynamisch, Direkt, Unmittelbar. Schritte Verfolgen. Die
Tänzerin und Choreographin Susanne Linke, ed. Norbert Servos, 158–161.
München: K. Kieser Verlag.
Servos, Norbert (ed.). 2005. Schritte Verfolgen. Die Tänzerin und Choreographin
Susanne Linke. München: K. Kieser Verlag.
Siegmund, Gerald. 1998. Im Reich der Zeichen: Jérôme Bel. Ballett
International/Tanz Aktuell 5 (4): 34–37.
Siegmund, Gerald. 1999. Endpsiel des Tanzes. “The Last Perforance” von
Jérôme Bel in Nürnberg. Ballett International/Tanz Aktuell 6 (1): 30.
Siegmund, Gerald. 2004. Der Herr der Worte. Jérôme Bels “The Show Must Go
On 2” am Brüsseler Kaaitheater. Ballett International/Tanz Aktuell 10 (11):
11.
Smithson, Robert. 1996. The Collected Writings. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Stamer, Peter. 2000. ‘Ich bin nicht Jérôme Bel’. Überlegungen zum Verhältnis
Figuration/Repräsentation im Tanztheater. Figuration. Beiträge zum Wandel
der Betrachtung ästhetischer Gefüge, eds. Bettina Brandl-Risi, Wolf-Dieter
Ernst, and Meike Wagner, 138–157. München: ePodium Verlag.
Starobinski, Jean. 1979. Words Upon Words: The Anagrams of Ferdinand de
Saussure, trans. Olivia Emmet. New Haven: Yale University Press.
States, Bert O. 2007. The Phenonenological Attitude. In Critical Theory and
Performance, Revised and Enlarged ed., ed. Janalle G. Reinelt and Joseph R.
Roach, 26–36. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Šumič-Riha, Jeliça. 1997. The Diasporic Dance of Body-Enjoyment: Slain
Flesh/Metamorphosing Body. In The Eight Technologies of Otherness, ed. Sue
Golding, 225–235. London: Routledge.
Thurner, Christina, and Julia Wehren (eds.). 2010. Original und Revival.
Geschichts-Schreibung im Tanz. Zurich: Chronos Verlag.
Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2011. Phenomenology of the Alien, trans. Alexander Kozin
and Tanja Stähler. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2003. The Puppet and the Dwarf. The Perverse Core of Christianity.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2008. The Odd One In. On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
 SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE  171

Films
Bel, Jérôme. 1999. The Last Performance. Directed by Aldo Lee. Berlin: Tanz im
August.
Bel, Jérôme. 1999. Shirtologie. Montpellier: Montpellier Danse.
Bel, Jérôme. 1999. Jérôme Bel, le film. Directed by Luciana Fina. Paris: Centre
Georges Pompidou.
Bel, Jérôme. 2001. The Show Must Go On. Directed by Aldo Lee. Porto: Teatro
Nacional San Joao.
 Critical Subjects

Dispositifs of Power: From Group to Solo Work

In October 2004, when The Show Must Go On 2 opened for three nights
at the Kaaitheater in Brussels, Jérôme Bel had already premiered another
new piece in Paris, Véronique Doisneau. In September 2004, the dancer
Véronique Doisneau took to the stage of the Paris Opera talking to the
audience about her experiences and desires as a professional dancer with
the Paris Opera Ballet. Whereas all of his earlier pieces (with the excep-
tion of the solo version of Shirtology) had been group pieces culminat-
ing in the 20-dancers extravaganza of The Show Must Go On, Véronique
Doisneau, was a solo piece. It was also a solo piece in which the female
protagonist spoke as and for herself. This marks a stark contrast to The
Show Must Go On 2 in which Frédéric Seguette articulated the commands
of the choreographer as a personification of the abstract principle of lan-
guage. Moreover, it was a solo piece that carried the name of its protago-
nist and not of Jérôme Bel as its title.
When in 1969 Michel Foucault concluded his famous essay “What
is an Author?” with the question “What difference does it make who
is speaking?” (Foucault 1977, 138), his indifference to subject posi-
tions may be read less as a general statement than an index of his own
philosophical and genealogical project: the creation of an archaeology
of knowledge independent of traditional narratives of history as the
thoughts and actions of great men. For the discourse, it does not mat-
ter who speaks as long as something is spoken. In the field of dance, as

© The Author(s) 2017 173

G. Siegmund, Jérôme Bel, New World Choreographies,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55272-3_5
174  G. Siegmund

in most other areas of social life, the question, however, is perhaps less
rhetorical. It does matter who speaks. The infinite discourse, as Foucault
himself explained in The Order of Discourse, is a source of fear. It needs
to be regulated, validated, made scarce, and reduced to a personalised
author figure as its source to control its inherently uncontrollable expan-
sion. Discourse is always related to power, which is also the power to
speak and be heard. Jérôme Bel’s work up until 2004 can be understood
as operating from within the discourse of dance, trying to unhinge some
of its defining features such as the author-figure as the producer and con-
troller of meaning. Casting the author as a function, as Foucault posited,
and handing the production and construction of meaning of the piece
over to the reader-writer, as Barthes proposed, Bel created the discourse
‘Jérôme Bel’ that foregrounded his view of dance. Analysing its constitu-
ent elements from the codes of choreography (Nom donné par l’auteur),
the dancers’ bodies (Jérôme Bel), costumes (Shirtology), movement (The
Last Performance), up to the choreographer as author (Xavier Le Roy),
Bel staged his personal view of dance without giving away anything per-
sonal in the process. Bel the choreographer was indeed a function and
not a person with a biography that ordered, structured, and regulated
a—his—discourse on dance.
Not surprisingly, given the relation of discourse and power, even the
discourse ‘Jérôme Bel’ produced inherent power structures and hierar-
chies between the dancers and the choreographer who, by force of his
function, expanded his vision onto the dancers. Although, as we have
seen, the writing process of pieces such as Jérôme Bel included the danc-
ers Claire Haenni and Frédéric Seguette in devising the scenes, the pieces
still relied on the author Jérôme Bel and his vision of dance. Apart from
his disenchantment with the particular results of his approach to subject-
ing Seguette to language in The Show Must Go On 2, Bel gives another
reason why he stopped touring the piece almost immediately after its pre-
miere. It marks a more general impasse he had reached in his work. In an
email conversation with the present author he made this point very clear:

In the field of contemporary dance, there are no more hierarchies between

the dancers. But these dancers who are all equal are all subjected to the
will of an almighty choreographer. For several years already, this has been
a point that I have had more and more difficulties accepting while work-
ing with my company. The pieces Véronique Doisneau and Pichet Klunchun
and Myself are obviously the solutions I have found for this unacceptable
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  175

situation: dominator (myself) – dominees (the dancers). I do not work with

a group of anonymous dancers anymore, but with a single subject whose
alienated identity is at the same time the subject of the piece. (Bel 2007)

Already while touring The Show Must Go On under stressful conditions,

Bel had become aware of the alienation between himself as choreogra-
pher and the dancers as interpreters of the piece, drawing attention to
the scale of power implicit even in the working structure of his own com-
pany. While rehearsing The Show Must Go On 2 with the original cast of
sixteen actors and dancers, attempts to make the rehearsal process more
democratic failed, “because already the proportion of one to sixteen
is not equal, which, if you want to achieve some results, is difficult to
manage” (Bel 2007). Instead of “objectifying” the dancers by giving
them orders, which for Bel seems to be the inevitable result of working
with a large group,1 Bel decided to focus his attention on one dancer
who would not be subjected “neither to me, nor to the system, nor to
art” (Bel and Charmatz 2013, 29, my trans.). Rather than employing
Fréderic Seguette and Claire Haenni as bearers of thought and figures
in the discourse ‘Jérôme Bel’, Bel leaves the stage to individual dancers
who speak in their own right. As we will see, this move does not abolish
power structures inherent in the productions, but it shifts their stakes.
For the dancers still appear subjected by Jérôme Bel as it is Jérôme Bel
who initiates their discourse. Yet he puts his discourse at their service so
that they may speak about their own subjectivation as dancers within the
dispositifs of their companies. By the time of its premiere The Show Must
Go On 2 was already outdated, being upstaged by Véronique Doisneau
that marked the beginning of a new phase in Bel’s work.
Thus, Bel’s pieces from Véroniqe Doisneau onwards bear the name of
their protagonist as their title. Véronique Doisneau, Pichet Klunchun and
Myself (that is Jérôme Bel), Lutz Förster, and Cédric Andrieux analyse the
power structures inherent in big dance companies like the Paris Opera
Ballet or the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. With this series of
works, Bel draws attention to the relation of the dancers’ individuality
emerging from their subject position and to the social and political impli-
cations inherent in the structures in which they work. It reflects on the
relation between aesthetics and politics. In more general terms, the shift
in Bel’s work can be described as a shift away from the nexus of subjectiv-
ity and knowledge (about the rules and conventions of modern and con-
temporary dance) to the nexus of subjectivity and power. Including the
176  G. Siegmund

notion of power in the relationship between choreographer, dancers, and

audiences entails looking at the institutions dancers work in, and are, in
fact, turned into dancing subjects. Investigating the general functioning
of the theatre and the tacit assumptions it makes in order to be accepted
as art turns into a more specific probing of work situations in big dance
companies. As Claire Bishop has remarked, Bel’s work remains so close
to the theatre apparatus that with each performance it becomes “a form
of institutional critique” (Bishop 2009).
This shift of attention is methodologically a shift away from discourse
analysis and the analysis of the epistemé of modern and contemporary dance
towards what Foucault calls the “historico-critical analyses” of a dispositif
(Foucault 1997, 317). In 1977, with the introduction of the concept ‘dis-
positif,’ Foucault was able to move away from the idea of discourse as an
ensemble of utterances and to take material aspects of a social organisa-
tion into account. Architecture and institutional practices became just as
important as thoughts, ideas, and written documents. With his concept of
the dispositif or apparatus, his earlier idea of the epistemé as a formation
of knowledge was replaced by the dispositif as a formation of vectors and
forces that orientate the material and immaterial elements that make up
a dispositif at a given historical time along a certain direction, producing
knowledge and subjects along its way. More specifically, in the context of
Bel’s work, this dispositif is broken down to the importance given to the
architecture of the stage, the spaces that are created by choreography, and
the places its subjects are physically and literally allowed to occupy.
If the whole of Bel’s oeuvre can be seen as an analysis of the dance dis-
positif in the latter half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-
first centuries, focusing on power structures and the function of art as
such are not only part of this overall perspective, but are also effective
on a smaller scale, operating from within individual companies and their
practices. Instead of taking the stage as a conceptual non-site, as I sug-
gested in the chapter on “Subjects of Discourse”, his eponymously titled
series on dancing subjects is primarily concerned with what Foucault calls
the “practical systems” (Foucault 1997, 317), in this case the practical
systems of dance. He is concerned with what dancers do and how they
do it as members of specific dance companies, setting out, as Foucault
says, “the forms of rationality that organise their way of doing things (this
might be called the technological aspect) and the freedom with which
they act within these practical systems, reacting to what others do, modi-
fying the rules of the game up to a certain point (this might be called
the strategic side of these practices)” (ibid.). As will become apparent,
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  177

however, straying from the rules as a dancer in a big dance organisation

hardly seems possible. Therefore, Bel’s series gains a strategic dimension
in the ensemble of dance practices, for it allows the dancing subjects to
modify the rules “up to a certain point”—by taking place centre stage.
The following section tackles the interplay between the technological and
the strategic side of being a member of a dance company.
If Bel’s aim is the emancipation of dancers, who are consequently no
longer subjected either to himself as a choreographer or to the system or
to art, as the quotation above states, what does it mean to be no longer
subjected to art? “Art”, as Bel continues, “is only our tool not our goal”
(Bel and Charmatz 2013, 29, my trans.). Being merely a tool rather
than an end in itself, art becomes a vehicle to set the second half of the
proposition of emancipation in motion, the establishment of social rela-
tions: “on the side of practice, an ethics of work relations, on the side of
the work, a politics of emancipation” (2013, 41, my trans.). In his most
recent series, from Disabled Theater, Cour d’honneur, which opened at
the Festival d’Avignon in 2013, to Gala and Tombe for the Paris Opera,
Bel works with non-professional dancers for whom art does, by lack of
professional formation, not mean technological prowess and the display
of professional skills of art as techné. The “de-skilling” (Bishop) of pro-
fessional dancers that characterised Bel’s earlier work is now turned into
a skilling of non-professional dancers, a skilling that is by force different
from professional skilling because in a theatre context it always retains an
air of unprofessionalism that does not belong to the stage. Its refusal to
be art in the modern or contemporary sense turns the stage into a site
of articulation and negotiation between art as an institution (how does it
organise, rate, bring about and display professionalism?), dance as a prac-
tice (what technical skills does one need and what kind of physical quali-
ties does one require to be allowed to dance up there?) and the social
relations to the audience as members of a public (what does the public
want to see and how does it want to be represented up there as a public?).

Véronique Doisneau (2004) and Cédric Andrieux (2009):

Speaking Subjects
“Good evening. My name is Véronique Doisneau. I am married and
I have two children, six and twelve years old. I am 42 years old and I
will retire in eight days. Tonight is my last performance at the Paris
Opera.” “Good evening. My name is Cédric Andrieux. I was born in
Brest, France, on June 17th 1977. I am 32 years old. I am a dancer.”2
178  G. Siegmund

The two people introducing themselves to the audience at the begin-

ning of their respective performances are Véronique Doisneau, until her
retirement in November 2005 a dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet, and
Céderic Andrieux who at the age of 22 joined the Merce Cunningham
Dance Company in New York City. What sounds like a banal state-
ment, almost a tautology, is the simple but crucial point: two dancers
speak, two dancers take centre stage in front of the audience and use the
pronoun “I.” By doing so, they assume a subject position, which gives
them agency. Other dancers who said “I” were Isabelle Torres, a dancer
from the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro in a piece that was shown
almost exclusively in Brazil, Lutz Förster, one of the protagonists of Pina
Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, and Pichet Klunchun, classical Khôn-
dancer from Thailand, who in the piece Pichet Klunchun and Myself, was
talking to Jérôme Bel on stage. In all of these pieces, Bel addresses the
question of subjectivity, which is, the overall question of his entire work,
playing on three levels with the meanings of the French word “sujet.”
They are the title, the protagonists, and the topic of their pieces. In their
eponymously titled pieces they speak in the first person singular using a
text that they, like Cédric Andrieux, have for the most part written them-
selves. They are the subjects of a sentence and of their speech. While talk-
ing, they reveal the disciplinary strategies that subject and bring them
forth as dancers. At the same time, they are the topics of their own dis-
course analysing their subjectivity in relation to the institutions they work
in. In the case of Doisneau, sujet also refers to her position in the hier-
archy of the Paris Opera Ballet: “I am a ‘subject’,” she explains. “This
means I can dance both Corps de Ballet parts and soloist parts.” Because
of this triple function Peter Dickinson in his review of Cédric Andrieux
compares Bel’s solo dancers to Brecht’s epic narrator: “Bel’s subject-per-
formers are dialectically showing the event (dance history) by showing
themselves (as working dancers) and showing themselves by showing the
event.” Consequently, as Dickinson continues, Bel’s use of autobiograph-
ical memory in the pieces “becomes less about individual psychology than
about the archaeology of dance as a discipline” (Dickinson 2014, 163).
There were other solos in the making, some more advanced in
rehearsal stages than others, but none of them were ultimately seen
through to the end. In his email conversation with Boris Charmatz, Bel
talks freely about his work with German actress Angela Winkler, star of
many theatre productions by Peter Zadek, Robert Wilson, and Klaus
Michael Grüber, as well as in several films by director Volker Schlöndorff,
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  179

most famously in The Tin Drum. Bel entered rehearsals with David
Hallberg from the American Ballet Theatre in New York, but could not,
as he writes, put their process into a satisfactory form that would com-
municate something about the mechanisms of Hallberg’s career (Bel and
Charmatz 2013, 30–33). There were conversations with dancer and cho-
reographer Prue Lang, who at the time until its closure in 2004 was a
member of Ballet Frankfurt under the direction of William Forsythe (Bel
and Charmatz 2013, 227). There was even the idea of a solo for Frédéric
Seguette, slyly introducing Jérôme Bel into the canon of big names such
as Bausch, Cunningham, and Forsythe, but above all (and more true to
the analytical nature of his project) scrutinising Bel’s own practice and its
disciplinary strategies. “The work of these solos,” Bel writes, “consist in
activating the memory, invoking the past with the threat that this activa-
tion presupposes death as its starting point” (Bel and Charmatz 2013,
33, my trans.). Uncannily in 2009, which saw the premieres of both
Cédric Andrieux in Geneva, Switzerland, and of Lutz Förster in Utrecht,
Netherlands, Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch died within weeks of
each other, inadvertently turning these pieces into necrologues. Bel does
not see the failure of any of these alternative plans to materialise as a fail-
ure. Beyond his personal experience, which must in any case have been
rewarding, they are not failures on a more conceptual level either. Since
the series rests on the principle of the ultimately infinite possibility of
new instantiations of concepts, even the ones not realised belong to the
series, albeit in a different material or immaterial form. The fact that, after
Doisneau’s retirement, the live performance of the piece was replaced by
the screening of the film shot during her last performance at the Paris
Opera by Jérôme Bel and Pierre Dupouey, is perhaps not insignificant. To
this very day, the film enjoys huge popularity and is still shown at festivals
and in museums. I will come back to this point below.
Carrying a long white tutu, a pair of pointe shoes, and a small bot-
tle of water, Véronique Doisneau enters the stage, which apart from
her small figure in the huge Opera Garnier is completely empty. Cédric
Andrieux places his sports bag, which, as will later be revealed, contains
a tricot and a pair of jeans, at the front of the stage. He, too, cannot do
without a bottle of water. Both Doisneau and Andrieux are unmistake-
ably characterised as dancers going to work, carrying their insignia—one
a classical dancer, the other the more sporty type engaged in a differ-
ent kind of dance. Here they stand facing the audience prepared to show
us how they work. Their speech is a direct address for which they seek
180  G. Siegmund

recognition by the audience. As members of the public, the audience

must acknowledge both their positions as a valid part of the discourse on
dance. This is what the dancers ask for. Being the subjects of their own
discourse also means taking over responsibility for what and how they say
it. The programmes list Jérôme Bel as in charge of the concept, but gives
credit to Cédric Andrieux or Lutz Förster not only for being performers,
but also for being the choreographers of their pieces. Authorial rights, as
Bel points out, are shared equally between them (2013, 27). In what fol-
lows I would like to inquire after what Foucault calls the “technological
side” of doing things, that is, the way in which dance company subjugate
their dancers. I will focus on the relation between discipline and the pro-
duction of space that assigns each dancer a specific place in the ranks of
the company.

Staying in One’s Place: Technologies of Subjectivation

Véronique Doisneau never became a ‘star,’ an étoile, with the Opera
Ballet. “The question never came up,” she muses. “I think I was not tal-
ented enough and too physically fragile.” Having had a back operation
at 20, which left her future as a dancer uncertain, may have thwarted
her ambitions. Although she does not mention it, the audience cannot
help but wonder if her back problems are related to her physically rigor-
ous and challenging training as a classical dancer from an early age. After
having talked about her favourite roles, the choreographies she liked
to dance and the ones she did not like, Doisneau shares with the audi-
ence her most hated scene of the classical repertoire, which, paradoxi-
cally, is in her opinion also one of the most beautiful, namely the scene in
Swan Lake where the 32 members of the corps de ballet dance together.
Doisneau goes on to explain that during that scene between the corp’s
pas de bourrées and attitudes, there are long passages of immobility, held
poses, where the corps dancers become “a human décor to highlight the
stars. And for us,” she continues, “it is the most horrible thing to do. I
want to scream and leave the stage.” Having said that, she goes on to
demonstrate the passage from Swan Lake, asking a sound technician to
provide her with the appropriate music.
For almost ten minutes she does very little but stand still, the occa-
sional change of arms and foot positions excepted. At first sight, this
scene looks like another example of Jérôme Bel’s methodology of liter-
alising speech acts by turning the bodies on stage into doppelgängers of
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  181

language. Yet, the devastating effect of the scene relies on its length, the
time that elapses while we watch Véronique Doisneau presumably doing
nothing until it hurts. This scene exceeds language and relies on the pos-
sibilities of the theatre to stage time and space for effect. It may therefore
not be replaced by a speech act, but exceeds the possibilities of language.
Without commentary, one understands the degrading hierarchy of the bal-
let company, which, as Doisneau freely admits, creates beauty. The scene is
built on three strategic reversals that point out the disciplinary work that
is indispensable for creating the beauty of ballet, but that because of its
stunning effects goes unnoticed. First, it reverses the spatial deployment of
bodies by putting the margins in the centre. By doing so, it also replaces
the soloists with a representative of the subordinate corps de ballet, which
Doisneau refers to as “us,” a group or collective of female dancers as
opposed to the individual soloists of higher ranks. Lastly, it replaces move-
ment by standstill. No longer relegated to the wings of the stage, immo-
bilised to function as human décor for the stars, Doisneau shows us the
backside of beauty and the unacknowledged work that helps create and
support it in the perception of the audience. The fringe is put centre stage,
whereas the two soloists, absent from the stage but present in our imagina-
tion, are spatially relegated to the margins. We imagine their movements
to the music that evokes their presence, a mental vision that is harshly
contradicted by what actually happens on stage. Standing still, here, is
the ultimate disciplinary work or, according to Doisneau, punishment.
Being unable to move and act only underscores the mobility and flexibil-
ity of some. All we see in Véronique Doisneau is the backside, fully lit, and
it is precisely the absence of movement centre stage that highlights the
ideology of the construction of the Paris Opera Ballet as a whole. As Bel
never tires of underlining, the classical ballet stems from a time of abso-
lutist power representing a hierarchically organised society. “Within the
organisation of ballet we are still in a monarchical system where only a few
have the power over an anonymous mass,” he says (Bel 2007). Véronique
Doisneau, like Cédric Andrieux, throws a spanner in the wheels of the
system—by invitation of the system itself, the piece was after all commis-
sioned by the Paris Opera Ballet—to expose its technologies of power and
to strategically debunk its hierarchies.
Cédric Andrieux talks in greater detail about his work as a dancer,
thereby illuminating more of the discourses and practices involved in
dance. His act of emancipation also relies upon a change in the architec-
ture and spatial relations of the stage that ascribe to him a fixed position.
182  G. Siegmund

In Cédric Andrieux, Cédric Andrieux tells us the story of his professional

career that started with a fascination for dance when he was a teenager
growing up in Brest. He tells us of the performances he saw there at Le
Quartz Theatre, his first dancing experiences before starting his train-
ing at age 14 at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et
de Danse in Paris. His first professional engagement took him to New
York, where in 1999 after a strenuous two-week selection process he was
accepted into the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. After leaving
the company in 2007, he returned to France to join the Opera Ballet in
Lyon from which he retired in 2010. In his matter-of-fact tone, he also
explains something about the ideas circulating in his youth that attracted
him to the world of dance in the first place. “After the events of Mai
1968 contemporary dance adopted some of the progressive ideas that
had developed in society,” he says, giving this statement more authority
by quoting his mother who explained to him that contemporary dance
wanted to be “more egalitarian and less elitist,” presumably compared
to ballet. It was a wish to participate in the process of social emancipa-
tion and freedom discursively underpinned by popular discourse that
attracted him to the world of contemporary dance. However, his desire
for emancipation and the promise of a different, perhaps freer, life was
disappointed once he joined the Conservatory in Paris. Although he
was trained to become a contemporary and not a classical dancer, even
in contemporary classes Andrieux encountered a system of norms, hier-
archies and quality judgments that created a system of ruthless compe-
tition among the students. The promise of contemporary dance that
public discourse held for him was countered by the actual practices of
the Conservatory intent on technical mastery, achievement, and perfor-
mance. Along with the actual dance techniques that were embodied by
the students with rigorous discipline and training, the values attached to
them turned Andrieux and his fellow students into veritable subjects of
contemporary dance.
Once in New York working with Merce Cunningham, Andrieux
encountered what seemed to him at the time the very same mechanisa-
tion of the dancing body that he thought he had left behind in Paris.
The first part of his performance in his piece Cédric Andrieux is dedi-
cated to his experiences in the Cunningham studio. The daily routine of
exercises, always to be executed in the same order of bounces, stretches,
and pliés frustrates him, and he goes on to demonstrate the repetition of
such a rigid movement pattern to the audience. As if to mock his work,
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  183

he gives the rhythm with his tongue to accompany his stiff torso tilting
and the movement of his arms to the side of the body. Thus exposed on
stage of what in the studio is nothing but a warm-up to keep the body
flexible to prepare it for future, more creative work, the sequence of
exercises looks almost moronic in its mechanical drive. Again and again
and again until Andrieux abruptly interrupts his exercises to walk to the
front of stage the stating: “After the pliés the training continues. Luckily
with exercises that change every day” (Fig. 1).
Like in Véronique Doisneau, what is striking here, too, is the impor-
tance accorded to the spatial deployment of the dancers and their rela-
tion to each other. Andrieux knows precisely where he stood during the
daily routines, namely in the last row to the right. From his position at
the back of the studio, always the same tableau of dancers in front of him
unfolded; they, too, being glued to their respective positions. From back
there, he also remembers Cunningham sitting at the front, to the side of
the formation, conducting the training. The spatial relation between the
bodies, here, is already part of the disciplinary regime that fixes them to
their places in order to provide Cunningham with a better overview of
their skills. Taking this into consideration, Andrieux’s disruption of the
scene, his initiative to leave his ascribed position to walk up towards the
audience can be seen as an emancipatory act.
In the following scene Andrieux describes his work on new move-
ment sequences in the same way as the mechanical positioning of body
parts. Working with Cunningham on a new choreography merely repeats
the subjection to a disciplinary principle that is completely alien to the
rhythms, habits, and necessities of the body. In Andrieux’s memory,
working on a new choreography is much like the work he did as a model
in art school: striking poses. Since Cunningham by the time was already
confined to sitting in a wheelchair, he could no longer himself dance
the movements he had devised with the help of his computer. Thus,
mimetic learning, a copying of movements from another living body, a
hands-on intuiting of possibilities of how to do it, was replaced by ver-
bal transmission of information. Cunningham, as Andrieux remembers,
described the movements the dancers had to perform according to his
instructions. He separated legs, torsos, and arms, and, step by step,
added one on top of the other, making the movement increasingly
complex with each repeated cycle of invention. Andrieux felt overbur-
dened all the time. Only after he had left the company did he realise that
Cunningham never cared about the perfection of movement execution.
184  G. Siegmund

Fig. 1  Cédric Andrieux, A Cunningham Subject © Herman Sorgeloos

 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  185

As Andrieux admits, he never made any value judgments about the way
the dancers coped with the sometimes even anatomically impossible
combinations of legs, arms, and torsos. Instead, he developed an interest
in movement precisely in the moment when the difficulties threatened
their performance with failure. Thus, Andrieux’s feeling of inadequacy
is a calculated part of the choreographic procedure based on chance and
algorithmic operations. The difficulty of the structure asks for individual
approaches and solutions of how to deal with the strictures and the dead
ends it produces. As a dancer, so it seems, Andrieux failed to develop an
individual take on Cunningham’s instructions. He failed to steal some-
thing back from his initial subjugation and to develop an implementation
of Cunningham’s technique in his body that would give him back some
of the original enjoyment for dance that he felt as a young man.
The dancing subject Cédric Andrieux, submissive to the voice and
instructions of his master, resists his subjection precisely at the point
where he perceives it as mere oppression. In Bel’s “talking dance por-
trait” (Dickinson 2014, 163), the dancer is turned into a speaking sub-
ject who becomes the subject of theatre. If Bel conceives of himself as
being a “theatre director whose subject is dance” (Bauer 2008, 43), then
this suggests that in his work, the two dispositifs of aesthetic production
and representation—dance and theatre—are interfering with each other.
Theatre is used to critically analyse dance and the production of danc-
ing subjects. Once again the effect is one of doubling the symbolic so
that, at the interstices of the two systems, something real may emerge.
Instrumental in this shift from dancing subject to subject of the theatre
is both Andrieux and Doisneau’s capacity to cite from memory. They
are able to repeat dance sequences, phrases, and entire scenes from their
work and performing experience that in the context of their solo pieces
serve as citations. As quotations, to use Brecht’s and Barthes’s terms
again, they are gestures that suspend a seemingly natural or effortless rep-
resentation and produce theatricality instead. They are gestures indexing
their process of subjugation and subjectivation that now they come to
reflect and, in the case of Andrieux, even to resist. In the process of being
repeated, the subject changes its place from simply performing move-
ments according to Cunningham’s instructions to a speaking subject
who reflexively turns in on himself and his work, thereby turning away
from Cunningham. Cédric Andrieux, like Véronique Doisneau, stages
an act of resistance. Both resist their habitual subjectivation as dancers.
From docile subject to a subject that says “no,” Andrieux and Doisneau
186  G. Siegmund

revisit the scene of their submission, de-placing it. By a decisive gesture

of her hands, Doisneau cuts off the music from Swan Lake and leaves her
pose, while Andrieux simply walks away from the scene of the dreaded
exercises. Speaking on their own behalf might not make them good
Cunningham or ballet subjects any more, but it turns them into subjects
of theatre. Neither does Andrieux speak the general truth about working
with Cunningham nor Doisneau the general truth about classical ballet.
They share with the audience their subjective points of view, which might
not be those of other dancers in the respective companies. Now they are
social subjects asking for recognition in front of the public.

Critical Strategies of Desubjugation with Butler

and Foucault’s Virtue

With his second work cycle, the series of portraits Jérôme Bel realised
between 2004 and 2009 with several dancers, the notions of absence,
death, and disappearance that characterised much of his first work phase
take a back seat. In their pieces the dancers address their subjectivation as
dancers with big dance companies. Bel’s focus shifts away from his own
discourse on dance to questions of power within the institution. Bel uses
his power and his name as an artist to allow other dancing subjects to
speak. “‘Subjection’ signifies the process of becoming subordinated by
power as well as the process of becoming a subject,” Judith Butler writes,
highlighting the duplicity of the process of subjection that was so dif-
ficult for Cédric Andrieux to negotiate. Butler goes on to deplore that
in Foucault’s theory of submission to power, “power in its double val-
ance of subordinating and producing remains unexplored” (Butler 1997,
2). Foucault’s analyses of power mainly focus on the technologies and
practices of submission by either discipline and control or internalisation
and governance, but leave the side of becoming a subject, or even an
individual, unexplored. If the submission to power generates the subject,
Butler holds, this can only mean that its submission is at the very same
time its becoming. This and the next section will look at what Foucault
calls the “strategical side” of the dispositif that may elude, change, or
redirect the technological side intent on subordination. In which respects
do Doisenau and Andrieux’s dance practices allow them to strategi-
cally modify the rule? To extend on Butler’s observation that Foucault
leaves the becoming of a subject underdeveloped, I want to add that it
is also the act of the subject’s resistance to power that goes unnoticed,
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  187

the becoming someone or something else than what is stipulated by

the iteration of norms and behavioural patterns. Butler addresses both
questions in her book, The Psychic Life of Power (Butler 1997), and her
essay on Foucault’s virtue “What is Critique?” (Butler 2004). In these
texts Butler suggests at least two possible answers to the question thus
rephrased. One lies in the distinction between subject and individual or
‘self.’ The other, following from that, in the act of desubjugation and
desubjectivation, which Foucault calls an “art.”
To underline her definition of the subject as opposed to the individ-
ual, which clearly has more psychological implications, Butler states:

‘The subject’ is sometimes bandied about as if it were interchangeable with

‘the person’ or ‘the individual’. The genealogy of the subject as a criti-
cal category, however, suggests that the subject, rather than be identified
strictly with the individual, ought to be designated as a linguistic category,
a placeholder, a structure in formation. Individuals come to occupy the
site of the subject (the subject simultaneously emerges as a ‘site’), and they
enjoy intelligibility only to the extent that they are, as it were, first estab-
lished in language. The subject is the linguistic occasion for the individual
to achieve and reproduce intelligibility, the linguistic conditions of its exist-
ence and agency. (1997, 10–11)

The subject is a linguistic category, a placeholder, the signifier “I”

whose referent is whoever speaks in the first person singular. The indi-
vidual, on the other hand, seems to be a larger category that some-
how precedes the subject: the individual may come to assume a subject
position in language to gain agency. In the act of opposition to power,
which is an act that makes the subject turn away from the options of
behaviour that power grants the subject, the subject repeats or iterates
its submission. But the iteration of what in Butler’s term is ultimately
a speech act that hails the subject, inevitably produces differences that
miss the norm and account for other forms of subjectivity. This in itself
has become a normative explanation of, for instance, gender identity.
But the quotation already suggests a more complex line of argumenta-
tion. The efficacy of the norm is broken not only by iteration, which is
purely a mechanical act, but by that which iteration works on. The raw
material that produces difference and therefore the inherent failure of
the speech act, here, is more than just a difference in contexts. Rather,
opposition depends upon a subject-to-be with its own individual forma-
tion of the psyche. It works on that which assumes a subject position
188  G. Siegmund

in the first place, that is to say, the individual that Butler distinguishes
from the subject. There is a psychic structure-to-be prior to or coexisting
with linguistic interpellation that brings the subject into being by hail-
ing it and making it turn around in recognition. Thus, Louis Althussser
in his famous scene of subjection—a policeman hails a man in the street;
the man turns and by the act of turning acknowledges his (inferior)
subject position in relation to the powers-that-be—cannot, as Butler
herself notes (1997, 5), explain why the subject turns in the first place.
Althusser cannot explain why the subject that is worked on by power
becomes a powerful subject in its own right. Perhaps, as Butler muses,
both Foucault and Althusser need a theory of consciousness, or even the
unconscious, to explain just why it is that the individual hailed by the call
of the law turns around instead of simply walking on (Butler 1997, 5).3
The possibility of following another course and resisting the call of the
law implies that every act of subjection that produces the subject at the
same time also produces the possibility of desubjugation and desubjecti-
vation of this very subject. The notion of desubjugation is related to the
notion of critique that Butler analyses in her reading of Foucault’s essay,
“What is Critique?” Considering Jérôme Bel’s collaborations with indi-
vidual dancers as works of critique of the power structures, it is helpful to
have a look at this essay. The solo pieces Bel facilitated as choreographer
stage the crisis of the submissive subject. He stages the dancing subject
in crisis. Crisis is here understood as the culminative moment leading up
to a decision prior to which an instance of separating and of distinguish-
ing has occurred. Critique, in this sense, from the Greek verb “krinein,”,
is a practice or technique of separating. Bel’s pieces operate as a critique
of power relations in dance institutions by underlining the strategies of
resistance to that power (Foucault 2000, 329). As a consequence, the
“antagonisms of relations” between body, space, and language, between
dancers and choreographers, between subjects and non-subjects, become
apparent. Butler sees Foucault’s critique as “a practice in which we pose
the question of the limits of our most sure ways of knowing” (Butler
2004, 307). Subjects engage in critical practices because they have “run
up against a crisis in the epistemological field in which one lives” (2004,
307–308). Thus, inherent in critique as a practice is the hope of trans-
forming the field of knowledge and experience. Although critique does
not have to offer solutions to the epistemological crisis of knowing, it
instigates a moment of separation from the current state of affairs.
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  189

Foucault defines critique as a question that comes up in relation to a

specific form of government: “‘how not to be governed like that, by that,
in the name of those principles’” (2004, 312). “How not to be governed
like that” does not formulate the desire not to be governed at all, but
the wish not to be governed in this way, but differently, according to dif-
ferent principles. Butler grounds the practice of critical intervention in
the increasing rationalisation of the principle of government that become
unacceptable to or uninhabitable for the subject. Once rationalisation
becomes too much, a moment of “desubjugation” sets in that offers the
subject the possibility of self-transformation. “If the desubjugation of
the subject emerges at the moment in which the episteme constituted
through rationalization exposes its limit, then desubjugation marks pre-
cisely the fragility and transformability of the episteme of power” (2004,
317). Thus, self-making, the formation of a different subject, goes hand-
in-hand with “desubjugation,” which is always also an instance of desub-
jectivation in as much as the subject depends on its submission. As Butler
points out, Foucault is unable to ground the critical attitude other than
making a strategic claim for the “originary freedom” (2004, 319) of the
human being. In 1982, in his essay “The Subject and Power,” Foucault
draws our attention to the fact that power depends upon freedom: “The
power relationship and freedom’s refusal to submit therefore cannot
be separated” (Foucault 2000, 342). Using the word freedom, Butler
argues, Foucault makes a performative speech act that brings about the
very notion of freedom that it speaks of. As a consequence, freedom is
a “fiction,” yet a necessary one that provides the possibility for critique
and openings for the transformation of the subject. It is interesting to
note that, at the end of the essay, Butler admits a shift “from the discur-
sive notion of the subject to a more psychologically resonant notion of
‘self’,” which for Foucault holds greater possibilities of agency, and, we
may add, for resistance (Butler 2004, 321).
In our context, “the failure to totalize the subject” power “seeks to
know and to subjugate” (2004, 317) is of interest, because Foucault
insists that such a moment of self-transformation is an art. The subject
engages in “arts of existence” (2004, 320) that transform its singular
being, thereby turning its very life into an oeuvre. This self-stylization
is the practice of a subject in revolt, its “revolt into style,” to borrow the
artist George Melly’s phrase from his study of British pop and youth cul-
tures (Melly 1972), or its “revolting style,” as Dick Hebdidge re-phrases
190  G. Siegmund

it in relation to the subculture of punk (Hebdige 1979, 106). Grounded

in the fiction of freedom, the subject that comes into being as a work of
art is likewise a fiction. The art lies in the subject that is ‘re-volting’ in
the literal sense of the term: as a subject that turns back on itself thereby
retroactively producing the very subject it pre-supposes. As Butler points
out in The Psychic Life of Power, “The paradox of subjection implies a
paradox of referentiality: namely that we must refer to what does not
yet exist” (Butler 1997, 4). Thus, style is an indication of the subject’s
critical turn that reformulates the rules of its being. Such a subject, like
a work of art, has no referent other than itself. The subject generated
in and by means of style is under construction. It de-sists from original
power relations in an act that brings the subject into ex-istence. It ex-ists
and stands outside of itself as a desubjugated subject whose new form
does not yet exist. To take care of this gap, to work on this indistinguish-
ability between submission and revolt, the subject engages in an ethical
and even moral relation with itself. It takes care of itself in a self-practice
that is virtuous.
“And what happens when I begin to become that for which there is
no place within the given regime of truth?” (Butler 2004, 315). Butler’s
rhetorical question is less rhetorical for Véronique Doisneau and Céderic
Andrieux who may very well have asked the question in relation to their
own dance practices and their respective regimes of truth. In fact, in their
pieces with Jérôme Bel they describe the process of rationalisation inher-
ent in any kind of dance technique that objectifies their bodies to the
point of pain. Not used to speaking on stage as dancers (dancers are said
to speak with their bodies), they assume a subject position by speaking
in the first person singular. Whereas before they were mere cogs in the
machine of ballet or Cunningham’s choreographies, now they speak crit-
ically of their acts of submission. In an act of desubjugation they reject
their old forms of physical subjugation, while verbal language offers
them the possibility to assume a different subject position that allows for
other possibilities of becoming a subject. Their act of resistance is speak-
ing. Their act of self-stylisation is not a revolt into style, but a revolt out
of style, since style is part of the protocol of dance. Their workman-like
attitude and rehearsal clothes speak out against the stylization of the
body in dance by technique and may best be characterised as an anti-
style. It remains, however, a gesture of desubjugation.
Although the referent of their speech is clear—the practices of the Paris
Opéra Ballet, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, their subjected
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  191

position as members of these companies—the subject they are address-

ing—themselves—becomes less clear in the process. Being at the same
time the title, the topic, and the protagonist of their pieces, their practice
here is clearly self-referential. Yet what they reference either does not exist
anymore—it gets lost in the turning back which shifts its position—or
does not yet exist, like the new form of subjectivity and individuality that
may emerge from their critical practice instigated by Jérôme Bel. What is
the ‘self’ that gains agency by assuming a subject position in language? It
is, as Roland Barthes would say, a theatrical subject that rises out of the
ruins of representation like a phoenix from the ashes. The art of existence,
the aesthetic mode of self-referential being, suspends the subject between
past and future, merely pointing in each direction without being able to
reach or picture it directly. Hovering in the gap between subject and self
or individual, the subject speaks in the seismic schism that Roland Barthes
claimed as the space of theatricality, neither here nor there but moving
inbetween, thereby producing art effects as possibilities.

Critical Strategies of Desubjugation with Freud’s

Fantasy
Strategies to deflect the forces guiding the dispositifs point towards the
failure of the dispositif to keep its elements under total control. Like the
body and its desire, they are always more or less than the technologies
that the dispositif demands. Sometimes the body even is too weak to
obey, a weakness that draws attention to the functioning of the dispositif
that if things run smoothly remains unnoticed. Failure disrupts the veil
of imaginary completeness that so many dance productions adhere to
as their value. The breakdown of technique in pain, as both Doisneau
and Andrieux know, the failure of the body to become a fully integrated
dance subject, the desire not to be governed that way and the ensuing
critical strategies of doubling, re-flecting, and re-volting can be described
as strategies to ultimately leave the original dispositif behind. Opening
up the fixed ways of working may, however, not be confused with a state
of control and absolute freedom. As Foucault has amply demonstrated
there is no freedom outside a structure. Freedom is the result of engag-
ing with a structure that is never fully determined and produces its own
failures or its own outside. Upon leaving their original work context,
both Doisneau and Andrieux enter into a structural relation with the dis-
positif Jérôme Bel that, for them, produces liberating effects. It offers
192  G. Siegmund

them possibilities of being and seeing themselves that they would not
be able to realise otherwise. The question that follows from this line of
argument is why do subjects want to stay within the dispositif in the first
place? What keeps subjects within their structures before the rationali-
zation of forms of governance, as Butler says, become too much? What
are the rewards of subjectivation that make us abide with our submis-
sion? I am looking for the normal and normalizing rewards for being a
subject. The answer to this question is the faculty of imagination that
provides the subject with a notion of its won potentiality. Thus, the
simple answer to Judith Butler’s question at the outset of her book The
Psychic Life of Power as to why subjects develop a passionate attachment
to their submission is desire (Butler 1997, 6). Subjects desire their sub-
mission because it is submission that gives them their desire. And it is
desire that gives them their sense of potential and futurity. As Véronique
Doisneau states, it is the corps de ballet’s disciplinary act of standing still
for ten minutes that creates beauty. Although a result of the structure
itself, desire is the instance that desubjectifies the dancers and urges them
to become more than functioning machines in the hands of power. It is
their locus of resistance—the wish or desire, as Foucault has it, not to
be governed in this way. The dispositif of the dance company and their
practices is never only an apparatus of capture, as André Lepecki suggests
(Lepecki 2007). Choreography is never just the side of submission, but
also of production, both imaginary and symbolic. It is never only the site
for subjects to be framed by norms and held captive in its organisational
and artistic structures. It is also the place where these structures can be
repeated, de-placed, and questioned. Structures produce their own con-
tingencies, one of which is the subject. In this sense, Jérôme Bel’s series
of solo performances are interruptions of the normal way of doings
things. In fact, as Butler emphasises, the act of critique (of representa-
tion, of the dancing subject’s submissive position) implies an act of de-
subjectivation that is simultaneous with the act of subjectivation.
If the theatre were only the place where subjects can repeat their acts
of subjectivation, it would indeed not be much more than just another
version of a newspaper or television show. Theatre would then only react
to other social discourses that it puts up for debate, merely applying
them to the facts of the theatre, however necessary this move may be.
This is in fact the danger inherent in the work Cédric Andrieux. Strictly
speaking, it is debatable whether Andrieux ever became a Cunningham
subject at all. Following his account, he was not able to productively
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  193

apply Cunningham’s principles to his body. He could only do so under

great pain, as he repeatedly states, the pain preventing the development
of a more positive work relation. Cédric Andrieux is a failed Cunningham
subject. What he failed to realise, then, is the second step of subjectiva-
tion, namely the move from submission to producing an individual or
a person that actively negotiates the structure. Instead of becoming an
aesthetic subject, Andrieux remains a disciplinary one. As a consequence,
he failed to understand the liberating potential in Cunningham’s work
itself. Working with non-determinacy and chance procedures that cut off
any subjective knowledge or choices in the making of the choreography,
Cunningham’s practice is one of de-subjectivation, too. Being a de-sub-
jectivation practice itself, it helps give dancers space for them for becom-
ing and change.
Since Cédric Andrieux is Andrieux’s own account of his biography as
a dancer (and not that of Bel, who would have given a different account
of Cunningham’s work, as was pointed out in the section on Bel’s own
formation as a dancer), the piece does not contain any alternative visions
of himself. It does not point towards the potentiality of Andrieux’s body
but remains with the physically painful experiences of subjection. The
piece therefore largely operates on the level of symbolic structures and
the normative bodies they produce. Positively speaking, what it does
is to unmask the necessary pre-requisite of painful disciplinary endeav-
our in the production of individuality and subjectivity. What its clarity
does not do, on the other hand, is to point towards or even unfold the
potential of the imagination as the realm or register of alternatives to
the factually given. It resists the projection of a body as a potential real-
isation of possibilities. Even in the excerpts in which Andrieux dances,
which mark important steps in his career, he does so in a neutral, almost
demonstrative way that gives the whole performance the character of a
lecture demonstration. There is no music to underpin their emotional or
even seductive and illusionary qualities. Like Brecht’s gestus that Roland
Barthes reclaimed for his notion of theatricality, Andrieux points towards
the social and institutional reality of the dance world without, however,
gaining any pleasure from its practices.
Véronique Doisneau, on the other hand, knows more about the
rewards and the pleasures of the imagination. In two episodes of her solo
she actually presents the imaginary body of the ballerina both as an ideal
and a projection to be desired. Her greatest dream, she tells us, is to dance
the role of Giselle. She puts on the tutu she carried over her arm, moves
194  G. Siegmund

upstage and begins to hum the music while she dances with admirable
clarity and precision half a duet from Giselle on her own. Her partner
being absent, she ironically indicates lifts she cannot perform by herself by
saying “lift with partner.” For three minutes, she is lost in a reverie making
her own musical accompaniment as if she were merely dancing for her-
self during a rehearsal in the studio. The strain of performing some of the
movements can be heard in her breathing and the wavering of her voice
while she hums. As a ‘sujet’ who is only allowed to dance minor solo parts,
Doisenau here dances the part she was never allowed to dance (Fig. 2).
Whether she was, as she claims at the beginning, physically not tal-
ented enough, remains open to debate after the visible results. Dancing
Giselle in Véronique Doisneau is thus the fulfilment of a wish, a poten-
tial dance that never actually happened, paradoxically realised as a private
fantasy in public. The second episode again refers to Giselle. In the epi-
sode that follows she removes the role of Giselle to an unreachable ideal
worthy of her admiration and fascination. During her career, as she tells
us, she admired many great ballerinas, amongst them Céline Talon in her
role of Giselle in Mats Ek’s modern version of the classic. Having said
that, she sits down and, turning her back towards the audience, looks at
the stage to witness Talon herself entering at the back of the stage and
dancing an excerpt from Ek’s choreography. Literally relegated to the
horizon of expectations, her dance is out of reach, only to be looked at
from a distance as an ideal that temporarily materialises before it vanishes
again like a hallucination.
Doisneau becomes a spectator in her own spectacle representing the
spectator’s role on stage. We look at Doisneau the way she looks at
Talon. And what we look at is always also a fantasy—our fantasy—which
is made possible precisely by implementing the subjectivating structure.
In dealing with the structure, by making it one’s own or by twisting it
to one’s needs, different or potential bodies as alternatives to the fac-
tual are proposed. Doisneau displays and unravels the mechanisms of the
imaginary side of the performance. These mechanisms are dependent on
what Freud describes as the “scopic drive” (Freud 2001, 129–133). In
Freud’s view, the drive that is connected to the gaze develops in a series
of substitutions until it reaches its final stage of development, which, as
we all know, is never its final state, since its prior stages persist, disturb,
and interfere. First, I gain pleasure from looking at myself, until I sub-
stitute looking at parts of my body for looking at external objects. What
happens next is the anomaly of the scopic drive, since the I reverts to
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  195

Fig. 2  Véronique Doisneau, Imagining Giselle © Anna von Kooij

looking at itself again, thus turning itself into an object that it actively
looks at. Finally, the I substitutes its own gaze with the gaze of some-
body else thereby turning into a passive object to be looked at by oth-
ers. While the source of the drive, the eye, or in Lacan’s anti-biologist
reformulation, the gaze, remains the same, in the inbetween phase both
the aim (active voyeurism and passive exhibitionism) and object (my own
body, an external object or body) of the drive are exchanged once again.
My own gaze is replaced by another gaze; the two gazes are reversible,
which means that I am also looking at myself when somebody else looks
at me. Freud’s concept of the scopic drive has often been criticised, espe-
cially in relation to the theatre, since it ostensibly advocates a narcissism
of the subject that goes against theatre’s critical potential. The imaginary
identification with characters, roles, or beautiful dancing bodies seduces
rather than being critical.
However, in the dynamics and shifts between the different stages
the gaze goes through and their modes of operation, a destabilis-
ing force is at work that unravels any kinds of identification as merely
temporary. Instead of speaking of narcissism, Freud uses the concept
196  G. Siegmund

of autoeroticism to explain how fantasy works. As Jean Laplanche and

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis have pointed out in their dictionary of Freudian
terms, Freud’s concept of autoeroticism, which is the realm in which
the scopic drive works, is distinct from his later concept of narcissism,
for narcissism already relates to an ego formation that is being desired
as an image (Laplanche and Pontalis 1988, 45–48). Autoeroticism, on
the other hand, precedes or undermines the subject’s narcissistic identi-
fication with an image. It does away with the image because it operates
on a pre-subjective level of disintegrated bodies. It speaks of a mobile
form of subjectivity, fluid in its cathexis to objects and their parts, and,
as Tim Dean suggests, is able to form temporary identifications across
normalised patterns of (gender) representation (Dean 2000, 261–262).
Autoeroticism is not without object. It simply refuses to distinguish
between the object’s function and its sexual possibilities. Thus, seeing in
general and in the context of the theatre in particular is neither a neu-
tral act of perception nor is it to be reduced to an optical configuration
such as that of linear perspective. Between functional seeing as perceiving
and the desire to see, fantasy intervenes. Thus, there is always something
of me in the fantasy that unfolds on stage, of me in a de-personalised,
pre-subjective state that is encapsulated in fantasy. Fantasy dissolves the
binaries between subject and object, between passivity and activity, and
between stage and auditorium. Just what the object of my fantasy is,
remains open. It may be anything seen or any word spoken across any
kinds of division that structure our identity. Fantasy and imagination,
therefore, strictly speaking are not the same thing. Where one disinte-
grates, the other picks up the pieces and reassembles them. Thus fantasy,
which in principle is dissolving, is given form and shape by the imagina-
tion, which integrates the dissolving parts to an imaginary whole.
Véronique Doisneau turns her fantasy into the image of Giselle.
Engaging with the structure thus leaves both artists and audiences with
two possibilities: One, artists and audiences follow its call, which rewards
our faith in the structure with imaginary bodies such as the one of Giselle
or as the one Cunningham’s techniques of composing the body and its
choreographies produce. Two, the structure can work towards its own
critical point of breakdown by pointing out its own inconsistencies. I place
Jérôme Bel’s work as a critical engagement with the world of dance in
the second category. Whereas the first option rewards us with the seduc-
tive beauty of dancing bodies, the second interrupts the flow of things.
It tends towards the disintegrating capacities of fantasy by producing
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  197

gestures and theatricality that at the same time allow us to reflect the strat-
egies of the dispositifs and to enjoy the surplus objects their disintegration
sets free. In the work of Jérôme Bel, structure serves to put us into con-
text with object a, the gaze, the voice, body parts or even objects from the
body as in the contested scene of urination in the piece Jérôme Bel.

Critical Strategies by Acknowledgement, or: The

Emptiness Looks Back
Cédric Andrieux, too, has a favourite scene that betrays his desire. His
scene is directly linked to the gaze of the theatre. After having joined the
Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon in 2007, he enjoyed dancing repertoire pieces
by Trisha Brown and Jérôme Bel. The entire ballet ensemble participated
in their production of The Show Must Go On. The piece, as Andrieux
remembers, struck him as extraordinary for the reason that Bel did not
choose the dancers according to their abilities. Everybody could par-
ticipate, regardless of their technical prowess. This egalitarian approach,
which Andrieux was not used to, for him visibly culminated in the ensem-
ble standing in one single line—a kind of chorus line dissolving traditional
ballet or modern dance hierarchies and conventions that always focus on
one or the other dancer even if, as is the case with Cunningham, the audi-
ence is given the choice of where to look. The Show Must Go On is the
anti-Swan Lake that caused Véronique Doisneau and the corps de bal-
let of the Paris Opera so much pain. Andrieux then repeats his favourite
scene from the piece: Every Breath You Take by The Police. As the music
begins to play, he positions himself at the front of the stage, engaging in
the play of gazes with the audience, smiling and looking around in the
auditorium trying to capture a gaze that would reciprocate his own. The
performance, however, does not provide the spectator with an image of
the possible respective fantasies of dancer and spectator. Although invok-
ing fantasy, it refuses to integrate it into an image like Giselle. Absent as
a visual form, fantasy becomes a possibility in the symbolic structure of
the choreography and the apparatus it supports. Cédric Andrieux exposes
the desire to see and be seen as the structure of theatre, crossing voyeur-
ism and exhibitionism that makes dancers and spectators swap their places,
integrating one in the fantasy spectacle of the other (Fig. 3).
The lyrics of the song, “Every breath you take, every step you make,
I’ll be watching you,” however, point into yet another direction: that of
paranoia. The ubiquitous gaze of the perpetrator following their object
198  G. Siegmund

Fig. 3  Cédric Andrieux, Looking for an Eye © Marco Caselli Nirmal|Teatro

Comunale di Ferrara

of desire to the point of stalking, as the lyrics suggest, may be translated

into the context of theatre. The gaze that Andrieux seeks out is not
only the gaze of the imaginary other, but also the gaze of the symbolic
space of theatre itself. He hopes to encounter a gaze that he can never
see, although he recognises it once it hits him. Since it is ubiquitous,
nowhere and everywhere at the same time, and as such identical with
the structure and the form of theatre, no individual subject may occupy
its position. The gaze cannot be mirrored to integrate the subject on an
imaginary level. Instead it points towards its contingency and depend-
ency on the structure. Thus, Andrieux and Doisenau do not only expose
themselves by speaking on their own behalf in addressing the actually
present audience. They also always address the empty space of the thea-
tre, an absent totality of ‘society,’ asking for symbolic recognition of their
subject position. On a symbolic level, desiring the gaze of the Other like
Doisneau and Andrieux articulates the desire to be recognised as a sub-
ject. The empty stage thus acquires yet another meaning.
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  199

Firstly, it is a non-site for the staging and presentation of numerous

concepts of dance and theatre. Once materialised, these concepts enter
a dialectical relation between the site from which the material is taken
(dance) and its relations to the non-site that facilitates its production
of meaning. The non-site underlines the conceptual nature of all dance
while dance points towards the inevitable aesthetical dimension of the
concept. Bel’s insistence on the empty stage, or as in Gala, even the
empty theatre including the auditorium, is an insistence on the character
of theatre as a non-site full of the possibility of possibilities.
Secondly, the non-site in psychoanalytical terms is the representa-
tion of the original phantasm that brings a world or worlds into being.
Where there was nothing, there shall be, with a little help from Lacan’s
objet a, something. The double framing of the theatre (the theatre build-
ing is distinct from the everyday life in the street; the stage is framed to
separate it from the auditorium) literally frames an absence, a nothing
or negativity as a presence or positivity. What happens on stage is not
primarily the representation of any given reality, but a re-opening of a
coming into being of world and subject. The empty stage as an absent
presence and a present absence is the site in which things, objects, voices,
gazes, body parts, and their relations appear. Once they appear, they may
be assembled and re-assembled, producing subjects along the way.
Thirdly, the empty stage is also the exposition of its symbolic function.
Referring to Judith Butler’s distinction between subject and person or
individual quoted above, the empty stage or theatre with its distinction
between stage and auditorium is analogous to the equally empty personal
pronouns as universals without reference in the structure of a sentence.
By assuming a position, my position, on stage or in the auditorium, we
become subjected and gain a subject position from which to speak and
listen. Assuming this position, as we have seen, may not immediately lead
to the construction of a new form of subjectivity or individuality. Bel
remains tied to the propositions of theatre even when he critiques them
by his disruptive interventions into the order of things. This accounts for
the theatricality of his subjects as artistic subjects whose virtue must lie
in their non-positionality while they position themselves as critical sub-
jects, that is as subjects of and in crisis of the dispositif that has brought
them about. Theatre integrates subjective, de-personalising fantasies by
giving them an imaginary form. In this sense, Julia Kristeva refers to the
theatre as the place where the imaginary is integrated into the symbolic
200  G. Siegmund

(Kristeva 1998). Like the space of theatre that is ontologically split into
(historically and spatially contingent) stage and auditorium, the subject
of theatre is a split subject.4 Theatre is the place where I can get a per-
spective on myself as non-self or even de-personalised self from another
vantage point that is always impossible for the subject to inhabit.
To sum up: Véronique Doisneau and Céderic Andrieux stage their
own discourse on dance, articulating their subjective points of view on
the dispositif of dance. By critically intervening, this shift changes the
vectors in the force field of dance, thereby exposing some of its orien-
tations and functioning mechanisms. Bel’s discourse on subjectivity pro-
vides insights into the subjectivating mechanisms and the representational
strategies of specific dance practices. Both solos stage what can be consid-
ered the general principle of choreography (Siegmund 2012a, b), namely
the confrontation of the body with that which produces it as a (dancing)
body: the symbolic structures. They confront themselves with techniques
that discipline them, organisational structures that place them, discourses
that shape their expectations and fantasies and, finally, choreographic
structures that regulate their activities. This confrontation, however, relies
on the ontological impossibility of the body ever merging with the struc-
ture. Since they are of two fundamentally different materialisations—the
binary logic of language and discourse on the one hand, and the rhythms
and the physicality of the body on the other—the two orders remain fun-
damentally incompatible. The consequences may be either tragic or comi-
cal. For Véronique Doisneau the choreographic structure of Swan Lake
that subjectifies her remains entirely alien to her physical rhythms and
demands. The scene from Véronique Doisneau positions her as a tragic
heroine painfully confronting the abstract und uninhabitable universality
of the choreography that destroys her as a dancer. Cédric Andrieux, on
the other hand, exposes the structure itself as empty, hollow, and mechan-
ical by going through the motions of his exercises. Body and structure
enter a comical relation that brings out the impurity of the pure concept.

Lutz Förster (2009): The Joys of Being a Dancing Subject

Lutz Förster fondly remembers his first production as a member of Pina
Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. During Kontakthof, a piece that dates
from 1978, there was one scene, even a scandalous scene, as Förster
recalls, in which all the dancers sat in a row of chairs close to the audi-
ence telling them about their first love. After an initial moment of shock
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  201

when he realised that his personal story would be made public and eve-
rybody could hear what he had to say, he soon discovered that he liked
it very much indeed. His colleague Jan Minarik walked the line of chairs
holding a microphone in front of the dancers to make their intimate con-
versation with members of the audience public to the whole auditorium.
Lutz Förster then goes on to demonstrate Minarik’s walk. When, finally,
Minarik walked up to him, he liked talking into the microphone even
more. He enjoyed telling his story, he enjoyed developing stories and
talking on stage, and he enjoyed the audience’s reaction and interaction
with him while he talked. Working on Kontakthof was a huge discovery
for the young dancer in his first mayor role, a step of emancipation that,
judged by his performance of Lutz Förster, he still benefits from today.
There is no doubt: Lutz Förster is both a lucky and a happy man.
As a dancer he enjoyed great success, pleasure, and fulfilment in his
work. Against all odds, he was accepted to study dance at Folkwang
Hochschule in Essen, Germany, although he was already twenty-two
years old. He caught the eye of Pina Bausch, who cast him for her 1975
production of The Rite of Spring. He made a smooth transition from
the school to becoming a full member of the company in 1978. In the
early 1980s in New York, he was invited to dance the role of Jago in
José Limon’s choreography The Moor’s Pavane, which was one of his
long-standing dreams as a dancer come true. While in New York he met
Robert Wilson, who told him that one day they would work together.
The promise was kept in 1988 when Wilson asked Förster to join him for
a production at The Hamburg State Opera. What is left, then, for Jérôme
Bel to work with, when his subject conceives of himself as already eman-
cipated? Indeed, Lutz Förster sits uneasily within Jérôme Bel’s oeuvre.
After having danced his little dance as a bee that collects honey from
Pina Bausch’s piece 1980, Förster for the first time mentions the way
Bausch worked with the dancers: “One day, Pina asked the question to
praise an object,” he begins. But what could have been the beginning of
a debate about Pina Bausch’s working methods, their implications and
consequences for the dancers, is immediately reduced to a moment of
choice—Förster’s personal reply to Pina Bausch’s question: “I will show
you my answer.” He then grabs the chair from the previous scene, places it
in front of a microphone stand and starts praising the merits and sufferings
of the chair. Förster’s answer comes too early, filling in the gap between
the production process and its result. Possible routes of exploration are
closed off before the journey even begins. His hymn to a chair forecloses
202  G. Siegmund

an investigation into the conflicts Bausch’s questions may have produced

during rehearsals. What did a typical rehearsal look like? Was answering
the questions met with resistance by the dancers? What did opening up
emotionally demand of the dancers? How did they negotiate between
the choreographer’s expectations and their own ideas and desires? Since
Pina Bausch’s work was not primarily dependant on an objectifiable dance
technique, what were the mechanisms of subjugation to become a Pina
Bausch dancer? In his narrative Lutz Förster suggests a kind of blind trust
in him and his fellow dancers that Bausch never questioned. What kind of
dependencies did this mutual trust produce and how did it filter into the
work? These are questions that Lutz Förster does not ask (Fig. 4).
Lutz Förster does not hold any insights into the inevitable depend-
ency of aesthetic beauty and physical cruelty or violence as does Véronique
Doisneau, nor does it stage a conflict between emancipatory discourses of
contemporary dance and their institutional betrayal as in Cédric Andrieux.
Lutz Förster, in his own words, appears as a subject that never doubts. Both
Doisneau and Andrieux made a moment of desubjugation the centre of
their solo, moving inbetween the old and a new “epistemological order” of
doing and knowing dance. They disidentified with the old, while only ten-
tatively formulating a possible more rewarding practice. The re-integration
of the subject for Véronique Doisneau remains on the horizon with Talon
dancing Giselle and her own almost private sketches of the role. Cédric
Andrieux catches a glimpse of it, exchanging gazes with the audience in
Bel’s The Show Must Go On. Lutz Förster, on the contrary, presents him-
self as an integrated subject from the very beginning. He is not a subject at
risk that risks itself in the performance. Instead, the performance allows him
to come into his own. Lutz Förster eliminates the difficulty of negotiation
between the subject as submission and the subject as production.
The piece is a beautiful autobiographical performance by and with Lutz
Förster, who shares the memories of his rich and exciting life as a dancer
on both sides of the Atlantic with his devoted audience. Thus, the func-
tion of the danced interventions that are part of the piece alters radi-
cally. In Véronique Doisneau and Céderic Andrieux, far from being mere
illustrations of language, the performative demonstrations of movement
sequences punctuated the dancers’ discourse. Their bodies made pain-
fully evident what their words could only describe. The verbal discourse
on dance and the physical practice of dance exceeded and reflected upon
each other, producing interferences between the two. In Lutz Förster the
excerpts from Pina Bausch’s pieces such as Kontakthof, 1980, Nelken,
Ahnen, For the Children of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow or José Limon’s
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  203

Fig. 4  Lutz Förster, Ode to a Chair © Anna von Kooij

The Moor’s Pavane are flashbacks into the protagonist’s past. Förster’s
dances are memories nostalgically accompanied by the original music,
which, in all cases, doubles the nostalgia or longing that they suggest in
their original production context. The piece is almost a meta-Pina Bausch
piece: a mémoire that works with memories of productions that are already
based on memories themselves.
204  G. Siegmund

With smooth transitions between speaking and dancing, operated by

the flick of a wrist that changes the position of the chair on stage, Förster
is able to blend the past almost seamlessly with the present. Dressed in
his three-piece pin-striped suit and white shirt, he is an elegant tall figure
that easily dances along the lines of his life, joining the dots between dif-
ferent times and spaces and bringing them together in the here and now
of the performance situation. Dancing and talking as if in a Pina Bausch
production, his life appears as a continuous stream of events whose chal-
lenges Förster mastered without too many bruises. There were, of course,
moments of crisis or radical change: in 1987, when he decided to leave
New York after three years of being part of the city’s avant-garde scene,
the death of his friend Axel, the spectre of the AIDS crisis, his disappoint-
ment with the state of affairs in Bausch’s company after his return, his
decision to leave again after only two years, and, in 2002, his reconcilia-
tion with Pina Bausch that culminated in a new production together. But
even these stories are blended into one continuous narrative that climaxes
in the very moment of performance. “In 2008, I received an email ask-
ing whether I would like to work with Jérôme Bel on a solo about my life
for the Spring Dance Festival in Utrecht,” he says at the very end of the
performance. “So here I am.” The final sentence brings his memories into
the present almost as if the current production were the telos or ultimate
goal of his life as an artist who, verging on 60, slowly draws to a close.
Lutz Förster is, indeed, a fascinating solo about Förster’s life. But it is
not a solo about the institution that is Tanztheater Wuppertal and its insti-
tutional practices and impasses that subjugate the dancers. While the other
solos were not primarily about the dancer’s lives but about their relation-
ship to the institutions they work in, Förster claims his solo to be about his
biography. As such, it can hardly be considered a realisation of Jérôme Bel’s
concept. After a series of performances that bore his name as author of the
concept, in 2011 Jérôme Bel handed over the piece entirely to Lutz Förster.
He withdrew his name, while the performance is still shown as Förster’s
solo performance under the name of Dance Stories by and with Lutz Förster.

Pichet Klunchun and Myself (2004): Post-colonial

Contact Zones
Bel’s demand to develop an ethical working relationship with the
dancers for their pieces alters the vector of the elements of a contem-
porary dance performance. It shifts power relations, changes responsi-
bilities, and enables its subjects to assume a subject position in the field
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  205

of dance. Consciously stepping back from dance as a visceral activity, it

replaces the work on energy with the work of reflection, the work on
the organic body with the work on the discursive production of the
body and the production of the sensuous with the production of the
intelligible. Instead of working on movement, Bel looks at movement
from the outside, observing its mechanisms and laying bare the rules
of the systems that produce movement. Bel’s project, as André Lepecki
has pointed out (2006), is foremost a project that works on theatre and
dance as systems of representation. Stepping back from the production
and ordering of movement, which would be the actual task of a chore-
ographer in a dance production, he observes their mechanisms of stag-
ing to point towards that which they must exclude. Positively speaking,
Bel’s work takes the theatre as theatre seriously. It does not abandon
theatre for other social practices, such as community work. As thea-
tre, or, as I have shown above, as a non-site, his pieces are always also
a theory of theatre or dance. While being a dance performance, pieces
like Jérôme Bel or Véronique Doisneau are at the same time also the con-
cept of a dance performance, which may, in the course of time, instan-
tiate various possible practices and sites. Theatre is the possibility of
possibilities.
On the other hand, engaging in a performative critique of specific
dance practices does not necessarily mean subverting these systems, or,
more generally, creating entirely new subjects. While Véronique Doisneau
and Cédric Andrieux literally de-place their subjects, they do not, however,
pre-empt the consequences their act of emancipation may have on their
own artistic trajectories. Conceptually, the politics of emancipation these
works aim at are still authored by Jérôme Bel. Doisneau and Andrieux
speak on their own behalf and in their own words, but they may only do
so once they have entered the discourse ‘Jérôme Bel,’ which facilitates
their speech. They do not only become subjects of their own dance, but
also the subjects of Bel’s discourse. They help to articulate Bel’s discourse
and its rules. Bel insists on an exchange at eye level between himself and
the respective dancers he works with, an exchange that inevitably includes
Bel in the equation, for instance, as someone who decides which mate-
rial to choose for inclusion in the performance. A dialogue or an exchange
always includes at least two parties whose power relations must be nego-
tiated. Cédric Andrieux, as Bel states, had more to say than what actu-
ally went into the piece, stories and movements that did not interest him
because, at the time, they seemed irrelevant to the topic of the piece (Bel
and Charmatz 2013, 171). Véronique Doisneau and Cédric Andrieux do
206  G. Siegmund

not operate outside power relations, which, if we take Foucault’s defini-

tion of power seriously, would be impossible in the first place. They do,
however, take Foucault’s proposition seriously that power depends on the
“originary freedom” of those whose actions are acted upon to resist.
While the emancipatory aspect of Bel’s solo pieces with Western danc-
ers is widely accepted, his duet with Pichet Klunchun, Pichet Klunchun
and Myself, meets with more resistance from scholars and audiences. For
what is at stake here are not only the power relations between chore-
ographer and dancer within Western dance companies, but the relation
between a Khôn-dancer from Thailand and a French avant-garde chore-
ographer under postcolonial conditions. In her astute analysis of Pichet
Klunchun and Myself, Susan Leigh Foster directly addresses this prob-
lem, making it the premise of her study. She remarks on the inequality
of the two dancers and choreographers with Klunchun being cast in the
inferior position. Since he appears in Bel’s representational frame that
remains unmarked, Klunchun’s traditional dance practice and its inher-
ent values cannot be taken on their own terms but appear naïve and old-
fashioned compared to Bel’s liberal Western approach to dance (Foster
2011, 201). In a similar vein SanSan Kwan admits that Bel is at least
avoiding some of the pitfalls of an intercultural artistic encounter, but is
nonetheless reproducing colonial structures. She bases her argument on
two observations. Despite the obvious fact that Pichet Klunchun speaks
for almost an hour on stage, she holds that the pronoun “myself” in the
title firmly establishes Bel as the speaker “and not Klunchun” (Kwan
2014, 189). She goes on to charge the piece with an imbalance in regard
to the way the two choreographers are allowed to speak about their artis-
tic practices. Whereas Klunchun is asked to “explain khôn as a form, Bel
is given the opportunity to describe his own work as a choreographer”
(Kwan 2014, 190). “Once again,” Kwan concludes, “a tired East-West
dichotomy emerges: the idea of the East as keeper of tradition and of
the West as site of individual artistic innovation” (ibid.). Yvonne Hardt
is more positive in her analysis of Bel’s staged dialogue. She understands
Bel and Klunchun’s conversation as an exploration of two artistic prac-
tices that she posits as “ethnographical sites.” The production thus high-
lights the respective codes and conventions of two dance systems that are
culturally specific rather than relying on the notion of a universal Western
dance (Hardt 2011, 27–42). Ramsay Burt, finally, reads the piece as an
exploration of sociability based on friendship between two artists trying
to establish a common that counters the loosening of social bonds in the
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  207

age of neo-liberalism. However, as Burt concludes, the piece does not

serve as a model for friendship, since it “turns out to be a short-term,
expedient, pure relationship” (Burt 2017, 155). But what if the piece
never was about friendship in the first place? What if Bel and Klunchun’s
dialogue was not about the personal as it articulates itself in the work
relationship of the piece? As Klunchun points out in his text on his col-
laboration with Bel, he and Bel communicate “through their common
bond of art. Although they have different ideals about art, art remains
their central topic” (Klunchun 2006). While I am partial to Yvonne
Hardt’s positive evaluation of the piece, I want to first take a look at the
piece as a work of art before returning to some of the points raised in the
discussion about Pichet Klunchun and Myself. My unease with some of
the arguments brought forward here may be explained by my different
understanding of the function and aims of art in relation to the political
sphere. What are the criteria for a true encounter between the dancers
under postcolonial conditions? What are these conditions, how are we to
deal with them, and above all, how do they translate into the context of a
theatre piece made for the stage?
I want to begin my discussion of Pichet Klunchun and Myself on more
positive terms pointing out instances were for me the piece succeeds. I
claim that the piece avoids both the pitfalls of exoticism and assimilation
inherent in colonial relations. Exotism is based on a fantasmatic projec-
tion of an image of the foreign culture that structures cultural representa-
tions. The Orient, as Edward Said (1979) points out, has been invented
by the Occident to ascertain its superior cultural, economic, and power
position. Exotism may include moments of appropriation of formal ele-
ments of that culture into a Western context without attention to their
history, meaning or cultural significance. Assimilation on the other hand
describes a movement of adaption of the colonized to the dominant,
colonial culture. As I hope to show, by avoiding all these tendencies,
Pichet Klunchun and Myself goes a long way to articulate a meeting of
traditions and cultures under contemporary post-colonial conditions.
In 2004, Jérôme Bel and Pichet Klunchun, who majored in Thai
Dance at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, met by mutual intro-
duction of the curator Tang Fu Kuen from Singapore. Bel was invited
to prepare a piece for the Bangkok Fringe Festival in December 2004
and, being unfamiliar with the local context, asked to work with a
Khôndancer. Neither did Bel know anything about traditional Thai
dance nor did Klunchun know anything about the work of Jérôme Bel
208  G. Siegmund

before they met. Given the circumstances of their meeting, they decided
not to develop a dance piece together, but to present the audience with
the real situation they were in at the time. Curious to find out more
about each other and their dance practices, Bel and Klunchun staged
their encounter as a dialogue or an interview between Pichet Klunchun
and Jérôme Bel. While the performance tries to keep up the impression
of a spontaneous question and answer session, both Bel and Klunchun
know the answers they will give in advance.
Several recordings of the piece exist that have been made at different
times of its performance history. These films differ not only in length,
but also in the performance attitude of Bel and Klunchun. An early
recording from June 2006 for the programme “Novel Dance” in Taipei,
Taiwan, reveals more of Bel and Klunchun’s emotional involvement in
their encounter. The question and answer sessions seem less scripted.
Interruptions and comments are frequent, because what was said was
only half understood, thus provoking further inquiries and making the
dialogue livelier. Carefully trying to establish a trust between themselves
at this early stage, they are still cagey about their own dance practices
and what the other may think of them. Bel often displays an ironic dis-
tance with expressions of disbelief commenting on what Klunchun says,
while Klunchun counters Bel’s incredulity with a dry humour that puts
Bel in his place. What appeared to be a spontaneous joke in 2006 had
been carefully integrated into the script by 2011. In Aldo Lee’s film of a
performance at Kaaitheater in Brussels, Belgium, the dialogue has been
smoothed out and the performers’ attitudes reflect Bel’s cherished neu-
trality in relation to the content. Klunchun and Bel ask the audience to
follow their thoughts rather than lock into any emotional subtext that
speaks of their intercultural encounter and its anxieties. Pichet Klunchun
and Myself is, by March 2011, as carefully scripted and staged as are all of
Bel’s other performances.
After its premiere in Bangkok in December 2004, the piece was first
shown in Europe in May 2005 at the KunstenFestivaldesArts in Brussels,
Belgium. There, Bel and Klunchun were sitting on the floor and, in the
course of the performance, moved around in an open space situation
with the audience facing the performers from one side. The informal
spatial arrangement, however, clashed with what soon became clear was
a scripted performance piece. Thus, for many of the later performances
two chairs were introduced to formalise the setting and to explicitly mark
the encounter as staged and rehearsed. Their conversation is more formal
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  209

than a spontaneous conversation, yet lively enough to communicate their

dedication to find out about each other. The set up of the piece consists of
two chairs facing each other with Bel and Klunchun entering the stage and
taking their seats. Klunchun, barefoot, is dressed in a pair of black pants
and t-shirt—he always wears black as he confesses—while Bel, who claims
to never wear black, sports a colourful shirt or sweater, jeans, and a pair of
sneakers. In the first section of the piece, which in its entirety lasts about
100−120 minutes, Bel interviews Klunchun, while half way through the
tables are turned and Klunchun assumes the role of the interviewer.
Their respective sessions progress, as Susan Leigh Foster observes,
methodically from talking about personal background and training, the
meaning of their approaches to dance in their cultural contexts, to explana-
tions and danced demonstrations of their respective work and questions of
how meaning is produced (2011, 197). The two parts are almost symmet-
rical in form and content. Both Klunchun and Bel, for instance, perform
three different representations of death from their repertoire. Given our
contemporary media context, the form of a public interview immediately
reminds the spectator of popular television formats dedicated to making
their subjects confess to exploit emotions and increase the TV station’s mar-
ket value. However, in Pichet Klunchun and Myself the audience learns very
little about the dancers’ personal biographies, let alone their fears, anxie-
ties, and desires. What comes perhaps closest to a kind of confession is Bel’s
statement that he is the father of a daughter, but is not married, whereas
Klunchun explains that in Asia it is important, above all for women, to be
married before they give birth to a child, which Bel considers old-fashioned.
The biographical details in the text are updated to match the performers’
situation at the time of performance. Whereas in 2006 Klunchun says that
he is not married yet, in 2011 he tells us that he is married. This personal
detail highlights different cultural values, but it remains, if not entirely
uncommented upon, a piece of information rather than becoming a site
for contestation or emotional exploitation. Since they communicate on the
topic of art, personal detail merely provides background information.
As with the confrontational arrangement of the chairs, the piece sets
out to build up a series of oppositions only to slyly undermine them as
the conversation progresses. Klunchun and Bel discover and negoti-
ate grounds for understanding each other, cultural differences notwith-
standing. Again, as with The Show Must Go On discussed in the previous
chapter, Bel uses the theatre as a space for negotitations that engages
­
all parties involved in the playful search for a common ground despite
210  G. Siegmund

cultural and structural differences. They stage discourses on each other

that are informed by cultural stereotypes, rumours, and knowledge.
Although it is Bel’s piece (that is why he uses the pronoun “myself” in
the title), the symmetry of the two interviews denotes their equality as
conversation partners. After having introduced himself, Klunchun goes
on to explain the origins of the Khôn dance under King Rama II more
than 200 years ago. Khôn, whose stories are taken from the Ramayana
epic and always include the character of the king, is always performed in
front of the king, and King Rama VI was such a good dancer that he him-
self danced in the Khôn performance, which that lasts for a week. After
the revolution, the new government prohibited the Khôn dance, trying
to bring the country closer to Western standards. Today, as Klunchun
bemoans, it has become an attraction for tourists to accompany their din-
ner. Bel counters this narration by explaining about the democratic ideal
of his dance practice that originates in a country that beheaded its king
and his whole family more than 200 years ago. It is about, as he says, the
things the people share. He aims at an equal relation between the dancers
themselves and between the dancers and their audience, questioning their
expectations about dance and offering them something new and fresh
to engage in. That is why he also includes different types of dance such
as disco dancing into his work. Bel casts his work as a resistance to Guy
Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, with which he considers contemporary
Western dance with its focus on virtuosity to be complicit.
After having talked about the history of Khôn, Klunchun goes on
to first demonstrate two basic exercises before explaining about the
four characters of the dance—male, female, demon, and monkey, with
his part being the demon—demonstrating their movements and defin-
ing their characters by a set of relations between eye and hand, feet and
legs. At Bel’s request he explains the role of the storyteller as being the
voice to the dancer’s body. Reluctant at first to do so because it brings
bad luck, Klunchun then demonstrates three ways in which death may
be represented in Khôn: the killed person goes off stage, the family walks
slowly as in a procession to indicate mourning, and, for the widow of
the deceased, to weep sitting on a chair with her face averted to avoid
showing her tears. Bel is less hesitant to demonstrate representations of
death from his work. Later on, towards the end of the piece, when the
question again turns to death and its representations on stage, Bel dem-
onstrates what he calls the first death scene he choreographed. Referring
to his first piece, Nom donné par l’auteur, he simply drops a few objects
on the floor and lies next to them. He then goes on to show Pichet
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  211

Klunchun and the audience the dying scene from The Show Must Go On,
sinking down to the floor to while Killing Me Softly With His Song5 plays.
Bel finally asks Klunchun to teach him some Khôn movements (Fig. 5).
Preferring the female character to the demon, Bel goes on to follow
Klunchun’s instructions and to faithfully copy his movements to the best
of his abilities: the extreme curvature of hands and fingers, the left hand in
relation to the left corner of the eye, the complex shifts in balance. Before
finishing his round, Klunchun demonstrates some of his own movements
based on Khôn. His own artistic project, he says, is to work with traditional
Khôn dance and to develop his own movements from it. In his demon-
stration he keeps the basic principles of the traditional dance, such as the
circle of energy around the body that keeps the energy in the system rather
than wasting it as in Western dance and the two-dimensionality of the body
that goes back to imitating the shadow puppets of the origin of Khôn,
and works with them, straightening his body and limbs, thereby chang-
ing weight distribution and balance all the time, using a different, less con-
trolled type of energy more akin to Western forms of energy expenditure.

Fig. 5  Pichet Klunchun and Myself, Teaching Khôn © association R.B.

212  G. Siegmund

The last scene of the performance once more puts into relief aspects
of the discourses that shape our perception of what a dance practice is.
Pichet Klunchun and Myself highlights that discourse also works with ste-
reotypes and rumours that forge the reality of the dance and the culture
it belongs to. Pichet Klunchun has heard a rumour that Bel’s dancers
are naked in his performances, probably a sign of contemporaneity in the
West. Performing a scene from Jérôme Bel kneading the skin of his stom-
ach, Bel finally wants to take off his trousers to demonstrate nudity, but
Klunchun stops him in the name of his culture’s standards of decency.
Referring to the nudity in many strip bars in Bangkok and elsewhere in
Thailand, Bel implies the stereotype that Thai people have no problems
with nudity. Klunchun replies that sex shows cater only for a tourist mar-
ket. With this suggestion the performance ends.
This is not the place to discuss the myriad and complex intercultural
relations of either Western dance or theatre with non-European or non-
Western forms of dance or theatre since the nineteenth century, when
capitalist forms of production, the development of global markets, and
means of travel increased the visibility of the culturally alien in Western
countries and vice versa.6 What I want to suggest, however, is the follow-
ing: The decision not to prepare a piece that fuses Khôn with Western
avant-garde practices, that develops and shares vocabularies drawn
from diverse backgrounds, but to stage their encounter as a perfor-
mance instead enables Bel and Klunchun, as Kwan admits, to avoid at
least some of the pitfalls inherent in any kind of intercultural dialogue
(Kwan 2014, 195). The dialogue provides a distancing frame that allows
for the contextualisation of both Khôn and Western avant-garde prac-
tices by the respective practitioners themselves, thereby resisting simple
appropriation. Both Klunchun and Bel do not engage in the fantasy of
a multicultural dance that assimilates local practices into a globalised
style that Ramsay Burt calls “a generic contemporary dance style” (Burt
2017, 153). The generation of theatre practitioners including Richard
Schechner, Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, and Eugenio Barba that
came into prominence in the 1960s and 1970s after extensive travels to
African and Asian countries appropriated and incorporated foreign ritu-
als, acting, and movement styles into their own theatre productions.7
They could do so because, in keeping with the structural anthropology
of the 1960s, they considered different cultural practices as structurally
equivalent and equal to their own (Osborne 2013, 163). To heighten
the efficacy of performance in relation to their audiences, to invigorate
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  213

communal and social bonds, sometimes in conjunction with the coun-

ter cultural movements of their time, their productions could not help
but convey aspects of exoticism that fascinated Western artists from the
Ballet Russes to Pablo Picasso in the heyday of modernism.8 By simply
talking about their biographies as dancers using movement only to dem-
onstrate certain points, Klunchun and Bel communicate that a rapport
between the cultures is not simply given by a cross-cultural humanism
based on naturalised identities and expressed in a homogenised dance
style but has to be negotiated including moments of disbelief, misunder-
standing, provocation, rejection, and surprise. Like Véronique Doisneau
and Cédric Andrieux, Pichet Klunchun is part of Jérôme Bel’s discourse.
They all appear within the frame of Bel’s proposition about dance. To
accept and go through that frame, which continues to exist especially in
a staged theatre or dance piece, however, denaturalises their position,
allowing them to speak about the structure that subjectivates them. It is
not the denial of the (colonial) frame and, as a consequence, the denial
of Jérôme Bel’s implication as a Western choreographer within that
frame, that holds emancipatory potential, but its conscious doubling that
produces an opening. Simply giving Klunchun the opportunity to per-
form one of his own choreographies without Bel’s framing would not
abolish the framing inherent in any kind of cultural operation. To the
contrary: Klunchun’s performance would meet with the same fate as the
traditional Thai dances that are now performed in front of tourists as
dinner entertainment, which Klunchun talks about in Pichet Klunchun
and Myself. His performance could not help but be conceived of as
exotic in front of a Western audience cast in the role of cultural tourists.
Klunchun resists assimilation to Western dance forms by sticking to the
traditional (and for many of his Asian contemporaries, outdated) form of
Khôn to bring it into the present. As he tells Bel and the audience, the
tradition of Khôn was officially suspended under the first democratic gov-
ernment in Thailand, when it was forbidden to dance Khôn, but dancers
were told to practice ballroom dancing instead to bring the country and
its art up to so-called Western standards. Instead of dancing in a Western
contemporary style, which, as he tells us, he learned and practiced all
over the world, he consciously chose to return to Khôn as the form of
dance that his body understands best. Going back to Khôn as a form of
dance and to develop its principles further, therefore, is an act of resist-
ance in the context of Thai dance culture just as Bel’s own practice resists
Western understandings of dance. The piece itself provides an explanation
214  G. Siegmund

as to why Klunchun talks about Khôn as a form, because Khôn provides

the basis for his own dance practice. It is a conscious artistic choice of
the artist himself, an act of resistance, rather than a Western projec-
tion. Bel for his part resists appropriating Klunchun and refrains from
using Khôn vocabulary for one of his own pieces as if these movements
belonged to him. Although it is evident Pichet Klunchun enters the dis-
course of Jérôme Bel that frames their chance meeting, on the level of
representation both share the same ground, with Bel talking about some
of the implications of his own dance practice. Both are dancers and cho-
reographers from different cultural backgrounds that meet at eye level.
Klunchun tauntingly challenges Bel’s seemingly superior position as an
artist from the West at the very beginning of his interview section, put-
ting Bel’s ego into perspective. “I know your name already,” he says. “It
is a famous name, Jérôme Bel.” “Really?” Bel responds. “Yes,” Klunchun
confirms. “In Bangkok?” Bel wonders as Klunchun, hurting Bel’s pride
by replying: “No. In the West.” Bel’s discourse may therefore frame the
performance, but it is also part of the game where it is confronted with
another view on dance from another part of the world. Thus, the frame
enters the performance itself, where it may be discussed and opened up.
Bel therefore does not appear unmarked and outside representation, but
as part of the performance itself. His position is as marked and debatable
as Klunchun’s, and debating is precisely what they do. Neither of them
speaks the ‘truth’ about dance, but presents their own culturally informed
or misinformed views on dance, which cannot be anything else but partial.
What all this leads up to is to say that neither Bel nor Klunchun nor
the audiences attending their performance are the self-identical subjects
that Susan Leigh Foster seems to imply in her critique. This was admit-
tedly more visible in the earlier days of the performance history of the
piece with Bel’s and Klunchun’s subject positions and identities being
put at greater risk by their mutual encounter. But what remains clear
throughout the performance is that Klunchun’s subjectivity is already
hybrid because of his various engagements with Western dance forms.
And although he has not engaged in Asian or Thai dance practices pre-
viously, Bel’s subjectivity can also be said to be hybrid on the level of
his status as an international artist showing his work around the world,
being in constant contact with different cultures and their demands on
him. As with the Bangkok Fringe Festival they, too, pay for his per-
formances. Foster suggests that Bel’s practice in a Western context is
an accepted avant-garde practice that affirms its brilliance in front of
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  215

theatre audiences by slighting Klunchun’s practice, thus reaffirming old

colonial hierarchies (Foster 2011, 197). It also suggests that Klunchun
is, simply because he comes from a non-Western country, in the posi-
tion of a victim, “the self-proximate, if not self-identical, subject of
the oppressed,” to quote Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s phrase (Spivak
1988, 279). The assumption that the self-identical oppressed may speak
“on his own terms” without being implicated in (colonial) relation of
power, for Spivak comes close to “the clandestine restoration of subjec-
tive essentialism” she charges some poststructuralist theories with (ibid.).
Klunchun, on the other hand, very clearly speaks for himself—both as a
marginalised voice in Thailand where only two people come to see his
performance, as he ironically states at one point during the show, and as
a more prominent voice in Pichet Klunchun and Myself. But everything
he says and explains about his dance practice is always already inscribed
in our contemporary intercultural and post-colonial condition chal-
lenging whatever his own terms might be. The same holds for Jérôme
Bel producing a piece in Thailand and speaking about his artistic prac-
tice in the presence of Klunchun. As for Klunchun, for Bel too there is
no outside of the colonial situation.Therefore, the supposition that the
audience, by dint of their identity as a Western audience, inevitably side
with Bel and his view on dance rather than appreciating and develop-
ing an interest in Klunchun’s point of view and expertise as a dancer,
again presupposes a self-identical Western subject. Bel’s slacker position
is surely not what many dance audiences want to see. Bel’s position as a
choreographer in Europe is, as was pointed out in the Introduction, not
uncontested, although after more than twenty years of work he surely is
recognised as one of its most prominent voices. As Kwan admits almost
against herself, “[all] encounters between East and West are inescapably
stained by the structures of Orientalism. (…) The piece cannot level out
that which is not even” (Kwan 2014, 195). Pichet Klunchun and Myself
may not level out the inequalities, but it may expose them and reflect
them in the piece. The piece does so by including Jérôme Bel’s position
in the performance itself. Moving himself from the outside as author-
choreographer of the pieces’ discourse to the inside on the level of its
representation, his discursive position enters into play and is now open
for questioning, deabte, and criticism. The shift from outside (discourse)
to inside (representation) is also marked by the pronoun “myself” in
the title. While Bel’s author-function was reflected in most of his earlier
pieces, too, and most prominently so in the role of the DJ in The Show
216  G. Siegmund

Must Go On, Pichet Klunchun and Myself is the first piece from Bel’s
oeuvre that addresses the artist Jérôme Bel in person. Bel represents him-
self and his own artistic practice: There are no more stand-ins.
Perhaps these ambiguities tell us something about the post-colonial
situation within which the piece is situated. Ananya Chatterjea in her
essay on the cultural value of mistranslations in contemporary choreog-
raphy in relation to Pichet Klunchun and Myself, too, questions the use
of trying to reset the balance between the coloniser and the colonised
from one side only. She writes: “But, as we reckon with the implica-
tions of the global, can we continue to insist on re-mappings in our own
terms?” (Chatterjea 2013, 17). The implications of the global seem to
change the field of operation where other strategies of “non-alignment/
mis-translation/contamination” will produce productive frictions and
tensions without consolidating “into any one particular understand-
ing” (Chatterjea 2013, 19). The post-colonial in the days of a globalised
art market, as Peter Osborne suggests (Osborne 2013, 164), does not
rely any more on the model of centre and periphery, with the periph-
ery being grafted onto the centre for reasons of appropriation, assimila-
tion, and exotic pleasure. Such a view is supported by the fact that Pichet
Klunchun and Myself was commissioned by the Bangkok Fringe Festival;
that is, by what in colonial terms would be considered the periphery,
although Thailand was never a colony, but which here acts as a cen-
tre able to produce work from all over the world. Everywhere where
organisations host art bienniales, or we could add, theatre and dance
festivals, is a centre, regardless of the geopolitical and cultural position
of the country. I want to see Pichet Klunchun and Myself in this con-
text. It is a “transnational” production that, as the festival that com-
missioned it represents a “zone of contact” between different nations,
cultures, traditions, and artists. As Osborne continues, arguing for a new
type of anthropology under new global conditions: “In this anthropo-
logical sense, contact is a site of risk, at which the stakes and meaning of
exchange are uncertain” (ibid.). The inequality in accessing the market
becomes smaller by the minute, as dance festivals commission, produce,
and stage work from all over the globe. To look for Pichet Klunchum’s
“own terms” (Foster 2011, 203) under such conditions seems
almost impossible. Looking for “one’s own terms” in this context can-
not help but express nostalgia for an unmediated encounter that our cur-
rent globalised conditions of production and recepetion does not exist.
Instead the task would be to enter Osborne’s “zone of contact” and to
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  217

work through the multiple framings and expectations together with the
beliefs and disbeliefs, prejudices, and misunderstandings they engender
without exactly knowing what the benefit of such an encounter will be.
Commissioned by the Bangkok Fringe Festival, which functions as a
zone of contact between artists and cultures, Pichet Klunchun and Myself
envisions the stage as the representation of this zone of contact, mak-
ing the establishment of contact its very topic. Klunchun and Bel are
constantly engaged in framing and cross-framing each other’s dance
practices, their histories, and the details of their execution. Klunchun
interprets Bel’s standing still through the frame of Buddhism, whereas
Bel detects some of ballet’s monarchic history in the history of Khôn.
Bel confronts Klunchun with his tourist-guide book knowledge of Khôn,
whereas Klunchun appeals to his country’s architecture to explain Khôn
principles. Bel uses his Christian background with its spatial code (earth-
below-death vs. heaven-above-life as the two main signifying chains) as
an interpretative frame to read Susanne Linke’s Wandlung from The Last
Performance, positing the dancing body in the piece inbetween life and
death. Klunchun is reminded of his mother dying while watching Bel’s
demonstration of Killing Me Softly with His Song from The Show Must Go
On. He sees it as an exact representation of the various stages of dying
with life slowly leaving the body and thereby altering its appearance.
Bel suggests that Klunchun is able to read the scene because it speaks
of a transcultural experience. During these exchanges, their frames of
understanding, misunderstanding, reading, and misreading are explicitly
stated, while also challenging one another. Acknowledging the here and
now of the performance situation by standing still on stage as Bel does
surely means something other than the quiet acceptance of existence in
the Buddhist tradition. Yet the frame of Buddhism allows Klunchun to
read the scene and make sense of it despite Bel’s intentions. The piece
makes apparent that all the performers know and can know stems from
their respective cultural backgrounds that support and facilitate their
respective dance practices.
Perhaps in the current context of post-colonialism it is not insignifi-
cant to note that their conversation is conducted in the English lan-
guage, which is neither Klunchun nor Bel’s mother tongue. Since
they only speak the language imperfectly, groping for words and the
right expression, they produce further misunderstandings that need to
be cleared up. Speaking in English also points to the fact that neither
of them represents themselves on their own ground and on their own
218  G. Siegmund

terms, which need to be negotiated through a foreign language. Being

the new lingua franca in the dance and performance scene around the
globe, English, rather than providing a neutral ground for exchange and
communication, makes its own demands on the artists and the way they
may represent and thus frame their work. The brokenness of their verbal
exchange reflects and refracts further the current state of affairs in the
globalised art world.
Working through multiple discursive framings as in Pichet Klunchun
and Myself is one way of dealing with issues of intercultural encounters in
a post-colonial situation. About Khôn, a performance by Pichet Klunchun
from 2008, is another. In this performance, which is authored solely by
Klunchun, Jérôme Bel interviews Klunchun about his dance practice
without confronting it with his own. His questions are more detailed,
focusing, as Foster reports, on the ways Khôn “represents events and
builds poetic imagery and also on its underlying principles for organiz-
ing the body into positions that make possible a recycling of energy out
into the limbs and then back into the center of the body” (2011, 206).
What goes unmarked in this performance, however, is exactly the post-
colonial situation in which the performance takes place and is able to gar-
ner interest in the first place. It eliminates the agon of the encounter by
placing Bel in the role of a modest interviewer, which belies the obvious
fact that on stage Klunchun’s ‘own terms’ are established by Bel’s ques-
tions. Indeed, Bel here functions as a facilitator of Klunchun’s agency.
This may, however, only be achieved at the cost of disguising his own
implication in the post-colonial scene as benevolent and enabling.
Susan Leigh Foster, like SanSan Kwan, long for good representa-
tions of an intercultural encounter that would be free of the pitfalls of
Orientalism. This longing implies that the critic knows what a “good
model of interculturalism” would look like and, what is more impor-
tant, how to implement it, thereby assuming a position of power over
the piece and its strategies of what is perceived to be an inadequate rep-
resentation, an attitude that ultimately just mirrors the colonial attitude
in regard to the work of art. But Pichet Klunchun and Myself resists this
colonising attitude from the side of the critic by talking back. In the
amazing second part of her essay, the ambiguities of the piece and the
questions it raised throw SanSan Kwan into doubt. The author begins
to question her own argument. Dissatisfied with her conclusion that the
piece does not “shed the weight of orientalism” (Kwan 2014, 194), she
goes on ask:
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  219

Is Bel’s work just one more example of an artist with good intentions who
yet again falls into the trap of exploiting the East for his own purposes? If
this is so, then what? Aren’t we a bit tired of wagging our finger at “bad”
intercultural appropriations? What would a “good” one even look like?
Hasn’t Bhabha shown us that everything is always already hybrid anyway?
Is this conversation done with, then? Do we just accept that intercultur-
alism is? If not, then what does Pichet Klunchun and Myself help us to
understand? (Kwan 2014, 194)

Rather than being a good representation of intercultural relations, the

piece denies any such claims to know. It refuses to grant the spectator
a glimpse of an ideal world already realised in the work of art, which
would ultimately only gloss over existing social and material inequalities
and struggles. I value the uncertainty and the contradictions the piece
produces as being a more productive way of art or dance to engage
with the social. Pichet Klunchun and Myself opens a dialogue. As dance
scholar Keith Hennessey has emphasised in his response to Kwan’s
“conundrum,” as she calls her position, the piece is Bel’s most widely
toured piece and it has “generated numerous responses” from audi-
ences around the world. It has, as Bel himself claims, generated dis-
course that Hennessey values as “generative of a continuing process of
engagement with the issues the piece raises” (cited in Kwan 2014, 194).
A continuing engagement with the issues raised can only happen if our
value judgments are questioned, our truths and believes suspended, and
we are willing to approach the piece from a different angle rather than
being confirmed by what appears to be the right way to do it. Pichet
Klunchun and Myself is a contribution to a debate and does not close it.
By doing so, it is a risky performance. It is a performance that puts its
claim to form and, by implication, perfection, at stake again by dissolv-
ing and contradicting it. It risks its own undoing by potentially failing
to etablish a conversation based on an equal exchange of positions. As
I have pointed out in relation to critical subjects, the structure of the
piece turns in on itself: Bel re-appears on the level of representation,
which next to Klunchun’s makes his artistic position a topic to be dis-
cussed. Rather than closing the piece off from further debates, this move
facilitates them. In his third cycle of work from 2010 to the present day,
Jérôme Bel explores these subjects at risk in a number of fragile pieces
that work against their own form of articulation. This will be the topic
of the next chapter. By discussing these pieces, I offer a model of art’s
220  G. Siegmund

engagement with the social and political that differs from the predomi-
nant Anglo-American model of an engagement with differences. The
model looks for equality on another conceptual level that precedes the
production of difference.

Notes
1. It is interesting to note that choreographer Xavier Le Roy around the same
time in his project eponymously titled Project tried to base the working
process of a group of 19 dancers and non-dancers on democratic princi-
ples of decision taking. The project started in 1998 with a workshop that
was continued over the years until in 2003 it was finally staged as a per-
formance. Le Roy’s approach to working with a large group of dancers
can be considered the exact opposite of Bel’s. While Bel conceives of the
work process as a relying on the choreographer’s orders, Le Roy aimed at
a democratic process of decision taking in which everyone was involved.
Approaches to material, entire scenes, or occurring problems were dis-
cussed aiming at a performance based on decisions taken unanimously by
the entire group (Siegmund 2006, 394–401).
2. All quotations from the pieces discussed in this chapter are my own
translations based on the texts used in the video recordings of the
performances.
3. In his reading of Althusser, Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar draws our
attention to the fact that, psychoanalytically, the act of hailing will never
produce a purely submissive subject. Since the voice of the caller inevitably
produces a second voice or a surplus that Lacan calls the object a of the
voice, the act of interpellation and subjugation is a risky affair. Since the
voice is never univocal interpellation can only succeed if the person who is
hailed heeds this second voice, too. It will fail if the individual that turns
desires to hear a different voice: the voice that he or she has heard before,
but has irretrievably lost. Ultimately, the fact that this voice may never be
heard, the voice of fantasy, is precisely the locus of resistance to the call of
authority (Dolar 2006, 124).
4. For German theatre scholar Helga Finter whose analysis of theatricality is
close to that of Roland Barthes, theatre creates what she calls a “subjective
space” in which the process of subjectivation is re-openend. Theatre holds
the possibility to stage the sensual registers of seeing, hearing, and sensing
in a non-habitual and non-normative way. By separating seeing from hear-
ing, the subject may invest its signifiers with desire that produces his or her
own imaginary (Finter 2014a, b).
5. For an overview of the faultlines and positions see Patrice Pavis (1996).
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  221

6. During the early period of the piece’s long run in 2005 and 2006 Bel also
demonstrated his work on Susanne Linke’s solo from The Last Performance
talking about the way Linke’s choreography depicted the dancer’s situation
between life and death. The scene was dropped from later performances.
In Aldo Lee’s film from 2011 the scene is absent.
7. One of the most prominent examples is Richard Schechner’s inclusion of
the birth ritual Asmat, a West Indian tribal practice of welcoming someone
into a group, in his production of Dionysos in 69. Schechner freely admits
that he copied the ritual from a book (Schechner and Pavis 1996, 43).
8. When in 1985 British Theatre director Peter Brook staged the Indian
epos Mahabharata, his production met with fierce opposition from the-
atre scholars and directors like Rustom Bharucha who accused Brook of
neo-colonialism (Bharucha in Williams 1992). As Clive Barker sums up the
argument, “Brook plundered the Indian cultural treasury with little or no
respect for any significance or values that the Mahabharata or the Indian
Theatre, might have beyond the utility he might wish to put it to” (Barker
1996, 252).

References
Barker, Clive. 1996. The Possibilities and Politics of Intercultural Penetration
and Exchange. In The Intercultural Performance Studies Reader, ed. Patrice
Pavis, 247–256. London: Routledge.
Bauer, Una. 2008. Jérôme Bel. An Interview. Performance Research 13 (1):
42–48.
Bel, Jérôme. Cedric Andrieux. No credits.
Bel, Jérôme. 2004. Véronique Doisneau. Directed by Jérôme Bel at Pierre
Dupouey. Opéra National de Paris Telemondis, France 2, and Mezzo.
Bel, Jérôme. 2006. Pichet Klunchun and Myself. Taipeh, Taiwan: Novel Dance.
Bel, Jérôme. 2007. Email conversation with Gerald Siegmund. May, Frankfurt.
Bel, Jérôme. 2009. Lutz Förster. Directed by Andrea Keiz. Berlin: Mime
Centrum.
Bel, Jérôme. 2011. Pichet Klunchun and Myself. Directed by Aldo Lee and
Jérôme Bel. Brussels: Kaaitheater.
Bel, Jérôme, and Boris Charmatz. 2013. Emails 2009–2010. Dijon: Les presses
du réel.
Burt, Ramsay. 2017. Ungoverning Dance. Contemporary European Theatre Dance
and the Commons. New York: Oxford University Press.
Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
222  G. Siegmund

Butler, Judith. 2004. What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue. In The

Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sara Salih with Judith Butler, 302–322. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Chatterjea, Ananya. 2013. On the Value of Mistranslations and Contaminations:
The Category of “Contemporary Choreography“ in Asian Dance. DRJ:
Dance Research Journal 41 (1): 7–21.
Dean, Tim. 2000. Beyond Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dickinson, Peter. 2014. Cédric Andrieux: With Bel, Benjamin, and Brecht in
Vancouver. TDR: The Drama Review 58 (Fall): 162–169.
Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Finter, Helga. 2014a. Das Kameraauge des Postmodernen Theaters. In Die souf-
flierte Stimme: Text, Theater, Medien, 47–66. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang.
Finter, Helga. 2014b. Zur Dioptrik von Text, Bühne und Zuschauer. In Die
soufflierte Stimme: Text, Theater, Medien, 221–230. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter
Lang.
Foster, Susan Leigh. 2011. Choreographing Empathy. Kinesthesia in Performance.
London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. What is an Author? In Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry
Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, 113–138. Ithaca, NY.: Cornell University
Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1997. What is Enlightenment? In Ethics. The Essential Works 1,
ed. Paul Rabinow, 303–319. London: Alan Lane and The Penguin Press.
Foucault, Michel. 2000. The Subject and Power. In Power: The Essential Works 3,
ed. James D. Faubion, 326–348. New York: The New Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 2001. Instincts and their Vicissitudes. In The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV (1914–1916),
trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud, 109–140. London: Vintage the
Hogarth Press.
Hardt, Yvonne. 2011. Staging the Ethnographic of Dance History:
Contemporary Dance and Its Play with Tradition. DRJ: Dance Research
Journal 43 (1): 27–42.
Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture. The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.
Kristeva, Julia. 1998. Das Theater der Psyche. In Grenzgänge. Das Theater und
die anderen Künste, ed. Grabriele Brandstetter, Helga Finter, and Markus
Weßendorf, 23–30. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
Kwan, SanSan. 2014. Even As We Keep Trying: An Ethics of Interculturalism in
Jérôme Bel’s Pichet Klunchun and Myself. Theatre Survey 55 (2): 185–201.
Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. 1988. The Language of
Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Press.
Lepecki, André. 2006. Exhausting Dance. Performance and the Politics of
Movement. London: Routledge.
 CRITICAL SUBJECTS  223

Lepecki, André. 2007. Choreography as Apparatus of Capture. TDR: The

Drama Review 51: 119–123.
Melly, George. 1972. Revolt into Style: Pop Arts in Britain. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Osborne, Peter. 2013. Anywhere or Not at All. Philosophy of Contemporary Art.
London: Verso.
Pavis, Patrice (ed.). 1996. The Intercultural Performance Reader. London:
Routledge.
Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Schechner, Richard and Pavis, Patrice. 1996. Interculturalism and the Culture of
Choice. In The Intercultural Performance Reader, ed. Partrice Pavis, 41–50.
London: Routledge.
Siegmund, Gerald. 2006. Abwesenheit. Eine performative Ästhetik des Tanzes.
Bielefeld: Transcript Verlg.
Siegmund, Gerald. 2012a. Cédric Andrieux von Jérôme Bel. Choreographische
Strategien der Subjektwerdung. In Theater und Subjektkonstitution. Theatrale
Praktiken zwischen Affirmation und Subversion, ed. Friedemann Kreuder,
Michael Bachmann, Julia Pfahl, and Dorothea Volz, 41–54. Bielefeld:
Transcript.
Siegmund, Gerald. 2012b. Negotiating Choreography, Letter, and Law in
William Forsythe. In New German Dance Studies, eds. Susan Manning and
Lucia Ruprecht, 200–216. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson, and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–
313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Williams, David (ed.). 1992. Peter Brook and the Mahabharata. Critical
Perspectives. London: Routledge.

Internet Sources
Bishop, Claire. 2009. Deskilling Dance. http://www.jeromebel.fr/textsandinter-
views/detail/?textInter=miscellaneous%20-%20claire%20bishop. Accessed 13
Oct 2016.
Klunchun, Pichet. 2006. Pichet Klunchun and Myself. http://www.jerome-
bel.fr/textesEtEntretiens/detail?textInter=pichet%20klunchun%20and%20
myself%20-%20pichet%20klunchun. Accessed 13 Oct 2016.
 Subjects at Risk

Risking the Performance: From Solo to Group Work

Jérôme Bel’s preoccupation with the role of the spectator goes back to
the very first cycle of his work from 1994 to 2004. In his first seven
pieces the spectator was cast in the role of reader. Most prominently in
The Last Performance, the audience is actually acknowledged as the pro-
ducers of the work, bringing it about with their active involvement in
filling in the gaps of the presentation with their knowledge as the perfor-
mance goes on. While some of their names are called up over the sound
system of the theatre, which had their names ringing in the emptiness
of the stage, the actual audiences, however, remained firmly seated on
their side of the theatrical divide. In his most recent productions, Bel
goes one step further. The equality between stage and auditorium that
was at stake in The Show Must Go On with its score of well-known pop
songs evoking a culture audiences and performers share, takes on a more
concrete form when spectators are actually allowed to perform them-
selves. A move like this effects another change in the parameters of the
dispositif of theatre, redefining what a performer is and what we expect
of them today at the beginning of the twenty-first century in a changed
cultural environment.
Bel’s performances are reflections of what sociologists call a new
kind of “ecology” of the theatre. As the age of print and book culture
that spawned the humanist revolution of the Renaissance is gradually
drawing to a close to make room for the digital revolution of the late

© The Author(s) 2017 225

G. Siegmund, Jérôme Bel, New World Choreographies,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55272-3_6
226  G. Siegmund

twentieth century, cultures of knowledge are replaced by cultures of

access (Rifkin 2001). As a consequence, social organisations, cultures,
and communities no longer validate their practices and knowledge by
referring to the next higher level of cultural organisation, thus working
in and consolidating hierarchies of expertise and authority. Instead, as
German sociologist Dirk Baecker argues, contemporary cultures refer to
neighbouring systems operating in the same horizontal plane as them-
selves. What once was the result of education, background, study, and
work resulting in a gradual increase in expertise of subjects, in contem-
porary digital cultures knowledge is equally distributed amongst co-
existing systems ready to be accessed by potentially everybody. Such a
horizontal operation includes all kinds of neighbouring agents from
objects to animals that are of equal value and possess equal agency within
a system. (Baecker 2007, 9). The many, or the multiude, replaces the
individual and its claims for sovereignity.1 The ideological implications
of this claim notwithstanding, this does not disclaim the modality of the
social operation it describes. Nowadays everybody can be an expert, as
youtube culture and blogging demonstrate. The truth of the knowledge
disseminated in clips and blogs does not depend on its validation by pro-
fessional experts, but on the sheer quantity of clicks.
While Bel’s recent pieces follow on from the proposition made in
Shirtology and The Show Must On to use the stage for all kinds of dancing
and not just for legitimate forms of concert dance like ballet, modern,
and contemporary styles, they radicalise Bel’s proposition by allowing
amateurs or untrained dancers to take the stage. Bel grants representa-
tion to those who, in the tradition of Western theatre, have no right to
perform in front of a paying audience because of their physical imperfec-
tions: non-professional dancers and performers, mentally and physically
challenged people, and the spectators themselves. German theatre scholar
Benjamin Wihstutz and his Berlin-based colleague Sandra Umathum,
have edited an entire volume on Bel’s piece Disabled Theater (Umathum
and Wihstutz 2015). According to Wihstutz, Bel’s production invites
non-normative groups to perform within the bounds of the thea-
tre apparatus and its rules of representation. Their apperance on stage
marks a re-entry of the social into the realm of art from which they were
excluded, providing visibility for socially marginalised and differently
abled people (Wihstutz 2015). As in Gala, providing visibility amounts
to nothing less than a democratic vision of our contemporary globalised
societies with various ethnicities, age groups, genders, technically skilled
and unskilled, abled and disabled people dancing with each other and
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  227

being represented on stage. As one of the spectators-performers in Cour

d’honneur expresses in her poignant poem to Pina Bausch, “these bodies
on stage, they correspond to my own body.” Although trained dancers
still perform in Bel’s pieces, the standards for performing are no longer
set by their technical mastery of a form. Dancers are no longer valued
because they are experts in certain dance techniques with acquired skills
that set them apart from all those who do not possess them. Instead,
they have to share the stage with performers from different educational
backgrounds who display all kinds of skills that are equally valuable. The
dancers’ expertise no longer necessarily lies in their physical prowess,
but in their powers of the imagination to transform themselves and their
bodies by dancing together with others. Jérôme Bel envisions dance as a
lived culture.
The radicalisation of Bel’s original proposition has consequences for
his politics of non-virtuosity and de-skilling, and its critique of dance
representation. The performers of his own company, most prominently
Frédéric Seguette and Claire Haenni, are masters of the carefully stud-
ied pose of understatement and neutrality, their bodies acting as carri-
ers of thought rather than as channels of energy. They display a careful
de-skilling of capacities, which ultimately amounts to a different form of
virtuosity or style enabling them to perform the de-skilling in the first
place. With his new subjects being non-professional performers, the
stakes have shifted slightly. As in Gala, their ballet pirouettes may look a
little shaky, yet their own dances and choreographies are a virtuoso dis-
play of creativity and energy. These performers are invited to show their
skills rather than to withhold them. But like the professional perform-
ers Bel works with, they too, are invited to do something they are not
used to doing, such as developing a coherent choreography and to per-
form it in a concert dance context. Bel aims at a different kind of virtu-
osity here that engages in an unleashing of forces each and every one
of us possesses. These transcend common boundaries of knowing and
not knowing, of being capable and incapable, and of being included and
excluded. The politics of equality inherent in this practice will be dealt
with in relation to his piece Disabled Theater. Before, the spectators that
in Cour d’honneur are turned into performers of their own memories
that are dealt with under the aspect of an ecology of the theatre. The
section on Bel’s collaboration with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and
Ictus, 3Abschied, picks up the topic of death central to all of Bel’s work
and looks at it from the perspective of putting the subject and its perfor-
mance at risk. A brief look at Tombe concludes this section.
228  G. Siegmund

Cour d’honneur (2013): Risking the Many

Upon his return from Avignon in the winter of 1954, Roland Barthes
mused on the different impression the court of honour, the Avignon
theatre festivals’ main stage, made on him while he caught a glimpse of
it passing by the Pope’s palace. As Barthes recalls, it was a grey and cold
day, the ground of the courtyard was dusty with an isolated tree planted
in the middle and a wooden door to the side. Dry and hard, simple and
natural are further adjectives Barthes comes up with to describe the loca-
tion, which in winter was not really a stage but resembled a desolate
schoolyard. And yet the absence of any theatre during that time of the
year made him understand the nature of theatrical space for a “grown
up theatre.” The cour d’honneur in winter is a non-site, a void, a noth-
ing, a silence, as he writes, upon which a “grown up theatre” is founded
(Barthes 1993, 395). Out of this emptiness the spectacle arises as a site
that is specific to this location with all the social spaces it creates. The
performance emerges out of the voiceless and unaccommodating mate-
riality of the place, whose contours or seams blur with the city and the
landscape, no longer separating humans from their surroundings like
the detested bourgeois theatre. Out in the open air, humans are exposed
both to the elements and to the forces of history. Like the theatres in
ancient Greece, such a place facilitates the “installation of the work of
man,” which is to say, human beings taking their destiny into their own
hands and making their own theatre, which becomes a metaphor for
people making their own history. Given Barthes’ enthusiasm for Brecht,
“the work of man” invites the grown-up spectator to actively construct
the meaning of the play, which stages its own production, rather than
being treated like children too immature to understand. Staging its own
production implies that theatre visibly and acoustically retains the emp-
tiness or absence out of which it emerges. Between the harsh and dry
materiality of the place and the processes of showing and signifying that
it facilitates the work of theatricality begins. “The work of man,” as Jean-
Loup Rivière points out, for Barthes also means making the experience
of time’s passing and accepting the cycle of life and death (Rivière 2001,
16–17). Between Avignon in winter and Avignon in summer, as Barthes
remarks, lies the change of seasons.
With each performance day after day, year after year, theatre repeats
its own passing. Avignon in winter teaches Barthes that death is the
ontology of performance. The ephemeral presence of theatre, which is
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  229

its ontological non-being or absence, makes the performance, as Peggy

Phelan has it, sink into memory, “where it eludes regulation and con-
trol” (Phelan 1993, 148). Performance’s time, therefore, it not the sim-
ple present, but the present of co-existing non-synchronised and highly
subjective times, of past and future, memories and expectations, count-
less medial reproductions and potential ideas—in short, of presences
being turned into absences and absences being turned into presences.
In 2013 Jérôme Bel presented a two-hour performance in the court of
honour of the Pope’s palace in Avignon. It consists of fourteen testi-
monies of spectators about the performances they had attended in this
very place, the court of honour, which also gives the performances its
title: Cour d’honneur. The performance consists of memories of perfor-
mances, which have all disappeared, but live on in the unruly realm of
the subject’s consciousness or unconsciousness. If performance stages
its own disappearance, it “rehearses and repeats the disappearance of
the subject who longs always to be remembered” at the very same time
(Phelan 1993, 146). Bel’s project situates itself precisely at the interstices
of the death of performance and the death of its subjects. With each per-
formance they remember, they inevitably remember their own passing.
Cour d’honneur is the death of performance, since it does not stage a
dance production in the contemporary modern sense of the term. It risks
its subjects, which is made even more palpable since the fourteen specta-
tors Bel gathers in Avignon are all non-professional performers.
A production for the Avignon festival had already been envisioned in
2010 at the suggestion of Boris Charmatz, who in 2011 became asso-
ciated with the festival as curator of its dance programme. Considering
the festival’s programme outdated, a state Charmatz tried to amend, Bel
expresses (in their email conversation) his horror of joining the ranks
of artists working for the festival. Nevertheless, he offers Charmatz an
“exercise,” as he calls it, a sketch of a performance that may never be
realised. In what follows Bel effortlessly draws up a virtual performance,
writing it before any contracts have been signed, performers agreed
upon, or rehearsals scheduled (Bel and Charmatz 2013, 152–168). His
principle idea was to pay attention not to the individual experiences
of a dancer as in his previous works, but to the production of a space:
“To assemble witnesses of a space such as the Cour d’honneur, which in
France is one of the symbols of theatre” (2013, 152, my trans.). At the
time, he envisioned a greater spectrum of witnesses ranging from tech-
nicians, firemen, or publicists working for the festival to artists having
230  G. Siegmund

performed there and spectators sharing their memories. Although the

final production singled out a group of spectators as the main perform-
ers, it remains remarkably faithful to the original sketch. Another source
for what was to become Cour d’honneur was a lecture performance
Jérôme Bel gave in 2009. Simply called A Spectator, he recounted some
of his memories and experiences as a spectator of dance and theatre
performances, an act that served as a blueprint for the other spectators
to come. Despite negotiations with the festivals’ directors, Hortense
Archambault and Vincent Baudriller, the performance was not real-
ised, because in 2011 the cour d’honneur was not available for the pro-
ject and because Bel was reluctant to leave the black box of the theatre
for an open air site where the conditions of performing are less clear. It
finally came about in 2013, when Cour d’honneur was performed at the
Avignon festival in July for four nights, which remain the only perfor-
mances of the piece to date.
The performance begins with the ritualistic formula that marks the
beginning of all of Jérôme Bel’s performances since Véronique Doisneau:
“Good evening. My name is.”2 The spectators-as-performers were cast
by newspaper advertisements asking for visitors of the Avignon Festival
to share their memories of the cour d’honneur, the principle stage of
the festival at the courtyard of the Pope’s Palace, in a performance at
Avignon itself. The fourteen witnesses chosen for the production then
sent their texts and memories to Jérôme Bel, who worked with them on
shaping the texts. They met with Bel several times or used Skype con-
ferences as a medium of communication. Their seats on stage arranged
in a semi-circle to face and embrace the audience, one by one the four-
teen performers take the microphone at the front of the stage to intro-
duce themselves. They state their name, their profession, and the city
or region they come from, before they tell the audience about the first
time they came to visit the festival. They remember the circumstances of
their coming to Avignon and, like the first performer, Virginie Andreu,
almost of all of them invoke the myth of the place and the excitement
and expectations it raised before their first visit. They remember specific
productions that impressed or disappointed them, but above all, they
speak of how the theatre and the productions they saw affected their
lives. Their memories are not merely memories of a good night out with
friends at the theatre, but on a deeper level they are testimonials of their
coming into being as subjects and of how these subject formations were
shaped by the theatre. In the theatre, as the performer Daniel Beuan
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  231

believes, like Ibsen’s character Peer Gynt, one learns to become what,
without knowing it, one always already has been.
The implications of the theatre in their own coming into being as sub-
jects is most evident with older spectators, whose veneration for the fes-
tival and its main stage are firmly rooted in their biographies. Coming
from a small village between Grenoble and Lyon, Jacqueline Micoud
recalls her first visit to Avignon at the age of 17. What she saw in 1960
was a performance of Sophocles’ Antigone, her first encounter with the
text that has remained with her ever since. “I realised that Antigone
had entered my life,” and every time she was faced with what looked
like insurmountable difficulties in her life, she turned to Antigone to
gather strength. At the age of 70, 53 years later, her last trial, she says,
will be her natural death, which she hopes to master again with the help
of the woman who against all adversaries did what she thought was the
right thing to do. Or Marie Zicari, who in 1983 attended two specta-
cles by Pina Bausch at the Cour d’honneur: Nelken (Carnations) and
Walzer (Waltz). Her poetic observations on the body in Bausch’s pro-
duction that reminded her of her own body culminate in the sentence:
“Pina gave me my place.” This statement gains further significance when
seconds later she admits that Marie is not her proper name: it had to
be “Frenchified” because of the Jewish background of her family. Her
real name, she confesses, is Josepina, or, as her grandparents called her,
Pina. After this startling transference of names and bodies she goes on
to remember a scene from Nelken in which four German shepherd dogs
are barking in the four corners of the field of carnations that delineates
the performance space on stage. Evoked by association rather than being
directly mentioned, images of Nazi Germany cloud the memory, which
places the two Pinas and their corresponding bodies and locations in the
field of history, a field of carnations to remember the dead, where the
Jewish girl and the daughter of the perpetrators meet.
Cour d’honneur, like all the other performances by Jérôme Bel, has an
episodic structure. There is no dramaturgical built-up with a climax and
scenes that prepare for or resolve the conflict. On a structural level, the
non-hierarchical organisation of the scenes already speaks of an ecology
of equally valid and co-existing parts. As in The Show Must Go On, these
self-contained episodes, however, are not randomly placed next to each
other. They follow a certain logic that describes, once again, the cycle
from birth to death. Cour d’honneur is a bow that takes its cue from the
cultural value the Festival d’Avignon has for the French nation, follows
232  G. Siegmund

this by an account of the festival’s early days, continues through vari-

ous more recent memories and attitudes towards the festival, before the
piece closes by going back again to the early days with the account of
Monique Rivoli. Born in 1947, the same year the festival was founded by
director Jean Vilar, her lifetime corresponds to the lifetime of the festival
with which she hopes to remain associated even after her death. Within
this frame there is another frame with two corresponding statements
at the beginning and towards the end of the piece. Both are dedicated
to the political aims and implications of the festival. In her account,
Jacqueline Micoud recalls how the amateur theatre group from her small
village, in which all social classes from workers to teachers participated,
was invited to the festival. Jean Vilar’s politics after the destructions of
World War II was to bring theatre to the common people and to grant
everybody access to the performances. The corresponding scene towards
the ending of the performance is the one in which Alix Nelva, a graphic
designer from Rodez, complains that she has always felt excluded from
the official festival. She prefers to attend performances at the fringe festi-
val, where ticket prices are lower and the social constituency of the audi-
ence more varied. Since she is not part of the privileged social class that
attends the official festival performances, she never went to see a show at
the cour d’honneur. Put off by the elitism of the audience and its anti-
social behaviour in pushing other people aside trying to get to theatre
seats, she resents the impression the bourgeoisie gives that the theatre
only belongs to a certain section of the population. This surely is a far
cry from Vilar’s egalitarian and educational intentions for the festival,
for which during the 1950s Roland Barthes in his heyday as a theatre
critic showed so much support (Fig. 1).
Within this double framing of life/death and politics, the individual
testimonies vary in style. From the breathless account of Adrien Mariani
to the measured account of Bernard Lescure to the spontaneous dia-
logue between Elena Borghese and Jérôme Piron, their speeches create
a lively rhythm that keeps the audience’s attention. Some have learned
their text by heart; some read it out from sheets of paper or from the
display of a smartphone. Because he is afraid to talk in front of such a
large audience, Pascal Hamant’s account has been filmed and is projected
onto the wall of the palace backstage. Some remember music, some
voices; some are fascinated by images while others still admire the physi-
cal prowess of a particular performer. The production is also a testimony
of the various ways in which memory operates. Certain performances like
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  233

Fig. 1  Cour d’honneur, A Greek chorus © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Romeo Castellucci’s Inferno that opened the festival in 2008 are part of
several memories, thus creating a secret dialogue between the various
perspectives offered. Their memories and testimonies are punctuated by
the appearance of dancers, actors, and actresses that take the stage to re-
enact monologues or dances from the remembered productions, turning
the performers into spectators again, spectators of their own memories
re-lived in second degree in the here and now of the performance.
What sets Cour d’honneur apart from a piece of cleverly done nostalgia
is its claim to contemporaneity that it makes in its staging. The produc-
tion seeks to establish an egalitarian relation of its constitutive elements
on stage, between stage and auditorium, actors and spectators, and, what
is more, between the cour d’honneur in relation to the French society
it represents. In accordance with sociological theories, I call this an eco-
logical concern. A few examples may highlight this. The first concerns
the actor-spectator relationship. Inviting the spectators on stage implies
that the auditorium itself is put on stage. The spectators speak about
and sometimes even enact their experiences made while sitting in the
very same auditorium they now face. Thus, the spectators who form the
234  G. Siegmund

audience and the spectators who speak to them share their experiences
as spectators. The actors and dancers who intervene in their accounts
share the same stage as their erstwhile spectators. What is more: they are
also joined in some of their performances by the spectators. When actress
Agnès Sourdillon recites one of her monologues from Molières École
des femmes, she is supported by the spectator Bernard Lescure who cues
her. They both act out the memory of one of Lescure’s fellow specta-
tors, Pascal Hamant. Remembering a performance by Boris Charmatz,
Enfants (Children), the young Anna Mazzia takes it upon herself to run
around the stage like a child from the production, screaming and giving
an impression of one of her most memorable scenes. Although the four-
teen spectators are joined by six professional performers, the participa-
tion of the spectators in some of their performances prevents the divide
between the two groups, both of which are, after all, performing. But
the two groups are also watching. They are watching each other’s per-
formances and, in the case of the actors, they watch the audience while
they are performing. Actor Oscar van Rompay recalls an incident dur-
ing Johan Simon’s production of Horvath’s play Kasimir und Karoline
when an enraged spectator interrupted the performance by insulting the
actors on stage. For Rompay the irate spectator was performing while he
was watching the spectacle, forming reactions and imagining comments,
before the roles were reversed again and the performance continued. He
too, was a spectator-performer just like the spectator-performers of Cour
d’honneur.
As has been mentioned, the testimonials of the spectators-performers
are aided by different technologies that function as mnemonic devices.
While Lecure and Zicari read their text from paper, Nelva scrolls down
the pages on her smartphone. Hamant’s testimony is pre-recorded on
video and projected live while he sits and looks at the audience. Baniel
Beuan’s account of his memories of the cour d’honneur are available
online on the festival homepage, and Monique Rivoli clutches her scrap-
book of personal impressions, entrance tickets and press clippings to her
chest like a diary. Memory itself is a technology. It is media-based, and
in Cour d’honneur different media from different times co-exist. The old
and the new, the analogue and the digital are equally distributed over the
time of the performance, creating a picture of our contemporary media
societies. The digital communication technologies even affect the time-
space of the performance. Much as she would have loved to perform,
actress Isabelle Huppert could not make it to the cour d’honneur because
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  235

of an engagement in Australia. Her contribution to the piece is thus a live

Skype conference to Australia where it is seven o’clock in the morning.
Via Skype, her face projected on to the back wall, she turns into Medea
giving the spectator Yves Leopold, the doctor in the house, the chance
to finally see her since he missed her performance the first time, having
been too busy with the ill health of spectators in the auditorium. Digital
technology turns Australia into another site of the production joining
times and spaces in a globalised non-place contingent to the actual physi-
cal location of the performance. The digital flow of times and spaces cuts
through the place of the cour d’honneur, turning it into a sign of our
contemporary spatial and temporal relations (Osborne 2013, 138).
Despite the impression of individualism that the performance gives, the
force of the production lies elsewhere. The fourteen spectators are indi-
vidual subjects speaking once again in their own name and sharing their
personal memories; and yet, after they have spoken, they all return to the
line of chairs, once again taking their places within the group and blend-
ing in with their neighbours, intersecting with the actors-dancers. The
production thus underlines the relation between the individual and the
group. Extending the proposition from The Show Must Go On, Jérôme
Bel’s return to group work in 2012 conceives of the group as a social
entity that speaks not just about the theatre but also about its sociality.
The conceptual constructivism of Bel’s performances that dealt with the
construction of a dance performance and the role of its constituent ele-
ments is now turned into a social constructivism—a construction of the
social, of which the performance is an example next to other constructions
of the social (for example community work, social projects). However, this
does not mean that it renounces its specificity as a theatre performance.
After all, theatre is still its topic and its form. The reversal of roles in the
dispositif does not abolish the theatre as theatre. It simply adjusts or redi-
rects its elements to visibly become a construction of the social. This con-
struction depends on the observation of others and on being observed by
others. Furthermore, it also depends on sharing: sharing memories and
introducing one’s own time almost as an interruption into the general
passing of time. What holds true for almost any theatre situation through-
out history, is here complicated since the respective positions of the
observers are constantly being reversed and implicated within each other.
This sense of flux results in the loss of a stable position or overview of the
situation. The spectators sitting in the auditorium are watching themselves
being watched thereby analysing their own behaviour and experience.
236  G. Siegmund

The figure that captures this ambiguity is, of course, the chorus. The
chorus is a theatrical figure in ancient Greek theatre, a trope specific to
the theatre. Performing in the round of the orchestra, mediating between
the actors performing on the proscenium in front of the palace at the
back and the spectators in the cavae of the auditorium in front, the cho-
rus represents the public mediating between the auditorium in front
and the actors at the back of the stage. The chorus expels the individual
actor, historically the first actor of Aischylus’ tragedies, who enters into
a dialectical relationship with the chorus, confronting it and being con-
fronted by it. Both actor and chorus do not exist without each other.
Representation here does not simply mean an act of substitution as the
actors in bourgeois theatre represent characters and their conflicts to the
audience. As theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehman has pointed out, space
in the bourgeois theatre is primarily a metaphorical space (Lehmann
2006, 150–153). The stage presents a closed fictional world, which rep-
resents social life that in its actuality is replaced by the fiction. The ancient
Greek theatre, on the other hand, is an open space. The chorus in ancient
Greek theatre is also made up of the public. It consists of citizens and not
of professional actors from the various political divisions of the state of
Athens, which they represent. Thus, the chorus does not only represent a
fictional role. Above all it represents the political and social order of soci-
ety from which it emerges. Rather than being metaphorical, as Lehman
continues, the relation between stage and auditorium is turned into a
metonymical relation. The whole of the theatre space is contiguous to the
actual space of the city, the region, the country, and the nation as a whole.
It is a porous space that lets people in rather than keeping them out.
The parallels to the cour d’honneur as a performance space are almost
self-evident. The spatial layout, although not round or based on a semi-
circle, in its tripartite subdivision equals that of the ancient Greek thea-
tre. The actual stage assumes the function of the orchestra for the chorus
and the public to perform, whereas the very literal front of the Pope’s
palace serves as the skenae for the actors. Jérôme Bel’s production gives
some of its original appeal back to the space. The court of honour in Cour
d’honneur is a place where, rather than actors, citizens of France gather.
Rennes, Vichy, Rodez, and even Brussels—the fact that they state the
city and region they come from hints at their embeddedness in the spa-
tio-social reality of France and even beyond in countries where French is
spoken. The spectators-actors come from elsewhere. They stay here only
temporarily before they disperse again. The cour d’honneur is a location
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  237

where people pass through to testify. They do not pretend to inhabit it for-
ever. It does not signify another space, it is an actual open uncovered
space within the city one visits and leaves again. In such a space one thing
does not lead to another; it lies next to another. Voices, stories, technolo-
gies, memories, practices, and bodies co-exist and are not graded or dif-
ferentiated in a hierarchical way. The list of testimonials, in principle, is
endless and open like the entries to the lists Tim Etchells favours so much.
Together the spectators-actors form a chorus of spectators that repre-
sents the French public in its stratifications and regional diversifications.
Lest this sounds too optimistic, it is, however, striking, that the four-
teen participants all come from the educated middle classes and are often
teachers of French Literature or the arts. It is striking that they are all
white. As Timothy Scheie, in his study on Roland Barthes, notes, Jean
Vilar’s vision of a popular theatre as a theatre for the people of France
conceived of the people of France as being primarily white ignoring the
processes of decolonisation and migration from the former colonies that
were beginning to change French society as early as the late 1950s (Scheie
2006, 60). Bel’s Cour d’honneur is also a faithful representation of this
particular history of the festival. The conspicuous absence of even work-
ing-class testimonies, let alone testimonies from people of colour who
attended the festival, is, however, given a voice by Alix Nelva, who criti-
cises the festival’s elitism to this very day. The sociality created by Cour
d’honneur is one of a certain social class. The ephemerality of theatre, the
passing of time that marks the time of theatre and its subjects, their acqui-
escence in death that theatre “at the vanishing point” frame, to borrow
Herbert Blau’s phrase, prefigures both Barthes’ reflections on Avignon
in winter and Bel’s production Cour d’honneur. Both the performers and
the audience’s acquiescence in death is the base for their fleeting sociality,
which will be the topic of the subsequent section. In 3Abschied, a collabo-
ration between Jérôme Bel and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, the theme
of the unskilled or de-skilled performer performing subjects at risk.

3Abschied (2010): Risking Death

In Pichet Klunchun and Myself, Bel and Klunchun spend considerable
time discussing modes of dying on stage. They show three representations
of death from their own work. In recollection, Bel says, he is surprised
that already in his very first piece, Nom donné par l’auteur, he unwit-
tingly played dead, dropping objects and lying down next to them on
238  G. Siegmund

the floor. Death is a recurrent theme in Jérôme Bel’s pieces. Most promi-
nently it figures in his collaboration with the Belgian dancer and choreog-
rapher Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and the Ictus Ensemble, 3Abschied.
Premiered in February 2010 at the Munt Opera House in Brussels, the
piece stands between Bel’s concern with the dancing subject’s agency in
his solo pieces and the group work with non-professional dancers from
the year 2012 onwards. Leaving the solo format behind, 3Abschied is not
a collaboration that focuses on Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s experiences
as a dancer and choreographer in an institution. Rather, it takes its start-
ing point from de Keersmaeker’s interest in Gustav Mahler’s music. De
Keersmaeker is well known for her approach to meticulously analysing the
musical score she works with before visualising its structure in her chore-
ographies. With Mahler’s “The Farewell,” however, both the music and
its content defied her working methodology. In order to find a different
approach to the music, she invited Jérôme Bel to develop a concept with
her. The last section of the production makes use of an artistic strategy
that will become important for Bel’s four subsequent productions, Cour
d’honneur, Disabled Theater, Gala, and Tombe. De Keersmaeker sings
Mahler’s song, putting herself at risk as a dancer-performer by choosing
to do something she obviously is not trained to do.
The title of the production refers to the last movement from Gustav
Mahler’s symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of
the Earth), from 1908, “The Farewell.” Mahler wrote the cycle of
songs after the death of his eldest daughter. It was first performed in
1911, six months after Mahler’s own death. Surrounded by death
during the time of its inception, perhaps not surprisingly in “The
Farewell” Mahler explicitly deals with death as a topic. The character of
the singer anticipating her own immanent demise is able to accept her
individual death because of her certainty that the earth will continue to
exist. Her subjective finite time and existence are thus sublated into the
eternal return of nature’s cyclical rejuvenation, which offers her salva-
tion. The number “3” in the title indicates the structural principle of Bel
and de Keersmaeker’s piece. 3Abschied is a collaboration of three part-
ners. Next to de Keersmaker and Bel it prominently figures the Ictus
Ensemble, a chamber orchestra based in Brussels with a focus on playing
contemporary classical music and a frequent partner of de Keersmaeker’s
dance productions with her company Rosas. The performance is divided
into three sections. In the first, de Keersmaeker narrates the origins of
the project, her interest in Mahler’s music, her concern about the state
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  239

of the earth today—with the exploitation of resources, pollution, and cli-

mate change—that for Mahler at the beginning of the twentieth century
was still a source of life, and her search for choreographic solutions to
transfer both the structure and content of the music onto the stage.
The second part accords space to Ictus playing the movement in
the transcription of the original score for chamber orchestra by Arnold
Schönberg. Against the very strong advice given to her by the famous
conductor Daniel Barenboim to not even attempt dancing to Mahler’s
piece of music, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker dances. Dressed in a
sweater, a pair of jeans and what look like a pair of heavy boots, her entire
physique remains tied to the earth. Placed amongst the musicians of the
orchestra, she listens intently to the music, trying to absorb it, before
she slowly starts to move. Almost imperceptible at first, her elbows held
close to her torso with her lower arms fumbling, her shoulders twist ten-
tatively, before her body opens up. Only roughly sketching her signature
movements of slight twirls, rapid twists and swinging arms, she inter-
rupts the flow of energy before she can get carried away. Her movement
phrases remain broken throughout, disconnected, fragmented, leading
nowhere, falling back onto themselves, while she is moving in and out
of the music, sometimes barely touching it, sometimes picking up its
force circling the stage, running upstage into the twilight of an undefined
area, where she can only be half seen, a body at the edge threatened to
be swallowed up by darkness, hovering, teetering to and fro, before re-
emerging from the shadows to re-enter the circle of musicians. Listening
again, trying to hear that voice that she could follow, bending over back-
wards on a chair, forcefully resisting the pull of gravity, pulling herself
up again, mumbling some of the words to the song, arms stretched
out, unresolved, she comes to a standstill. Heeding Barenboim’s advice,
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker does not dance to the music. She impro-
vises approaches to it from several angles without taking possession of it.
There is no definite choreography that would give Mahler’s “Farewell” a
physical and spatial form or representation (Fig. 2).
The third part is concerned with the content of “The Farewell” and
how its message of acquiescence in death can be staged. This third part,
which covers the last 30 minutes of the 90-minute performance, is again
divided into three parts, which, perhaps not surprisingly, describe three
different ways of dying on stage. To demonstrate them, Jérôme Bel
enters the stage from the auditorium. While the orchestra is playing the
last phrases of the song, the musicians leave the stage one by one until
240  G. Siegmund

Fig. 2  3Abschied, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker © Herman Sorgeloos

only the bassoon player is left playing his plaintive last notes before he,
too, gets up and leaves. In the second version, which, according to Bel,
underlines the theme of acquiescence in death better than the first, the
musicians sink into their chairs or down to the floor remaining motion-
less until the final note has been played. The third version that came
up during rehearsal involves only the pianist Jean-Luc Fafchamps and
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. When the pianist starts playing, she stands
motionless next to the piano, eyes closed, hands in pockets, until she
raises her voice and starts to sing. With her left arm slightly undulating
to accentuate the notes, she sings the song her voice teacher told her was
too difficult for her to sing. In her confident yet shaky and fragile voice
she hits and, more often than not, misses the notes, struggling with the
higher end of the scale and with articulations, while her body gradually
starts groping for movements in space, barely touching the music and yet
visibly trying to incorporate its rhythms and textures.
Death, here, is not represented in a legible gesture of sinking to the
floor. Rather, it is both metaphorically and literally enacted in the sense
that Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker dies up there on the stage. She dies as
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  241

a performer doing what she cannot do, singing Mahler’s “The Farewell”
with an untrained voice incapable of mastering the difficulties of the
score. In this awkward scene that is at times painful to watch and to lis-
ten to, de Keersmaeker loses her expertise as one of the most accom-
plished dancers and choreographers of the last 35 years, jeopardising her
virtuosity as a performer for an act of dedicated, but nonetheless ama-
teurish singalong that misses the perfection of the musical form. And yet,
her singing at the very same time fulfils the form, because she is literally
trying to come to terms with death, which is the content of the lyrics,
looking for ways to approach it, accept it without knowing it. By doing
so, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker puts her identity as a dancer at risk. In
a gesture of desubjugation and desubjectivation, she questions what she
knows. She doubts the rules of her well established dance practice of
developing steps to a score, thus opening up a space for uncertainty.
The mise-en-scène underlines this move. At the very beginning of the
performance, the Ictus Ensemble take their seats, but instead of play-
ing, the musicians and the singer are made to listen to a recording of
“The Farewell.” In a gesture that echoes the DJ from Jérôme Bel’s The
Show Must Go On, de Keersmaeker puts on a CD with a recording of
the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra from 1952. The production operates
with subtle shifts in the dispositif of the stage, making the various players
in the field change their functions of playing, singing, dancing, watching,
and listening. They are temporarily asked to assume a different position
from what they are used to doing, thus changing their relation towards
the music. As with the three versions of dying, there are three different
versions of the score in the three parts of the piece (the recorded version,
the Ictus orchestra version, the piano version) and three different voices
(Kathleen Ferrier in the recording, Sara Fulgoni singing live with Ictus,
and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s version in the third section). Thus,
there is no single version that can claim to be the definitive version cho-
sen by the production team because it represents their interpretation of
the score. Instead, Bel and de Keersmaeker revisit the music again and
again, trying to come to terms with its propositions, failing and trying
again without exhausting it. In this respect, the non-possession of the
form that de Keersmaeker exhibits in her singing echoes the non-posses-
sion of the form in the staging, which, ultimately, echoes the non-posses-
sion of death that no living body can own, know, or inhabit.
In Jérôme Bel’s discourse, death does not figure as a psychological cri-
sis, a source of anxiety or emotional familial conflicts. Death represents
242  G. Siegmund

the limit of representation itself. In the theatre, death can only be rep-
resented and not experienced without violating the laws of theatre. It
can be encoded, as Pichet Klunchun demonstrates in relation to Khôn
dance, or, as Bel attempts in his movement sequence to Killing Me Softly.
Staging death can be based on a more detailed observation of external
signs such as facial expressions, small gestures of hands or body postures
in keeping with a more realistic acting style that, towards the end of the
eighteenth century, for instance, Lessing in his thirteenth piece of the
Hamburgische Dramaturgie argued for. Yet the representation will always
be based on a fundamental ignorance of what it is the performers rep-
resent. Thus, representing death is always also the death of representa-
tion, since all claims to accuracy and to a referent that could speak of the
experience of death must fail. To represent death is to miss it entirely.
Death misses its representation in the same way as any representation
fails death. Missing their referent, death’s representations inevitably
move between presence and absence, codes and observations, without
being able to penetrate the inner sanctum, which remains a mystery. In
relation to death, any type of representation is a sign that openly dis-
plays its theatrical nature. Without a referent it can only point towards
an inaccessible experience whose description will miss its object once
again. If Roland Barthes, as I have argued, places his notion of theat-
ricality within the very crisis of the sign to represent, a crisis of which
theatricality is both the symptom and the solution, death figures largely
as the ultimate horizon of signification that will forever be deferred. The
duplicity of the body as a mere fact, a ‘there’ or ‘thus’ and a sign that
betrays its nature as a sign, which is one of the hallmarks of Barthes’
definition of theatricality, threatens the body with death from both sides
of the split. As semiotics has shown, the sign kills the body and turns it
into an ideal signifying machine bereft of any disturbing and fascinating
physicality. Yet, on the other side of pure phenomenological facticity or
materiality, the body does not exist either, for it is bereft of any social,
political, or cultural dimension that gives the body agency and discursive
power as a singular body. A body on stage is always some body and not
no body. Between the two, in the midst of the rift, as Timothy Scheie
states, “a faint voice whispers” within the non-discursive empty space
opened by the breach of signification—and in psychoanalytical theory
it is most often indeed a voice that tinges the body with meaning and
ensures its survival (Scheie 2006, 182). Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  243

untrained and therefore faint voice, is, as Ramsay Burt suggests, an

unruly voice that pushes the pleasures of singing to the point of the
unbearable. For him, de Keersmaeker’s voice expresses a “movement
of solitude” that “maps her inclination to a world” she cares for and
wants to heal (Burt 2017, 138). It is an uncanny voice that comes from
a simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar place that opens itself up once
the obvious beauty of the music gets stabbed. The body is the limit of
language, thwarting the function of language to name and identify. At
the same time, language delineates the limit of the body that does not
exist beyond the “faint voice” of signification. 3Abschied is a movement
inbetween Mahler’s music and its representations in different modalities
and with different means. It is a movement between the simple enun-
ciation “There it is!” and the artist’s attempts to explicate the “there,”
which cannot come to a conclusive end. It is the failure of the dancer
who dances, the singer who sings, and the director who interprets. The
rest is perhaps not exactly silence, but the very idea of theatre as the rift
itself.
By being close to somebody who dies, we develop at an intimacy with
the person dying, just as we experience an unbridgeable separation, since
we cannot share the other’s experience of dying. For Maurice Blanchot,
this scene is the nucleus of an understanding of community that resists
the immanence of its own presence, the totality of its members, in favour
of an openness based on separation. “To remain present in the proxim-
ity of another who by dying removes himself definitively, to take upon
myself another’s death as the only death that concerns me, this is what
puts me beside myself, this is the only separation that can open me, in its
very impossibility, to the Openness of a community” (Blanchot 1988, 9).
Jérôme Bel and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, too, stage an intimacy
with death that is at the same time a separation, a separation of means
and experiences that artists and audiences alike nonetheless share. Her
way of singing, is, give or take a few singing lessons, in no way differ-
ent from what members of the audience themselves could attempt. Anne
Teresa de Keersmaeker’s singing articulates the very emotional and dis-
turbing fact that in relation to death, which her singing approaches while
holding it at bay, we are all amateurs. This is why, for me, despite the
initial feeling of awkwardness that the scene produces, it is so poignantly
moving. The political implications of unlearning skills and doing some-
thing one cannot do will be discussed in the subsequent chapter.
244  G. Siegmund

Disabled Theater (2012): Risking In-difference

Jérôme Bel’s concern has always been with the theatre and its mecha-
nisms of production, representation, and reception. His pieces need
the framed theatre space in order to work and open it up from within.
For Bel, the theatre is a cultural formation or apparatus that produces
and represents subjects. The very title of the piece, Disabled Theater
(2012), takes us in this direction. It does not primarily denote theatre
with or for disabled people but rather points to the disability of thea-
tre itself. In Disabled Theater, theatre and its traditional modes of rep-
resenting characters, bodies, and the subjects produced by them, are
disabled, interrupted, put to a halt, and driven towards malfunction.
The heated debates that followed the production offer a glimpse of
how profound this disturbance is. On the one hand, there are tradi-
tional theatre audiences who are disturbed by the sheer sight of disabled
people on stage. Their conventional expectations of who is allowed to
enter the stage as an actor or actress and who may be represented on
stage are disrupted. Their perception is disabled for they cannot judge
the production in the familiar terms of good or bad acting. What are,
therefore, the values underlying a production such as Bel’s? And, this is
even more telling, even people who are used to dealing, working, or liv-
ing with physically or mentally challenged people are disturbed by the
production. The actors and actresses of Theater HORA are supposedly
put on display without the security of playing a clearly defined character
that would allow them to show their skills and capabilities.3 Performance
scholar Leon Hilton in his essay on the piece comments on Bel’s reasons
for engaging with the Theater HORA actors and actresses. In an inter-
view Bel underlines that what he found in them was “the presence of
the performer” that would go beyond traditional notions of acting. “I
mean that the performer has to be as much as he or she can in the pre-
sent, not in the reproduction of something which has been done before
during the rehearsals. The actors of Theater HORA, because of their
cognitive alterations, can do this easily. They are connected to the pre-
sent that others are not: and this theatricality is what I was looking for,
because I knew this would be powerful and intense onstage” (Bel quoted
in Hilton 2014, 160). Apart from the curious fact that a choreographer
whose entire body of work is built on an analysis of cultural codes sud-
denly speaks about the powerful presence of performers, Hilton, here,
detects a patronizing attitude towards disabled performers, insinuating
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  245

that they be closer to nature than so-called normal people who are cul-
tured (Hilton 2014, 161). American theatre director and disability
scholar Scott Wallin criticises the show for reinforcing purely negative
stereotypes about mentally challenged people. Already the first scene of
the show in which one after the other the 11 actors and actresses walk
up to the front of the stage and remain standing there for one minute,
“calls up uncomfortable memories of the historical freak show and tour-
ing ethnographic exhibitions” (Wallin 2015, 65). According to Wallin,
the show’s dramaturgy of presenting one actor after the other isolates
the performers instead of giving them the opportunity of producing a
communality that would transcend their social isolation in a positive way.
“Instead,” Wallin argues, “the show achieves its force and audience inter-
est by tacitly targeting the uncomfortable feelings many of us have about
disability and then offering a sense of emancipation from these disabling
perceptions and emotions.” The show, Wallin concludes, “lacks critical
engagement with disability and presents it in ways that reflect a tradi-
tional, normate view” (Wallin 2015, 64). Whereas Wallin sees a lack of
the positive in the production, other critics find the production too nor-
malising in a positive sense. Instead of staying with the trouble of social
exclusion and the disruption of social situations that physically and men-
tally challenged people continue to experience, the production levels the
disruptive force that is disability by presenting the actors as actually quite
nice people.4
When theatre is disabled, it seems that our implicit and tacit value
judgments and the ideas and attitudes they rely on are made explicit
again. They are once again open for discussion. When theatre is disabled,
it also lays bare its mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, of giving or
holding back agency that, with its social repercussions, far exceeds the
framework of the proscenium stage. In what follows, I want to shift the
ground of argumentation away from the representation of disability on
stage and draw our attention to the fact that Disabled Theater takes place
in a theatre in front of audiences. I want to focus on the theatrical situa-
tion. Despite their disabilities, the 11 performers of the show are profes-
sionally trained actors and actresses, “actors, nonetheless,” according to
Sandra Umathum (Umathum 2015, 99). Disabled Theater is a theatre
production by a professional theatre company. I come to the theatre to
watch other people. And this is what JérômeBel asks me to do. The sim-
ple fact that the production takes place in a bourgeois theatre context
means that the scene Wallin describes can simply be read as a scene that
246  G. Siegmund

introduces the actors to the audience. The actors simply do their job,
namely entering on stage, presenting themselves, and acting. Dressed in
casual clothes and not doing anything freakish that would actively draw
attention to their “otherness,” the scene does not depict or represent a
freak show. But even if it did represent a freak show, the introductory
scene would not be a freak show. It simply would be a quotation or cita-
tion of a freak show, which had entered the frame of the theatre, thereby
altering what is at stake in the production. This is not to say, of course,
that the label “freak show” is not a valid description of what the scene
produces. However, by strategically separating the reality of the stage
and the signification processes it produces, the scene opens up the ques-
tion as to why we think the scene is a freak show, although we only see
a bunch of mentally challenged actors in front of us. By loosening the
habitualised connection between signifier (body on stage) and its signi-
fied (freak show), the scene allows us to reflect upon why it is we think
the scene resembles a freak show. The resulting doubling of framings
(freak show—theatre) produces openings for reflection, analysis, and
communication that may not easily be resolved, since either side is always
in excess of the other. Either side is and is always at the same time not
the other. The scene therefore opens up a gap between the banal mate-
rial reality of what is happening on stage (actors presenting themselves)
on the one hand and the signifying processes and cultural contexts
(a freak show) triggered by it on the other. Scott Walllin bemoans the
fact that because of Bel’s playing with voyeurism, the production pre-
vents the audience to engage with the true causes of their discomfort,
namely “society’s fear and devaluation of cognitive difference” and our
lack of understanding how we can “fully interact with mentally disabled
people” (Wallin 2015, 68). As a piece of theatre, Disabled Theater cer-
tainly does not teach or educate audiences of how to be better people.
But since it constantly draws our attention to our positive and negative
reactions towards disability that circulate between stage and auditorium
to produce the social situation of the performance, contrary to Wallin’s
claim it does offers the possibility for the audience’s reflective engage-
ment of their own role in bringing disability about. With Disabled
Theatre, prejudices are up in the air circulating and hitting the audience
with all the force of the unhappy return of feelings and opinons believed
to have been long overcome. The distance between stage and audito-
rium, between what actually happens on stage and what we believe to
see, opens up a space in which cultural stereotypes, received opinions,
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  247

expectations, prejudices, and genuine interest in the actors and actresses

may circulate. This circulation produces discourse and an ongoing
engagement with the issues raised, which I ultimately understand to be
the topic of the piece.
In this section, I will look at Disabled Theater in the context of
Jérôme Bel’s other pieces and explore common topics and concerns.
Disabled Theater shares at least three prominent features with Jérôme
Bel’s other pieces as an independent choreographer, a career that spans
a twenty-year period from 1994 up until 2014. First, it analyses the fea-
tures of a theatre or dance production by reducing, isolating, and dis-
playing its constituent elements. These features include the role of the
director or choreographer as author of the pieces he or she produces.
Second, it cleverly and very entertainingly investigates and, above all, cel-
ebrates the role cultural codes and sign systems—whether physical, cos-
tume-related, musical, or verbal—play in producing subjects. Thus the
(dancing) bodies in his performances are, unlike in the modern dance
tradition, not characterized by moving according to natural principles,
but rather as cultural constructs in need of deciphering. As a conse-
quence, the spectator is put into an active position as the producer of the
work. Third, following from the production of subjectivity by cultural
subjection, it broaches the issue of the power relations at work in the
theatre and its apparatus: the power relation between performers and the
members of the audience as in The Show Must Go On, the power relation
inherent in the hierarchies of a classical ballet company as in Véronique
Doisneau and the power exerted by the choreographer/director over the
company of dancers and actors.
Yet, in working with actors and actresses from Theater HORA for
Disabled Theater, Jérôme Bel’s questioning of theatre seems to have
taken another direction. “Their way of acting,” states Bel in an interview
with the dramaturgue of the piece, Marcel Bugiel, “involves a kind of
critique of the critique I have been leveling at the theatre machine. With
them, I have met my match!” (Bel and Bugiel 2014, 13, my trans.) In
another interview, he expands: “In the case of Theater HORA’s actors,
what fascinates me is their way of not incorporating some of theatre’s
rules (…) It’s an extremely interesting situation for me because in a way
their theatre is freer than that of standard performers. Their freedoms
reveal theatrical possibilities that I didn’t know existed” (Bel and Burgiel
2012). Heeding Leo Hilton’s warning against the patronizing notion
that mentally challenged people are somehow closer to an unmitigated
248  G. Siegmund

presence that would cast them as being less cultured and more natural, I
detect the reason for the effects of presence somewhere else than in the
performers’ disabilities. What produces the sensation of presence is less
their disability, but rather the fact that as trained actors they are asked to
dance. In what sense, then, is Disabled Theater more than this, namely
an investigation into the myths and ideology of modern dance and thea-
tre? What is it that brings Jérôme Bel to the limits of his own method
in the way the actors and actresses from Theater HORA perform thea-
tre? In which way is Disabled Theater a meta-critique of Bel’s critique of
dance? Surprisingly enough, Disabled Theater is more than this, because
it indulges in the act of dancing. Disabled Theater for Jérôme Bel marks a
return to dance as an energetic principle, which all his other productions
were so critical of. It indulges in the energy of the dancers transforming
themselves not only by displaying cultural signs, but by the sheer force
of their movement that goes beyond any kind of technique. This force in
Disabled Theater can be read as a political act. Instead of arguing that Bel
is interested in aesthetics (the theatre and its conventions) rather than in
politics (emancipating mentally challenged people),—an argument that
always makes theatre appear deficient in regard to real political action
implying that, as a consequence, theatre can only be political once it has
overcome the restrictions of theatrical representation—I want to look for
the political within the aesthetical. In which way can theatre as art be
political and still be theatre? Is there even a unique way for theatre to
be political? In order to address these questions, I will draw on the phi-
losophy of aesthetics and especially to the work of German philosopher
Christoph Menke. His understanding of art as an interplay of becom-
ing and presenting resonates strongly with my previous reflections on the
nature of theatricality and its operations of doing and undoing form and
meaning. I call this operation of undoing form while displaying a form a
“risky” operation. Theatre that risks its very own form can be considered
to be political.
In Disabled Theater Jérôme Bel remains concerned with the name of a
person as a public, social and cultural agent. “My job in this performance
is to be myself and not somebody else,” states Miranda Hossle, an actress
with Thetaer HORA, thus underlining a specific feature of Disabled
Theater she apparently liked. Performers being themselves instead of play-
ing roles and developing characters in a plot is certainly one feature that
Disabled Theater shares with Jérôme Bel’s other pieces. Ever since the
dancers Claire Haenni and Frédéric Seguette in Jérôme Bel wrote their
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  249

proper names, age, height and bank balance on the back wall of the the-
atre with a piece of white chalk, Jérôme Bel has repeatedly asked per-
formers to use themselves and their personal experience as material for a
piece.
However, are these performers simply being themselves, as Miranda
believes? If yes, what does that self consist of? Although performers using
their proper names have become quite a standard feature of theatre or
dance performances since the work of Richard Schechner, Pina Bausch,
or Forced Entertainment, to name but a few, it takes a slightly differ-
ent twist in the work of Bel. Already the piece Jérôme Bel underlined the
importance of the names the dancers put themselves under or subject
themselves to. In Jérôme Bel it was a double subjection that produced
the subjects of the performance: both Haenni and Séguette subjected
themselves to the name of the piece, Jérôme Bel, which is also the name
of the choreographer, and, on stage, they literally subjected themselves
to their proper names by literally placing their naked bodies next to and
underneath their writing. It is their names that designate and identify
their bodies and turn them into what they are: public persons. Thus, the
self Bel and his performers deal with is never the private or psychological
self, however imaginary and contested such a concept may be; but the
public persona, created by a (legally binding) name that links the body to
the symbolic order of a society. They speak in their own name by assum-
ing this name as a mask or persona, thereby becoming members of civic
society. As I have argued they become subjects by assuming the subject
position language offers to them.
The same holds true for the eleven actors and actresses of Theater
HORA. It is by virtue of a speech act that they assume their names and
act as responsible subjects. As with the dancers of his other pieces, they
are given agency to speak and act in their own right. This, however, can
only mean that they find their position within language and the power
structure it imposes on them. They do after all answer to the demands
of Jérôme Bel. What is their own may then only appear when negotiat-
ing with the structure, which is just what the actors and actresses from
Theater HORA do as the nature of the demands gradually changes.
Significantly, though, Bel’s strategy is here slightly different. The first
demand he makes on them is not to introduce themselves one by one by
their names, but to stand silently in front of the audience for one min-
ute. Before we learn who they are and what they do (namely acting), the
members of the audience are confronted with their gaze that looks back
250  G. Siegmund

at them—confronting them with their own gaze and its implicit preju-
dices of how we perceive disabled people. We5 are asked to confront our
gaze with their unusual physicality and behaviour and not to turn away
as we would probably do in the street. The theatre requires us to watch.
If we avert our gaze in shame, we disable theatre at the very root of its
functioning. The power of a mutual gaze to acknowledge the presence
and existence of the other precedes the following act of naming. In the
act of giving a name to a face or a body, a person emerges whom I can
turn to and deal with. What the performance in Bel’s logic does, then, is
to stage a shift in our perception of the (disabled) performer from non-
entity to person, or subject.
What we are given to see and what shows and exposes itself during
Disabled Theater is not what we are used to or expect to see in Western
theatres. Education or actors’ training in general aim at learning how to
create, inhabit, or show a role and at the same time at taking control of
the gestural and vocal material produced with a readiness to take over
any other role by means of technique. Thus, the actor has to be endowed
with reason to be able to do this. Reason very basically means the capac-
ity to repeat as an act of self-appropriation of one’s aquired faculties in
order to transcend one’s individual being towards a general idea the dra-
matic text wants to express. Following this logic, which has been estab-
lished since the Enlightenmant with its focus on reason as the faculty
that distinguishes the human from the non-human, disabled people are
unreasonable and not human, because they cannot repeat. As a conse-
quence, they are not fit to appear and act on stage.
Despite this history of discrimination, the actors of Theater HORA
are trained actors and actresses. Gradually, from what initially looks
like random acts in responding to Bel’s demands, patterns of repetition
emerge that give the impression that the actors and actresses consciously
create roles for themselves. It becomes evident that they control the
manner in which they want to appear and that they are perfectly capa-
ble of reproducing their texts and their dances. There is Tiziana Pagliaro,
who plays the naive girl answering the questions about her handicap and
about her opinion of the show with a nonchalant “I don’t know.” Or
Peter Keller, whose stories about the stars at the beginning seem to make
no sense at all, but once elements of the story start reappearing in sub-
sequent answers, the impression of a consistent universe is created, even
though we may not be able to penetrate it.
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  251

Reflecting on the power relations inherent in a theatre production

must by necessity include a reflection on the position of the director of
the piece. Since Disabled Theater is based on commands the director
gives to the performers (things he asks them to do), the topic of power
relations is indeed at heart of the structure of the piece. Yet the produc-
tion, as I argue, does not hide the issue of power. Rather it addresses it
by making it a part of the performance itself. It literally plays with the
power relations inherent in the performance, thus making them negotia-
ble. In The Show Must Go On, the DJ sitting in front of the stage putting
on the music occupied this position of power, representing the choreog-
rapher. Disabled Theater, too, includes the director’s position by placing
the figure of a translator on stage. For practical reasons there are two,
Simone Truong and Chris Weinheimer, who take turns according to
the touring schedule and their availability. They take their seat on the
right-hand side of the stage behind a table with a computer and other
technical equipment. At the beginning they state clearly why they are
here. “Good evening. My name is Chris Weinheimer. I was hired as an
assistant and translator because the actors only speak Swiss German and
Jérôme Bel doesn’t.” In the performance that follows, they assume the
role or position of a spokesperson for choreographer whose commands
they repeat for both the actors and the audience to hear. “The first thing
Jérôme asked the actors was to enter the stage one by one and to stay in
front of the audience for one minute.” Thus, they can by no means be
dispensed with once the rehearsal process, which their work had facili-
tated, is over. They translate the rehearsal process into the actual perfor-
mance by repeating and thus laying open both its task-based orientation
and Jérôme’s process of perceiving the actors. The actors are asked to
perform certain directions, such as to stay in front of the audience for
one minute, but the way in which they perform these directions is up
to them. When they appear one after the other, it very quickly becomes
apparent that not all of them hold out in front of the audience for a full
minute. Some have their eyes closed looking downwards, others stare the
audience out.
The repetition of the director’s commands is what gives the piece its
clear structure. Altogether there are six commands and their related tasks
that the actors are asked to perform. They are asked to stand in front
of the audience for one minute, to introduce themselves, to name their
handicap, to prepare a dance solo to a choreography and a piece of music
of their own choice. Then they are asked to give their opinion on the
252  G. Siegmund

piece and, finally, to take their bows. Each actor and actress takes lib-
erties according to their own liking with the command given to them.
With their stereotyped or even ritualistic beginning, “Then Jérôme asked
the actors,” or “After that, Jérôme asked the actors,” these demands are
clearly marked as performative utterances which, by virtue of being artic-
ulated aloud, actually create the scene they speak of. At the same time,
they are characterized as repetitions or iterations of both themselves
as verbal utterances and of a reality preceding them. They quote the
rehearsal process which, as becomes apparent in the series of dance solos
performed by the actors and actresses, itself quotes cultural materials and
contexts, and introduces them into the world of the performance. Thus,
on the level of its content, the performance also deals with its own mak-
ing. The making of the performance, then, becomes part of the level of
representation. To refer to Émile Benveniste and Tzvetan Todorov’s dis-
tinction between histoire and discours, one might say that what the per-
formance deals with on the level of histoire, or the story it unfolds, finds
its referent in the discourse that produces it, and vice versa (Todorov
1981/1966, 132). A work of art displays how it is made at the same
time as it is created.
The self-referentiality of form and content must, however, not be
misunderstood as an elitist strategy of art for art’s sake. If, as I argue,
the power relations between director and actors are part of the rehearsal
process, Disabled Theater projects them on stage where they suddenly
belong to the content of the performance. Only then do they enter
into play and become negotiable, that is they become open for us to see,
judge, agree, or disagree with. The power relations inherent in the appa-
ratus of theatre and its constituent organs of director, actor, technician,
scenographer, and audience are included in the reflexive and critical pro-
cess of the performance itself. Thus, Disabled Theater not only confronts
us with how Jérôme Bel dealt with disabled actors and actresses, the
result of how they have been staged, but the piece also makes us aware of
the functions of the performance as well as the conflicts inherent in the
interactions of these roles in the process of staging.
In the reduced set-up of the performance, this becomes most evi-
dent in the section where the actors are asked to voice their opinions
about the show. After Damian Bright has stated that he likes the show
very much, he confesses that his mother has seen it, too. “She said that
it is a kind of freak show. But she liked it a lot!” This is more than can
be said about Matthias Brücker’s parents and sister. “My parents did not
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  253

like it. My sister cried in the car. She said we were like animals in the zoo.
Scratching and fingers in the mouth.” By including audience, or even
more strongly, family reactions in the performance, we are immediately
referred back to our own judgments. On what grounds does Damian’s
mother think that the performance is a freak show? Did we, too, see it
that way? Is it fun to watch freak shows, and why does she like to watch
freak shows even though she thinks it might be problematic to like them?
Do human beings that scratch themselves in public and put their fin-
gers in their mouths lack humanity and are therefore relegated to the
presumably lower status of animals in the zoo, to be stared at? Why do
we think about people with cognitive alterations as lacking culture and
being animal-like? Disabled Theater draws our attention to the grounds
of our own value judgments by constantly disorienting the stable posi-
tion from which to judge. What is more, the eleven actors and actresses
perceive themselves as constantly being judged. Never allowed to sim-
ply ‘be’, everything they do or say is refracted in a net of contradictory
points of view which clearly exposes their so-called disablities as a discur-
sive construction. 
But it is not only the judgment or perception we have as members
of the audience that is being put into question. It is also the direc-
tor’s judgment on, and his perception of, what he liked and disliked
that is laid open and even corrected, thus redressing the power balance
between actor and director. Originally, Bel had chosen only seven out
of the eleven solos the actors and actresses came up with to be shown in
front of the audience. In his statement, actor Gianni Blumer complained
about Jérôme Bel’s choice of solos to be performed. “I am not happy
with the solos,” Gianni says. “I want to be part of the seven best, too. I
did not dare to complain to Jérôme Bel, because actually he is very nice.
I was very angry not being able to dance. I am the best dancer. And
I want to make the audience laugh.” With a significant change in the
structure of the speech acts performed in the piece, with his next com-
mand, Bel addresses not the actors but himself: “After that Jérôme finally
decided to show the four solos he didn’t choose.” Yet, again Jérôme
Bell’s change of mind destabilizes not only his own position of power,
but also the stable position from which the audience judges what they
see or hear. When is a dance a good dance? When does Jérôme Bel, after
all a famous choreographer, think that a dance is a good dance? Both the
actors and members of the audience perceive themselves, their respective
actions and acts of judgment in a field of heterogeneous points of view
254  G. Siegmund

that destabilize any solid ground from which to claim one single truth
about what we have seen and heard.
I would like to take the structuralist argument developed above
a little further. With Derrida in mind, I want to insist on the iterabil-
ity of the speech acts of the six plus one commands the translators give
(Derrida 1988). One crucial function of iteration is that it has the power
to de- and re-contextualize the thing or word iterated. Repetition,
as Judith Butler never fails to remind us, always produces a difference.
What is crucial for the question of power relations inherent in Disabled
Theater is that repetition deprives the notion of power of its essential-
ist implications. It is surely not only for pragmatic reasons of time and
availability that Jérôme Bel does not himself participate in the per-
formance and commands the actors in person. Instead, the translators
translate his commands into the performance situation. Thus, the iter-
ation shifts the power away from the individual Jérôme Bel bestowing
it unto a name, Jérôme, which in the performance functions as a signi-
fier of power. Taking into consideration Jérôme Bel’s concern with
the author as a discursive function with a proper name as its sign for a
special way of writing, an écriture, it becomes evident that the Jérôme
of whom the translators speak does not only refer to the actual person
Jérôme Bel. Rather, it also refers to the (depersonalized, structural)
function of power that organizes the field of performance. Similar to the
actors and actresses who become speaking subjects in the process of the
performance by assuming a performance persona under their public
name, Jérôme Bel is subjectified by assuming the position of Jérôme, the
name that organises the field of performance and the position of power
as author of the piece. The credits in the programme notes list Jérôme
Bel as responsible for the concept, whereas all the performers, like Cédric
Andrieux or Pichet Klunchun, are given credit not only for performing
but also for creating the show. What is left of the individuals who argued,
demanded, wished for, resisted, answered, shared, or simply followed the
demands during the rehearsal process are generalized functions exposing
the structure beneath manifest power relations in the theatre apparatus.
How, then, can these power relations change? As Gianni Blumer’s
intervention or speech act demonstrates, they may change when the
position of power is confronted with its own contradictions. If one of
the rules according to which Jérôme organises his écriture is to give the
eleven actors and actresses agency over what they do and say, on which
grounds then does he initially deprive four of them precisely of that
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  255

agency? If, as actress Miranda Hossle states, her task is to be herself, why

then is another self worth less than her self? The contradiction Jérôme
runs up against lies in his desire not to judge, not to rate the performers
according to their individual abilities as dancers or performers, and not
to distinguish among them to produce more and less valuable perfor-
mances. So, before they all take their bows, the remaining four perform-
ers are given time to perform their respective solos.
The eleven solos of the actors and actresses make up the core of
Disabled Theater. They are organized in two simple series of dances fol-
lowing each other without transition, comment, or narrative context. As
with the other demands, the translators call up the actors and actresses
one by one and ask them to perform. Tiziana Pagliaro is the first one
to take the stage, doing little jumps, flicking her hair, and bowing back-
wards to an Italian song. Remo Beuggert is acting cool by remaining
seated on a chair center stage. He starts his dance by rolling his head and
pointing with his fingers like a musical conductor, before he gets up and
includes the chair into his dance. Miranda Hossle, supported by several
percussionists among her colleagues, chooses a very rhythmical music
to which she moves by isolating her limbs. Julia Häusermann takes on
the full force of Michael Jackson’s They Don’t Care About Us, pointing,
marching and crotch-gripping gestures included, while Peter Keller sim-
ply raises his right hand in the air smiling his way through Du bist mein
Stern (You are my star). While Damian Bright runs in circles around the
stage taking command of a hard techno track, which impels also some of
the other actors to beat the rhythm, Lorraine Meier pirouettes to Abba’s
Dancing Queen, falling into ballet poses every now and again. At the
beginning it is clear that all of the dancers are fluent in the language of
popular culture, quoting and interpreting its gestures, movements, and
emotional content. In fact, they do as anybody else would do if asked
to choreograph and show a dance. Disabled Theater, then, is another
example of the discourse Jérôme Bel: it presents a series of images with
no transitions between the scenes. As will be become clear in this section,
it also articulates a specific relation to modern and contemporary dance
and makes use of cultural gestures and movements that are quoted and
repeated by the individual actors and actresses, thus playing, at first sight
at least, on the idea of difference as the productive force for subjectivity.
But the way Bel deals with difference here is indeed different from
both The Last Performance and The Show Must Go On. In The Last
Performance the same choreography, Susanne Linke’s Wandlung, was
256  G. Siegmund

repeated several times by both male and female dancers in full sight of
the audience or behind a moving curtain, leaving the audience to imag-
ine the dance. Thus, with each repetition the differences in the execu-
tion of the choreography become apparent, the individual bodies
failing to exactly repeat the dance, thus flexing and shifting perception
and meaning. The Show Must Go On, for one thing, did not consist of
one piece of music and choreography, but of a sequence of 19 popu-
lar songs that where not repeated in the course of the performance.
The production of difference therefore took place within each song and
dance that was, with the exception of the DJ following the command
of Tina Turner’s Private Dancer, danced by the whole ensemble. The
audience could compare individual ways of performing the task that con-
sisted of performing the lyrics of the songs’ choruses. Apart from that,
The Show Must Go On secretly spun a narrative between the songs. The
piece played on the myth of creation. It conceptualized the theatre as a
place where, with each performance, worlds are created that die when
the show is over only to begin again with the next show.
In Disabled Theater there is no secret narrative that links the songs
and dances. There is no repetition, neither synchronically nor diachroni-
cally, apart from the structuring device of sequencing the dances. There
is no comparison, because the material is different to begin with and no
two dancers do the same thing. What Disabled Theater surely shares with
Bel’s other pieces is his trust in the cultural production of bodies. The
eleven solos are wonderful examples of how the appropriation of cultural
knowledge, gestures, and movements informs the bodies of the actors
and actresses. These cultural inscriptions function in the same way for
everyone, whether abled or disabled. Beyond the specific bourgeois taste
that has to be acquired by conscious choice or through exposure to cer-
tain works of art, popular culture as the great equalizer permeates all of
us because we are surrounded by it whether or not we realise it. It is cul-
ture that makes us and our bodies human. What Disabled Theater does
not show is that we are all human beings because we are, as humans,
naturally alike. We are human beings because we are culturally alike. But
in which respect are we culturally alike?
If the ways of inscription function similarly for everybody, then the
first answer to this question is that we are culturally alike because we are
all subject to the laws of repetition and difference. But this cannot be
enough. The individual results of how the actors and actresses dealt with
the cultural material in their respective choreographies are, of course,
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  257

different. As such, they may be judged as better or worse dancers, as

more or less to the liking or taste of the choreographer. Bel’s own artis-
tic choice of only seven out of eleven solos is evidence of this. So, cul-
turally, we are not alike. Here it is worth noting that in Bel’s work the
very notion of difference seems to have shifted. While in The Show Must
Go On difference was seen as a creative trigger for playful subject pro-
ductions, in more recent pieces like Cédric Andrieux with their focus on
the power mechanisms of the dance world, the idea of difference devel-
oped strong negative connotations. Now, difference is used to judge and
evaluate people’s abilities. It is used to keep them in their place. Being a
subject, on the one hand, subjects you to the normative codes of society,
while, on the other, it gives you the freedom to play with these codes.
But being a subject in this sense does not give you the force or drive to
play. In Disabled Theater, finally, the sphere of popular culture that so
prominently features in Jérôme Bel’s pieces simply appears to be the
privileged sphere where something beyond difference articulates itself. It is
something that cannot appear without working on cultural material but
is nonetheless not identical with the material worked on.
It is significant that after avoiding to stage proper dances in almost
all of his pieces in favor of a physical, but nonetheless highly discursive
negotiation of dance, the body and choreography, Disabled Theater
unapologetically indulges in eleven dance solos. The fact that the per-
formers of Theater HORA are actors and actresses and not trained
dancers surely is a central aspect here. Their bodies are not trained suf-
ficiently in any kind of dance technique to teach them normative move-
ment patterns that some may master while others will not. The actors
and actresses dance without pretensions to deliver a technically perfect
dance. Instead, like Gianni Blumer who thinks he is the best dancer, they
present dances that are true to their imagination. This is what the piece
shows: the power to appropriate forms and formats and fill them with
personal desire as a driving force—not to express themselves for the audi-
ence but rather to project versions of what they might be by producing
personas in order to seduce and play with. What makes the solos so com-
pelling to watch is the actors’ ability to lose themselves in the dance, to
abandon themselves to the point of recklessness while at the same time
trying to retain control over the form they chose to create. What we see
is a constant doing and undoing of form, of control, the loss and regain-
ing of control, which makes the dances risky. When Lorraine Meier has
to stop momentarily to catch her breath amidst the never-ending swirls
258  G. Siegmund

of spiraling strings in “Dancing Queen,” or when Julia Häusermann can-

not connect her Michael Jackson crotch-grabbing pose to her next move,
the actors put their performance at risk. In moments like these, it is the
ongoing and relentless force behind the power to master the form that
becomes paramount.
In Disabled Theater, Bel’s attention shifts away from the regulation
mechanisms that produce difference (training, repetition, the power of
the director or choreographer) to a state where difference does not mat-
ter and jouissance sets in. According to Lacan, jouissance is a surplus of
meaning, a state beyond meaning where meaning collapses when the
symbolic universe momentarily connects to the register of the real to
which we generally have no access. Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s sing-
ing of Gustav Mahler’s “The Farewell” in 3Abschied was an earlier case in
point. Jouissance is the effect of this touching and always also unpleasant
and disturbing collapse, the response we produce and the perverse enjoy-
ment we get out of something undoing and losing its power to differ-
entiate (Evans 1996, 91–93). Jouissance is a highly ambivalent response
that is produced by, and answers to, the ambiguity of the performance
undoing itself. Here we are approaching a state of in-difference. I delib-
erately choose the term in-difference despite the negative connotations
that it entails. In this state of in-difference, I argue, lies the “critique of
the critique” of theatre and dance that Bel spoke about in the conver-
sation with his dramaturgue. In the final section I will explain what in-
difference means in the context of Disabled Theater.
In Disabled Theater, Jérôme Bel moves from difference to in-differ-
ence. What emerges in Disabled Theater is precisely a force that trans-
forms cultural material and performers alike. In the dances of the
performers something appears that operates ‘in’ difference. It works
from within social difference to a point that carries difference away
towards an indifference to difference. In his concept of aesthetics, the
German philosopher Christoph Menke aims at developing a theory of
equality and freedom that is rooted in the notion of the aesthetic as play.
Human beings are equal in their potential for reason, or for transgress-
ing their social conditions of being. The most important political eman-
cipation for Menke is not the “emancipation of differences from political
oppression,” for differences give way to ever more differences dividing
us according to what we are and can do. “The most important political
emancipation,” he writes, “the emancipation that gives rise to politics, is
emancipation from the differences that constitute our abilities and us as
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  259

able (or unable, less able, and variously able).” (Menke 2011, 13–14) To
argue this type of emancipation, he distinguishes between the two con-
cepts of “force” and “capacity.” Menke calls the ability of human beings
to learn, to become social beings and even experts capacity, faculty or
power (Vermögen). He opposes it to the concept of force (Kraft) that
produces transformations of what we have learned or acquired (Menke
2013a, b). For Menke, this distinction between capacity and force
becomes important in relation to the political dimension of art and aes-
thetics. If the promise of art since the late eighteenth century has been
the freedom of man, in what then is this freedom grounded? In force,
which is pre-subjective, yet human. Neither freedom nor equality are a
given. “Man is neither free nor equal by nature,” Menke states, referring
to Hannah Arendt’s “prepolitical state of nature, which is,” as Menke
points out, “nevertheless a social state: the economic, technical, cultural
state of ‘society,’ the life of ‘private citizens’” (Menke 2011, 11). In this
social state we acquire capacities by learning. We gain skills by training
that turn us into human beings able to successfully partake in society.
However, acquiring capacities also implies that some skills are worth
more than others. We are being graded according to normative values
(worthy-worthless, useful-useless, abled-disabled, etc.) and according to
our capacities to perform (good-bad, productive-unproductive, good
representations-bad representations). “Our capacities socialize but also
disunite us. They are fields for and objects of struggle” (2011, 12).
Seen from this perspective, Jérôme Bel’s criticism of the theatre appa-
ratus and of the normative implications of any kind of dance technique in
solo pieces such as Véronique Doisneau or Cédric Andrieux has primar-
ily dealt with the level of power (Vermögen) in both senses of the term
as capacity to differentiate and as power relations. What was less impor-
tant in the solo pieces so far was precisely the force of imagination to
transcend the power that defines the dancers by subjecting them to its
norms.6 The form as a symbolic structure was only tentatively put at risk;
rather, it was fulfilled. In Disabled Theater, however, Bel rediscovers the
imagination in the eleven actors and actresses to reveal something of that
force that puts both the actors’ and the audience’s acting and thinking at
risk again (Fig. 3).
As I have tried to show above, the power of the performance resides
in the force of the performers to transform themselves while dealing with
cultural material. This force, as Christoph Menke observes, is common
to all before any distinction can be drawn. It is common to all disabled
260  G. Siegmund

Fig. 3  Disabled Theater, Lorraine Maier has Force © Michael Bause

and so-called non-disabled people or performers alike, thus delineating a

space before difference, a space preceding cultural differences that may
include or exclude us (Menke 2013a, 170). Menke’s force is the site of
the unforeseen and unpredictable emergence of an event (Ereignis). It
is human rather than subjective. In fact, force is never given as such. It
can only be seen at work in retrospect once it has engaged with cultural
material that it shapes, forms, and deforms. The force of imagination
becomes concrete in playing with cultural material without being iden-
tical with the material, thus making closure impossible.7 It is through
these acts that our equality (Gleichheit) becomes apparent. It is an equal-
ity that consists in, and simultaneously enables, the possibility or poten-
tial to transcend our social limits and beings.

Having force, in which we are equal, cannot be proved by demonstrat-

ing its objective existence. Equality, as equality of force, is nothing given.
Force, in which we are equal, is a presupposition, because it is there for us,
we experience and know of it only by performing acts in which it unfolds.
Such acts are aesthetic: acts of play, of imagination. They are acts in which
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  261

we go beyond our socially acquired abilities and capacities, in which, in

other words, we do something we can’t do. (Menke 2011, 15–16)

The actors of Theater HORA dance despite the fact that they have no
professional dance training. It is precisely in a field where they are dilet-
tantes in the best sense of the term that they are able to surpass their
social limits, thereby revealing something much more fundamental to
human beings than acquired professional proficiency. With Menke, thus,
equality comes into play as a difference before difference, a difference
that prepares the ground for all the individual differences that come with
cultural learning: a difference that is in-different to difference because it
makes difference possible. One can acquire capacities by cultural learn-
ing, but its sister act, force, undoes what learning, training and educa-
tion have taught us. Form and norm are jeopardized by force. It is on
this ontological level that Menke situates the aesthetic. The aesthetic
is not identical with art, but preferably shows itself in works of art. In
works of art, the gliding or sliding from force to power, from loss of con-
trol to control, from failure to success, exposes itself to be experienced
and reflected. In working with disabled people, this state of in-differ-
ence must not, indeed, be misunderstood as indifference, or careless-
ness as Michael Jackson’s song has it in Julia Häsuermann’s dance solo.
In-difference neither means repressive tolerance that pretends to accept
difference as long as one is not confronted with it. In-difference is the
result of the imagination’s power to do and to undo differences as a
force that is common. Like the actors of Theater HORA everybody can
dance in a way that is true to their imagination. Thus, political equality is
aesthetic in-difference that puts difference itself at risk transcending the
social limits that it helps to create.
Making a point for force as something that is in-different to differ-
ence and thereby common to all, is a risky suggestion. It goes against
the grain of an understanding of difference as an entirely positive power
that enables subjectivity and agency. Instead it draws attention to the
dangers inherent in identity politics based solely on the notion of dif-
ference. First, it makes us aware of the fact that the production of dif-
ferences however equally valid they are as differences goes together with
the production of social value systems that rate certain differences higher
or more productive than others. Second, it underlines the danger that
assuming an identity by the production of difference tends towards clo-
sure of that identity with the risk of identity and difference becoming
262  G. Siegmund

totalitarian notions themselves. Difference to others makes you blind

to the fact that to begin with you are never identical with yourself. In
this sense force works against subjectivity and identity even while one
assumes it. Force is the reminder and remainder of something that pre-
cedes the subject that Menke calls the “human.” Thus its politics operate
on a different level than the politics of difference with its call for politi-
cal engagement and negotiation between the interests of different social
groups. Force, which is blind to any particular kind of difference, helps
to enable the production of differences. Situating the political at such a
fundamental level of equality has the advantage of it preventing the clo-
sure of any system, group, or subject whose borders must ultimately be
policed in order to safeguard their identity. It provides an opening into
seemingly closed systems and by doing so it enables the possibility for
change. As every work of art reminds us by the production of ambiva-
lence it is the very reason why there can be no closed system or identity.8
The theatre is engaged in this paradox of becoming and re-presenta-
tion. Within this paradox the play with difference belongs to the side
of representation and the value judgments attached to it, whereas the
side of force belongs to the side of becoming or transformation. While
the first settles for a form, the second undoes what he first has settled
on. Whereas the first asks actors, dancers, and performers to assume an
identity or subjectivity, the second undermines it and opens it up. Thus,
bringing force into play gives something back to audiences and perform-
ers alike; it gives something back that is human and therefore common
to all as a source of their equality.9
Disabled Theater, thus, is a political piece, because it is highly aes-
thetic. Radically speaking, it is not political, because it gives a minority
group (physically and mentally challenged people) space for representa-
tion and agency in a field (the theatre) where traditionally it has none.
Rather, it is political because it systematically destroys any kind of secure
ground from which to differentiate between an appropriate or inappro-
priate representation of disabled people, between power on the one hand
and powerlessness on the other, between good or bad dancing and, more
important in the context of disability, between what is to be considered
as abled or disabled. If it is correct that, whenever an intellectually chal-
lenged actor or actress appears on stage, we cannot not see the role he or
she is playing through the lense of disability (Dederich 2007, 43), then it
is this very difference that is at stake here. In Disabled Theater, the non-
disabled members of the audience, of course, see mentally disabled actors
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  263

dancing—only, however, to reveal our point of communality as the

potential to transform. The piece questions the very grounds on which
our judgments about disabled people, power relations, and individual
capacities are based. Constantly forcing us to re-think, re-consider, and
re-see what we have already seen and thought—like Bel had to re-think
his decision to exclude four solos—it engages both our experiencing and
our thinking and pushes them beyond their limits.

Tombe (2016): Risking the Institution

Twelve years after Véronique Doisneau, Jérôme Bel was once again
invited to produce a piece for the Paris Opera. Tombe, or Tomb, is a con-
tinuation of Bel’s concerns with contemporary dance as representation
of a democratic society. The piece consists of three duets that bring Bel’s
work with diverse forms of dance andphysically and mentally challenged
or non-professional dancers to the heart of the national institution,
which for him is still representative of an aristocratic society out of synch
with the concerns and problems of contemporary France. As Florian
Gaité describes it, the curtain rises over the décor of the second act of
Giselle with a sepulchre in the foreground (Gaité 2016). The tomb is
the tomb of Giselle, who having died at the end of Act 1, together with
the Wilis each night at midnight reappears from the grave to dance and
enchant young men lost in the forest. Beginning the performance in the
décor of another piece, the most romantic of all classical ballets, is a form
of appropriation. Like a parasite, Bel here sneaks into ballet’s established
form and shape only to undo it from the inside, to use the institutional
support for his own purposes. Metaphorically, this gesture characterises
ballet as a dance from the tomb, which like the figure of Giselle rises
from the graveyard of the Paris Opera with each performance of the clas-
sical repertoire. The stage of the Opera becomes the graveyard of dance.
At the same time, this criticism is extended to the Opera Ballet as an
institution, which becomes a vault, a building closed off from society,
dedicated to the memory of an art form that, according to Bel, says very
little about the lives of people today (Fig. 4).
The repertoire of the Paris Opera Ballet today no longer exclusively
consists of pieces from the classical or neo-classical ballet repertoire. It
also includes works from the modernist traditions of both Germany and
the United States, and commissions productions from younger, contem-
porary choreographers with diverse backgrounds in dance. Its repertoire
264  G. Siegmund

Fig. 4  Tombe, Parasites at the Paris Opera, photographie © Benoîte Fanton

also includes pieces by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Boris Charmatz,

whose work since the 1980s and 1990s championed a different kind of
corporeality. After all, in 2004 Bel himself enjoyed great success at the
Opera with Véronique Doisneau. In this respect, Jérôme Bel’s criticism of
the institution as being inert and unable to change may be unfounded.
Yet, however exemplary the Opera’s repertoire politics are in one respect,
its repertoire remains faithful to the canon of Western concert dance
without questioning the canon and its mechanisms of in- and exclu-
sion. Furthermore, rules and disciplinary protocols of presentation are
observed with only professionally trained dancers with a certain physique
and corporeality being part of the company.
These are precisely the points that Jérôme Bel takes issue with in
Tombe. For the first duet Grégory Gaillard and Henda Traore walk onto
the scene of Giselle as if they were visiting a foreign planet. Like tour-
ists, they point out the architectural features and majestic decorations of
the building when in mid-scene the house lights go on and the scenery
changes, displaying the technical apparatus of the theatre as a machin-
ery of illusion and make believe. With the gesture of Roland Barthes’
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  265

mythologist, Bel demystifies the aristocratic splendour of the Palais

Garnier. He replaces the seductive pomp of its glorious former days
with a vision of contemporary dance based on the very features the Paris
Opera Ballet must exclude to stabilise its identity as one of the most
prestigious ballet companies in the world. As in Cour d’honneur, Bel
stages that which cannot be spoken of on stage, bringing it into the open
of the brightly lit arena. Although the audience’s memories are part of
the performance situation, their habitual place is with the audience off
stage where they may be shared or become part of discussions, which,
however, do not affect the representation on stage. Bel stages the ob-
scene, which must remain unseen und unheard backstage in order for the
representation of dance on stage to be successful.
The idea behind Tombe is as simple as its structure is clear. Three male
dancers from the company ranging in rank from coryphée, to sujet, and
étoile, invited three female partners to develop a duet together. Each
duet is a sign of that which the Opera Ballet excludes: dance from non-
Western cultures, physically challenged dancers, non-professional danc-
ers. That which is excluded by the institution is here entirely articulated
in relation to the female body, offering further reflections on the power
relations between the genders and the role of women both in dance and
our societies in general. After their visit to the grave of Giselle, Gaillard
and Traore engage in a duet that breaks down the code of ballet by mix-
ing it with movements from African dance. The disciplined body of bal-
let segues into a body with a different balance, shiftings of weight and
relation to gravity, which allows the protagonists’ greater freedom and
enjoyment in movement. Sébastien Bertaud arranges his duet with the
physically challenged dancer Sandra Escudé, who dances in a wheel-
chair. In a piece of classical choreography Escudé elegantly and effort-
lessly stands her ground, as Florian Gaité reports, with her amputated
leg lifted into the air, demonstrating her strength and aesthetic sensi-
bilities (Gaité 2016). In the last duet of the piece, Benjamin Pech pays
tribute to Sylviane Milley, a balletomane with the Opera for sixty years.
Like in Cour d’honneur, the idea was to call a spectator unto the stage
to give her the opportunity to demonstrate her deep knowledge of bal-
let and her delicate and sensitive way of communication through move-
ment. Milley’s dream was bound to come true towards the end of her
life. Although not a professional dancer herself, she was to become an
expert amongst experts, both sides of the proscenium being united in
their love for ballet. Unfortunately, however, Milley was hospitalised
266  G. Siegmund

before the premiere for loss of memory due to dementia. To remember

her and her expertise, her last rehearsals with Pech are shown on film
as the last duet of Tombe, a duet that turns into another reflection on
death and dance, on memory and time passing. Like the Wilis in Giselle
whose tomb at the beginning of the performance was transformed into
an effect of the theatre apparatus, Milley cannot stop dancing up there
on the screen, the media safeguarding her afterlife in the twilight zone
between physical death and symbolic life. Towards the end of the perfor-
mance Tombe indeed appears to be the grave of the institution, but also
the wistful reminder that institutions like the Paris Opera Ballet produce
and communicate all this knowledge that Milley had gathered. It pro-
duces memories and keeps desires alive, which, for the sake of the future
of the institution, can never be underestimated.

Notes
1. German sociologist Dirk Baecker, working within the school of Niklas
Luhman’s system theory, distinguishes between four main types of cultures
that historically succeeded each other. The oral society of ancient Greece
was replaced by a culture of writing, which in turn, with the invention of
the printing machine, was succeeded by book culture. These shifts in cul-
tures are brought about by a change of the leading medium, which, once it
has been introduced, provides a surplus of information society has not yet
found a way of ordering, processing, and stabilising. With the computer
succeeding the book as the main medium in contemporary society, which
Baecker calls the “coming society,” knowledge and its production, distri-
bution, and organisation as well as the social communication processes it
entails need to be verified again, which leads to a period of heightened
observation, checking, and trial and error procedures to find out what
communicates and how (Beacker 2007). The term “multiude” was coined
by Paulo Virno to describe an ambivalent figure that stands in opposi-
tion to the citizen and the (bourgeois capitalist) order it represents. As an
unruly assembly of people the multitude holds the potential for numerous
forms of sociability and self-determination (Virno 2004).
2. All the quotations given form the productions analysed in this chapter are
my transcriptions and translations from the video recordings.
3. This argument was brought forward by Gisela Höhne during a panel dis-
cussion I participated in on 30 May 2013 in Zurich after a performance
of Disabled Theater. Gisela Höhne is the founder and director of Berlin-
based company “Theater RambaZamba”, a well known theatre company
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  267

working with mentally challenged actors and actresses. The discussion was
published in Bugiel and Elber (2014, 384–398).
4. The argument against the production as merely representing “a domesti-
cated otherness” and being “a fell-good theatre piece” was brought for-
ward in the same discussion (Bugiel and Elber 2014, 396) against my
humanistic argument that for me the show ultimately made disability
disappear.
5. I assume the position of a non-disabled person and posit this group with
some historical accuracy as the regular theatre-going audience of the past
50 years. If physically or mentally challenged people are in the audience, as
may very well be the case, the relation of the gazes will be further compli-
cated causing a split even in the auditorium.
6. Especially in Cédric Andrieux, but also in Pichet Klunchun and Myself, this
leads to a certain discursive dryness or barrenness of the pieces as pieces of
art, whereas Véronique Doisneau used the dancer’s imaginative force to a
higher degree.
7. In a similar argument, Wolfgang Iser (1993) isolates the force of imagi-
nation (das Imaginäre) from its individual acts of realisation by means of
the fictitious, or the fictive (das Fiktive) to form specific works of fiction
(die Fiktion). The fictitious works on the boundless imagination to give
it a form through specific acts. For Slavoj Žižek (1997, 127–167) in his
reading of Lacan, phantasy is precisely that which prevents the closure of
worlds. Since it belongs to the register of the symbolic mediating desire
and the eternal return of the same that belongs to the drive, it opens up
possibilities for the appearance of the unforeseen.
8. For a more elaborate discussion on the notion of dance and politics see
Siegmund (2016, 2017).
9. In relation to Paolo Virno’s work, Ramsay Burt describes Virno’s con-
cept of the “general intellect” as constituting “common-pool resources
that contribute to the life of communities in general” (Burt 2017, 22).
Although Menke’s concept of force is basically an anthropological one, it
shares with Virno’s more socially and practically oriented term a common
concern for human equality and freedom and how they may be achieved.

References
Baecker, Dirk. 2007. Studien zur nächsten Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a. M:
Suhrkamp.
Barthes, Roland. 1993. Avignon, l’hiver. In Oeuvres Completes, Tome I, 1942–
1965, ed. Éric Marty, 393–395. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Bel, Jérôme and Marcel Bugiel. 2012. Interview About Disabled Theater.
http://www.jeromebel.fr/textsandinterviews/detail/?textInter=disabled%
268  G. Siegmund

20theater%20-%20marcel%20bugiel%20and%20jerome%20bel. Accessed 24
Feb 2017.
Bel, Jérôme, and Theater HORA. 2012. Disabled Theatre, Recording and ed.
Walter Bickmann. Berlin: HAU1.
Bel, Jérôme. 2013. Cour d’honneur. Directed by Don Kent. France television. 
Bel, Jérôme, and Boris Charmatz. 2013. Emails 2009–2010. Dijon: Les presses
du réel.
Bel, Jérôme, and Marcel Bugiel. 2014. Auftreten und leuchten. Theater und
Behinderung—eine Spurensuche zwischen Integration und künstlerischer
Autonomie. Theater der Zeit 4: 12–15.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1988. The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris.
Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press.
Bugiel, Marcel, and Michael Elber (eds.). 2014. Theater HORA. Berlin: Theater
der Zeit.
Burt, Ramsay. 2017. Ungoverning Dance: Contemporary European Theatre Dance
and the Commons. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dederich, Markus. 2007. Körper, Kultur und Behinderung: Eine Einführung in
die Disability Studies. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.
Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Signature Event Context. In Limited Inc, 1–23.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Evans, Dylan. 1996. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New
York: Routledge.
Gaité, Florian. 2016. Tombe. http://www.jeromebel.fr/performances/presentat
ion?performance=Tombe. Accessed 25 Nov 2016.
Hilton, Leon. 2014. Presence, Rhetoric, Difference: Jérôme Bel and Theater
HORA’s Disabled Theater. TDR: The Drama Review 58 (3): 156–162.
Iser, Wolfgang. 1993. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary
Anthropology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby.
Abingdon: Routledge.
Menke, Christoph. 2011. Aesthetics of Equality/Ästhetik der Gleichheit, dOCU-
MENTA 13, 10, Notes—100 Thoughts No.10. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz.
Menke, Christoph. 2013a. Die Kraft der Kunst. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Menke, Christoph. 2013b. Force. A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic
Anthropology, trans. Gerrit Jackson. New York: Fordham University Press.
Osborne, Peter. 2013. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art.
London: Verso.
Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked. The Politics of Performance. London:
Routledge.
Rifkin, Jeremy. 2001. The Culture of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism.
New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher and Putnam.
 SUBJECTS AT RISK  269

Rivière, Jean-Loup. 2001. Roland Barthes Schriften zum Theater. In Ich habe das
Theater immer sehr geleibt, und dennoch gehe ich fast nie mehr hin, ed. Roland
Barthes, 7–18. Berlin: Alexander Verlag.
Rosas, and Jérôme Bel. 2010. 3Abschied. Recording and ed. Olivia Rochette and
Gerard-Jan Claes. Paris: Théâtre de la Ville and Festival d’Automne.
Scheie, Timothy. 2006. Performance Degree Zero: Roland Barthes and Theatre.
Toronto: Toronto University Press.
Siegmund, Gerald. 2016. Mobilization, Force, and the Politics of
Transformation. DRJ: Dance Research Journal 48 (3): 27–32.
Siegmund, Gerald. 2017. Rehearsing In-Difference. The Politics of Aesthetics in
the Perforamnces of Pina Bausch and Jérôme Bel. In The Oxford Handbook
of Dance and Politics, eds. Rebekah Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy
Martin, 181–198. New York: Oxford University Press.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1981. Les catégories du récit littéraire. Comunications 8:
131–158.
Umathum, Sandra. 2015. …Actors, Nonetheless. Disabled Theater, ed. Sandara
Umathum and Benjamin Wihstutz, 99–112. Berlin: Diaphanes Verlag.
Umathum, Sandra, and Benjamin Wihstutz. (eds.). 2015. Disabled Theater.
Berlin: Diaphanes Verlag.
Virno, Paolo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wallin. Scott. 2015. Come Together: Discomfort and Longing in Jérôme
Bel’s “Disabled Theater”. In Disabled Theater, eds. Sandara Umathum and
Benjamin Wihstutz, 61–80. Berlin: Diaphanes Verlag.
Wihstutz, Benjamin. 2015. “…And I am an Actor”. On Emancipation in
“Disabled Theater”. In Disabled Theater, eds. Sandara Umathum and
Benjamin Wihstutz, 35–50. Berlin: Diaphanes Verlag.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. The Plague of Phantasies. London: Verso.
 Dance in Its Post-medium Condition

On 15 January 2016, I attended another performance of Gala, this time

at Tanzquartier in Vienna, Austria. Just three days prior, on 12 January
in Istanbul on Sultan Ahmed Square a suicide bomber had killed twelve
people and left thirteen injured, most of them tourists visiting the pop-
ular area of the Turkish metropolis. One year before, in the very same
place another terrorist attack had killed several policemen and women.
On 13 November 2015, 130 people were killed and 352 injured when
Paris was hit by a series of coordinated terrorist attacks threatening foot-
ball fans in the Stade de France, killing rock fans at the Bataclan night
club and dinner guests in several cafés and bars in the 10th and 11th
districts of Paris. While all this shocked the world, the killing in Syria
had already been underway for five years with millions of refugees mak-
ing their way into its neighbouring states and into the European Union,
which, as a reaction, eventually closed its borders. With the attacks in
Istanbul still fresh on our minds, the performance of Gala with its cel-
ebratory spirit of diversity seemed at once terribly naïve and touchingly
apt (Fig. 1).
Jérôme Bel’s representation of an ideal society, its politics of diversity
and inclusion, looks suspiciously like a politically correct utopia. Every
single item on the news accuses Gala of being a lie. Who are we to
believe in this fairy tale of a peaceful contemporary society, which, as a
fairy tale, is not that different from the traditional fairy tales of the ballet
repertoire? But perhaps the piece is also an adequate reaction in defiance
of the current social and political situation of threat, fear, and anxiety.

© The Author(s) 2017 271

G. Siegmund, Jérôme Bel, New World Choreographies,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55272-3_7
272  G. Siegmund

Fig. 1  Gala, Everybody Dance Now! © Herman Sorgeloos

If dance is always also a representation of the society it is produced by,

if it, like ballet, represents the values a society is built on, then certainly
the values put on display by Gala are well worth enacting and project-
ing, especially in times when living these ideals seems an impossible task.
What is the common ground on which we can build a (new) form of
communality? How do we live together? Once again, the simplicity of
the structure and the clarity of the piece’s presentation turn everything
that happens on stage into a significant gesture. The constituency of
dancers is both an intellectual sign, as Roland Barthes believes, that in its
duplicity never loses its visceral corporeality.
If one looks more closely, however, not all is well in Gala’s politically
correct fairyland. After all, the heterogeneous line up of professional and
non-professional dancers with diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds is
not only a representation of our globalised urban living spaces. Gala also
depicts the problems related to these “zones of contact” (Osborne) we
live in. It stages a “zone of contact” between individuals that directly
affects the form of the performance. Their establishment of contact poses
a veritable problem for the performance as a performance, which threatens
 DANCE IN ITS POST-MEDIUM CONDITION  273

to collapse any minute. As in Disabled Theater, the performers in Gala risk

what they know, thereby putting their identity as both social and perform-
ing subjects at risk. I will briefly deal with this risk in two ways here, first
by looking at the form of the performance, which is the level on which
this risk is being acted out or performed, and second by assessing the con-
cept of Gala and its more general repercussions within the contemporary
field of dance.
Gala is indeed a very fragile operation. For in every city or region
Gala is playing, an entire new cast of up to 20 dancers is assembled.
Performers with various backgrounds in physical cultures are invited to
submit a video with a solo they developed and which they dance them-
selves. The show will ultimately be built on these very solos the success-
ful applicants bring to the rehearsals. Whether a candidate is chosen or
rejected primarily depends on the mix of characters the concept of Gala
requires. A few days before the premiere the show is put together and
rehearsed by two of Jérôme Bel’s assistants. There are 10 assistants alto-
gether. In Vienna, Chiara Gallerini and Maxime Kurvers took responsi-
bility for the cast. Given the herculean task of having to coordinate and
prepare nearly twenty dancers in only five and sometimes even fewer days
of rehearsals, the results obviously vary from city to city. I have attended
three different versions of Gala in three different cities. In one version,
the difference between professional dancers and non-professional danc-
ers was just too big to question standards of representation or presen-
tation. Some dancers assume their tasks more seriously. Others are just
sketching them. Their choice of music is more or less dynamic. Their
solos are more or less captivating. Performance attitudes vary consider-
ably: in some versions some dancers look as if they do not want to be
on stage at all, while others just like it a little bit too much. At worst,
Gala exudes the spirit of a school performance with parents, friends, and
relatives cheering on their beloveds in cheesy and outrageous costumes
on stage. At best, Gala strikes the right balance between having fun
and the effort it takes to seriously communicate with others. The short
rehearsal span is thus conducive to the aim of the production to keep the
search for a common ground of communication fresh and open, to actu-
ally present communication as a task and not as an achievement. With
every performance and with every cast the struggle begins anew. The risk
lies in overstepping the thin line between knowing and not knowing; the
complementary dangers of the dancers’ playing it safe and being inatten-
tive lurking on either side of the divide. If the performance succeeds, one
274  G. Siegmund

sees subjects standing their own ground dancing figures from the ballet
repertoire in defiance of their lack of technical skills. But defiance can
easily look like failure, which, if it is all you see, gives the performance a
cynical note.
If the performers in Gala manage to keep these impulses at bay, their
fear of opening up to the movement of the other is the most striking fea-
ture of their performance. Once the chorus of dancers has worked its way
through the more dutiful tasks of dancing bits of ballet, waltz, and even
Michael Jackson, they are finally ready to shine with their own choreogra-
phies. In the section “Company Company” a member of the group steps
forward to present his or her solo, while the rest of the company has to
follow, trying to pick up the movements in an act of mimetic learning by
doing. Drastically under-rehearsed by professional standards, just how to
deal with the body of the other and its production of and by movement
becomes the main question. The drama that moves Gala is the fear of
the other’s body. The dancers oscillate between hesitation and determi-
nation, observing and moving, rationalising the movement and recklessly
abandoning their bodies to its force. Quite a few of them are reluctant to
join in, only loosening up when it is their turn to dance their own solos.
The actors on stage in Gala are in a constant state of negotiation: How
to respond to the other’s proposition, which only approximately fits one’s
own body and which one may not like at all; how to try and get close
to the other’s body by moving along with it; how to take on the other’s
body by picking up the right energy, speed, and rhythm and directing it in
space; and how to get into the groove of the other. The fear of the other’s
body is also the fear of failing—failing the task by not being able to cope
with its complexities, and failing the other whose physicality and corpo-
reality remains unassimilable. Like the ballet professionals who suddenly
look unprofessional trying to pick up hip hop movements, they all fail,
unable to unlearn what they know, whether they are professional dancers
or not. To sincerely engage with the other’s proposition, therefore, is a
never-ending task both in Gala and in society at large. What remains is the
effort of touching the other by moving along with him or her, to mutually
give and take a little bit of movement shared in the communal act of danc-
ing. As a performance in an art context, Gala is eminently risky. As a social
experiment, it makes visible what is at stake in building a community.
Gala also raises the stakes on the conceptual level. The piece is a con-
cept without an original manifestation. After the success of The Show Must
Go On, the piece became a repertoire piece for many dance companies
 DANCE IN ITS POST-MEDIUM CONDITION  275

around the world. Not only was Bel touring the production with is own
company, but from Warsaw, Poland, to Vancouver, and to Seoul, differ-
ent versions of the show were staged with local dancers and performers.
The piece is also taught to dance students at schools such as P.A.R.T.S.
in Brussels, Belgium, or Folkwang Hochschule der Künste in Essen,
Germany. Like Gala, two assistants of Bel’s teach the piece in two five-
day rehearsal sessions to students and dancers alike (Bel and Charmatz
2013, 170). Yet with The Show Must Go On the idea of an original pro-
duction remains, and perhaps there are even two originals: the very first
production in 2000 at the Deutsche Schauspielhaus in Hamburg with a
cast of actors from the company, and in 2001 the version with Bel’s own
company that premiered at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris.
With Gala, however, the concept of the performance is literally with-
out an original production. It is a concept travelling without a choreog-
rapher and without a cast. It is a travelling concept that abolishes the idea
of an original production in favour of a myriad of diverse instantiations
all over the globe. The conceptual non-site of Gala, whose visible mani-
festation is the empty theatre that at the beginning of the performance is
shown in all its historical and cultural diversity, over and over again mani-
fests itself in an infinite series of productions of which none can claim to
be the original, the best, or the definitive version. The various instantia-
tions of the concept Gala take site and create spaces in the local and yet
also global theatres they occupy. They inscribe themselves into local con-
texts and act globally at the same time. Like Pichet Klunchun and Myself,
Gala establishes a “zone of contact” between cultures, traditions, and
bodies. The outcome of the encounter, however, like the quality of the
performance, remains uncertain. Within Bel’s trajectory as a post-concep-
tual artist, Gala marks yet another step of the removal of the figure of the
choreographer as a person with a biography. Casting the choreographer
as a figure in the discourse of dance in the period from 1994 to 2004
allowed Bel to produce scintillating and liberating effects of meaning
and pleasure. Freed from the intentional transmission of meaning from
dancer to spectator, the death of the author gave rise to the birth of the
reader, according to Roland Barthes; in particular, a reader who vis-à-vis
Bel’s pieces produces his or her own meaning and subjectivity reading
the cultural signs and creatively engaging in the intelligible propositions
presented on stage. The subject as discourse was the promise of freedom
from the subject positions modern and contemporary dance produced.
In an act of critical desubjugation, Bel re-directed the forces in the
276  G. Siegmund

dispositif of modern and contemporary dance to create his own discourse

with its elements that, in return, produced him as author-subject. With
the shift towards the power relations in specific dance practices from
2004 to 2009, the power relations between Bel himself and the dancers
he works with come under scrutiny. Aiming at the greatest level of equal-
ity between dancer and choreographer diminishes the role of the chore-
ographer to that of facilitator of the dancing subject’s agency.
Form 2010 to 2016, the subjects at risk within the conceptual frame
that Bel provides affected his own position even at such a low level as
that of facilitator. For the move to remove oneself even further from the
realisations of the productions comes at a price that Bel, as the choreog-
rapher-author, has to pay, too. These problems are very clearly problems
of power. On the one hand, Bel abandons control of the performances
of Gala by leaving their orchestration in the hands of assistants. Maybe
this is why, unlike in most of his other productions, Gala does not reflect
the position of the choreographer within the performance. By taking
the choreographer out of the process of realising the performance, the
performers themselves are given the greatest control over their material,
albeit with the assistants trying to guide them along, arranging the order
of solos and developing performance attitudes. At the same time, this very
act of emancipation leaves a vacuum of responsibility. It risks leaving the
performers without orientation about what the concept requires and how
to achieve these requirements. The risk for Jérôme Bel, ultimately, is the
risk that the concept he has authored becomes unrecognisable in its very
manifestation. The risk he takes is the risk of being effaced completely.
Jérôme Bel’s desire to disappear that most visibly manifested itself occurs
in the ending of The Last Performance, where the production of the per-
formance was passed on to the spectators. In Gala, this removal of the
choreographer returns in a much more radical way. The disappearance
of the choreographer in the episode of “Company Company” hands the
stage over entirely to the performers. When at the outset of his solo series
Jérôme Bel claimed that the dancers should no longer be subjugated nei-
ther by him nor art, he also made a claim for dancers or performers to
make use of the stage for their own purposes. If art is simply a tool, but
not the aim of the performance, then Gala is the tool for the perform-
ers to stand up and express themselves and their ideas. Like the actors of
Disabled Theater, they need to inhabit the stage and appropriate it, mak-
ing dance their own. Like the two practices related to the notion of Gala,
one professional, the other educational, Gala marks the line between art
and non-art, once again reducing art to the degree zero of its possibilities.
 DANCE IN ITS POST-MEDIUM CONDITION  277

What is more, the various instantiations of the concepts need not

take the form of a live performance anymore. The concepts for Bel’s
pieces undergo different mediatisations. They are shown in various
types of venues and on various occasions, from theatres and festivals
to exhibitions, museums, and galleries. Bel’s “dance performances”
have even crossed over to film and the visual arts. They blur both the
boundaries of the genres and of the medium-specific forms and con-
texts of each presentation. In this context, it is significant to note that
after Véronique Doisneau’s retirement the live performance of the piece
was replaced by the screening of the film, which was shot during her
last performance at the Paris Opera. To this day, the film enjoys huge
popularity and is still shown at festivals and in museums. The film has
replaced the live performance. In a similar vein, after an initial series
of live performances of the piece Disabled Theater) for the June 2013
opening of dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany, (and again during
the closing week of the exhibition in September 2013), for the entire
duration of the exhibition, a video of the work was shown. Bel’s invi-
tation to participate in a visual art exhibition as a choreographer, like
Trisha Brown before him at dOCUMENTA 12 or Tino Sehgal also
at dOCUMENTA (13), underlines the move away from medium-spe-
cific art to practices deployable in various contexts. While Brown and
Sehgal’s contributions to the exhibition were continuously being per-
formed live by alternating casts, Bel chose to present a film, a film as
choreography as a piece of visual art. Meanwhile, films of other produc-
tions such as The Show Must Go On have also taken on a life of their
own, being shown instead of the live performance at festivals.1 What
holds true for the pieces as such is also a defining feature within the
pieces. In parts, Tombe or Cour d’honneur consist of film recordings.
Drawing up no distinction between the ostensibly live and the mediated
obviously questions the ontological status of the live performance and
begs the question of what actually belongs to the work and what does
not. Is the video or DVD recording merely a secondary spin-off of the
original authentic live show or is it indeed another instantiation of the
concept and therefore the work itself?
Such a shift in the ontology of dance is already inherent in Bel’s con-
cept of the body as always already being implicated in langue and images.
If the body is not conceivable without an image, as a consequence
recorded images may take its place. The substitution of the live with
the recorded nonetheless raises questions. Can the choreographer con-
ceive of his art without relying on dancers?2 Will he or she increase their
278  G. Siegmund

stakes in cultural capital at the expense of the dancers? Are dancers being
made redundant? Now that dance is no longer primarily concerned with
movement, does the living body vanish from the picture, too? A first
answer to these doubts and queries is to underline that fact that seeing
a film appeals to our living bodies as spectators. It produces embodied
thoughts, emotions, and reactions. Even filmic representations of bodies
still have the living body as their index or referent. The living body still
constitutes the horizon for Bel’s artistic universe and the questions that
figure against its background.
Understood in this way, the film ceases to be a representation of an
absent live performance. It assumes the function of a gesture that points
toward the body and its gestures that it reconstitutes and preserves. It is
interesting to note that philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his essay “Notes
on Gesture” argues that it is the gesture and not the image that lies at
the centre of film. In his archaeology of the gesture Agamben states that
the emergence of film and the cinema towards the end of the nineteenth
century is the result of an attempt to re-appropriate the true gesture of
the bourgeoisie, which had been lost in social life. From the point of view
of dance, however, Agamben’s widely received thesis reads slightly dif-
ferently. If cinema is the result of a loss, then dance at the beginning of
the twentieth century was coming into its own. Modern dance, according
to its own understanding, finds the original or true gesture of the body
and expresses it. Rather than losing it, in dance the bourgeoisie finds their
body. The loss of dance’s gesture occurred much later: in the 1960s, and
it continues in full swing today in our globalised media and digital socie-
ties. Jérôme Bel’s work documents the loss of the original gesture of the
body. By doing so, he brings the body about as a gesture in the true sense,
which Agamben describes: “What characterizes gesture is that in it noth-
ing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured
and supported. The gesture, in other words, opens the sphere of ethos as
the more proper sphere of that which is human” (Agamben 2000, 56).
What the gesture of dance supports is movement’s mediality and the fact
that human beings are always already in language. “If dance is gesture,”
Agamben continues, “it is so, rather, because it is nothing more than the
endurance and the exhibition of the media character of corporal move-
ments. The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making
a means visible as such. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium
of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them”
(Agamben 2000, 57). As a consequence, dance scholar Peter Dickinson
in his analysis of Cédric Andrieux writes that “the dance film would seem
 DANCE IN ITS POST-MEDIUM CONDITION  279

to be the logical extension of Bel’s theatrical frame: a place where we can

repeatedly arrest, review, and take stock of what, after Agamben, we might
call the biopolitics of choreographed movement, in which the forms that
dance has taken during its institutional lifetime are examined in dialectical
relation to the naked lives of the dancers who are at once included within
and exceptional to that history” (Dickinson 2014, 168).
The dancers in Jérôme Bel’s productions always expose their own medi-
ality. They do so by interrupting the habitual ways a contemporary dance
production employs the body’s physicality and corporeality. Films and live
performances are two ways of producing gestures by interruption. They
are the two sides of the same coin. Both try to come to terms with the
dancers’ exceptionality, their singularity that emerges out of the protocols
of representation, the techniques and technologies that subjugate and pro-
duce the body, and the institutionalised power relations the dancers work
within. Gesture therefore is also “essentially always a gesture of not being
able to figure something out in language”(Agamben 2000, 59), which is
precisely why different media are used to come closer to that basic excep-
tionality of the single dancer. The gesture like Bel’s bodies expresses noth-
ing. Almost passively and stuubornly it supports its own mediality as an
ethical gesture: as an opening to relate to others. Bel’s work is also a search
for possibilities to relate, feel, see, move, and being moved by these singu-
larities. His pieces allow us to come closer to the performers and produce
ethical relations towards themselves and their actions.
The medium-specific understanding of dance, which was a sign of its
modernity, has, since the 1960s, shifted toward dance as an inter-medial
practice. Abandoning dance’s modernist foundations in the kinaesthetic
as its prime medium of aesthetic pleasure and meaning production, dance
as a visual or even “writerly” practice has entered the terrain of the visual
arts and theatre. Rosalind Krauss has labelled the new conditions under
which art is produced and received as its “post-medium condition”
(Krauss 1999). In Jérôme Bel’s work, dance has become a transcategorial
practice. Questioning the nature of dance, its reality and identity, Bel has
produced a highly singular discourse on dance and what it can do. The
elements of his discourse are deployed over a series of productions that
explore dance’s constituent features. The concept ‘Jérôme Bel,’ which
for Bel is still primarily a matter of language, has up until today been
realised in three distinct series that produce subjects of knowledge, of
power and of risk, respectively. Jérôme Bel risks dance by putting perfor-
mance itself and its identity at risk. As such, his dance practice, looking
for freedom within practice itself, is a highly contemporary one.
280  G. Siegmund

Notes
1. 
Jérôme Bel’s homepage lists the performance history of each of his
pieces since their premieres. Included in the histories are the film show-
ings that are merely marked with an asterisk to distinguish them from live
performances.
2. 
In the most recent phase of his artistic work, choreographer William
Forsythe arrives at a similar post-medium condition of his work on move-
ment, dance, and choreography. Forsythe develops and exhibits so-called
“choreographic objects” in galleries and museums, which objectify move-
ment and subtract choreographic principles form actual living bodies. In
the objects, movement and choreography exist without bodies making
trained dancers redundant. Forsythe writes: “Choreography and dancing
are two distinct and very different practices. In the case that choreography
and dance coincide, choreography often serves as a channel for the desire
to dance. One could easily assume that the substance of choreographic
thought resided exclusively in the body. But is it possible for choreogra-
phy to generate autonomous expressions of its principles, a choreographic
object, without the body?” (Forsythe 2017). Tying in with my argument
on the effect this objects have on the body of the recipient, with Forsythe
it is the visitor to the gallery or museum that is set in motion: the spectator
is choreographed by the object engaging with it.

References
Agamben, Giorgio. 2000 (1992). Notes on Gesture. Means Without End. Notes
on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Acarino, 49–60. Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press.
Bel, Jérôme, and Boris Charmatz. 2013. Emails 2009–2010. Dijon: Les presses
du réel.
Bel, Jérôme. Gala. Directed by Aldo Lee. 2016.  
Dickinson, Peter. 2014. Cédric Andrieux: With Bel, Benjamin, and Brecht in
Vancouver. TDR: The Drama Review 58 (Fall): 162–169.
Krauss, Rosalind. 1999. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-
Medium Condition. London: Thames and Hudson.

Internet Source
Forsythe, William. 2017. Choreographic Objects. http://www.williamforsythe.
de/essay.html. Accessed 2 Mar 2017.
www.jeromebel.fr. Accessed 18 Oct 2016.
 Index

A on Brecht, 95
Absence in
deconstruction, 105, 124, 149
phenemonology, 105
psychoanalysis, 76, 105, 138, 149,
153
semiotics, 105, 116, 121, 149
Auslander, Philip, 35
Author, 23, 56, 63, 65, 67, 73, 76–82,
89, 104, 122, 136, 138, 173,
174, 204, 218, 247, 254, 276
B About Khôn, 214, 218
Ballet
Academie Royale de danse, 7, 182
Conservatoire, 182
Louis XIV, 7, 41, 42
Paris Opera, 41, 42, 50, 173, 175,
178, 181, 197, 263, 266, 277
Barthes, Roland
Avignon in Winter, 228, 237
Baudelaire’s Theater, 89, 90
Empire of Signs, 13, 93–95
image, 87, 93, 96, 160
Mythologies, 87
text, 59, 80, 87, 89, 91, 95
The Death of the Author, 79, 275
The Pleasure of the Text, 89
Writing Degree Zero, 59, 64, 89
Bauer, Una, 56, 64, 158
Bausch, Pina
1980, 11, 37, 38, 202
Bel, Jérôme
3Abschied, 12, 227, 237, 238, 258;
Fafchamps, Jean-Luc, 240;
Fulgoni, Sara, 241; musicians,
147, 239, 241
Angelin Preljocaj, 44, 45
A Spectator, 82, 149
Caterina Sagna, 46
Cédric Andrieux, 12, 175, 178–181,
185, 193, 197, 202, 205, 213,
254, 259
Cour d’honneur, 12, 177, 227,
229–232, 236–238, 265,
277; Andreu, Virginie, 230;
Beuan, Daniel, 230; Borghese,
Elena, 232; Hamant, Pascal,
232; Huppert, Isabelle, 234;

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 281

G. Siegmund, Jérôme Bel, New World Choreographies,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55272-3
282  Index
Leopold, Yves, 235; Lescure,
Bernard, 234; Mariani, Adrien,
232; Mazzia, Anna, 234;
Micoud, Jacqueline, 231, 232;
Nelva, Alix, 232; perform-
ers, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12, 82, 126,
151, 157, 163, 165, 178, 180,
208, 209, 217, 225–227, 229,
230, 237, 249, 250, 273, 274,
276, 279; Piron, Jérôme, 232;
Rivoli, Monique, 232, 234;
Sourdillon, Agnès, 234; Van
Rompay, Oscar, 234; Zicari,
Marie, 231
danced with, 132
Disabled Theater, 12, 177, 226,
227, 238, 244, 245, 247,
248, 251, 252, 254–259, 262,
273, 276, 277; interpreters,
175; Truong, Simone, 251;
Weinheimer, Chris, 251
Disabled Theater”\t “see also Theater
HORA, 262
Disabled Theater” \t “see also Theater
HORA, 277
Gala, 1, 4, 5, 68, 82, 146, 153,
177, 199, 227, 238, 271–276
Isabelle Torres, 178
Jérôme Bel, 1, 3, 4, 6–13, 279
Joëlle Bouvier/Régis Obadia,
L’Esquisse, 45
Lutz Förster, 12, 175, 178–180, 201
Nom donné par l’auteur, 8, 12, 48,
49, 56, 59, 62–64, 66, 67, 72,
78, 84, 104, 106, 108, 118,
125, 138, 157, 174, 210, 237
Philippe Decouflé, 46
Pichet Klunchun and Myself, 219,
237, 275
productions, 4, 15, 49, 51, 71, 103,
104, 120, 124, 127, 138, 143,
149, 175, 178, 197, 204, 205,
236–238, 244, 246, 275–277,
279
Shirtology, 8, 12, 48, 67, 78, 104,
116, 118, 120, 125, 174, 226
The Last Performance, 12, 48, 66,
68, 78, 94, 104, 125, 127,
131, 134, 138, 153, 165, 174,
225, 255, 276
The Show Must Go On, 12, 69, 78,
104, 138, 139, 142–144, 146,
149, 154, 157, 158, 160, 161,
163, 165, 173, 175, 197, 202,
211, 216, 217, 225, 235, 241,
247, 251, 256, 257, 275, 277
The Show Must Go On 2, 12, 104,
158, 163–165, 173–175
Tombe, 10, 12, 177, 227, 238, 263,
277; Bertaud, Sébastien, 265;
dancers, 2, 5–7, 9, 10, 12, 177,
238, 265, 272–279; Escudé,
Sandra, 265; Gaillard, Grégory,
264, 265; Milley, Sylviane, 265;
Pech, Benjamin, 265; Traore,
Henda, 264, 265
Véronique Doisneau, 12, 173–175,
181
Xavier Le Roy, 8, 12, 48, 49, 56,
73, 75, 78, 79, 81, 104, 138,
174
Bellmer, Hans, 121, 123
Benjamin, Walter, 29, 93
Bergson, Henri, 161
Blanchot, Maurice, 243
Brown, Trisha
accumulation, 31–33, 277
Burt, Ramsay, 33, 206, 212, 243
Butler, Judith
performativity, performance, 83
Psychic Life of Power, 187, 190, 192
What is Critique?, 187, 188

C Conceptual art, 16, 51, 69, 73, 98,
Centres chorégraphiques nationaux
(CCN)
Créteil, 43
education in Angers (CNDC), 45
Grenoble, 47
Havre, 44
implementation by Jack Lang, 44
Les Signataires du 20 août, 47
Montpellier, 43, 47
Charmatz, Boris, 9, 47–49, 67, 157,
178, 229, 234, 264
Chatterjea, Ananya, 216
Choreographers
Bagouet, Dominique, 42
Béjart, Maurice, 42
Childs, Lucinda, 49
Diverrès, Catherine, 43, 46
Faber,Viola, 44
Galotta, Jean-Claude, 43, 47
Hoghe, Raimund, 9, 48
Huyhn, Emmanuel, 49
La Ribot, Maria, 9, 48, 49
Le Roy, Xavier, 1, 9, 48, 56, 73, 78,
79, 81, 104, 138, 174
Mantero, Vera, 9, 49
Marin, Maguy, 42, 43
Monnier, Mathilde, 44, 47
Nachbar, Martin, 10, 49
Nikolais, Alwin, 44
Plischke, Thomas, 9, 49
Railhac, Michel, 44
Saporta, Karine, 43, 46
Sehgal, Tino, 49, 277
Stuart, Meg, 9, 48
Taylor, Paul, 42
Weidt, Jean, 42
Wigman, Mary, 18
Chorus, 3, 36, 140, 142, 147, 156,
197, 236, 237, 256, 274
Comedy, 158, 161, 163, 165
Index   283
158
Co-producers
Cultural Centre of Belem, Portugal,
49
French ministry for Culture and
Communication (DRAC Ile-
de-France), 50
Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Germany,
49
Institut Français, French Ministry
for Foreign Affairs, 50
Kaaitheater Brussels, Belgium, 49,
208
La Menagerie de Verre Paris,
France, 49
SKITE Lisbon, Portugal, 49
TanzWerkstatt Podewil Berlin,
Germany, 49
Critics
Gaité, Florian, 263, 265
Ploebst, Helmut, 11, 125
Stamer, Peter, 125, 126
Wavelet, Christophe, 47, 48
Cunningham, Merce, 25, 42, 44, 45,
49, 50, 175, 178, 179, 182, 183,
185, 190, 192, 193, 196, 197
Cvejić, Bojana, 18, 25, 51
D
Dancers
Antonio Carallo, 126, 136
Claire Haenni, 105, 174, 175, 248
Férdéric Seguette, 57, 58, 105, 114,
175
Gisèle Tremey, 105
Miguel Pereira, 116
others; Buirge, Susan, 42;
Carlson, Carolyn, 42; Dupey,
Dominique, 42; Dupey,
284  Index
Françoise, 42; Goss, Peter,
42; Robinson, Jacqueline, 42;
Russilo, Joseph, 42; Waehner,
Karin, 42
Pascale Paoli, 75
with Jérôme Bel, 51, 190, 204,
248
Yseult Roch, 105, 113
Death
as crisis of representation, 242
as disappearing, 128
Of the author, 275
of the author, 79
De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa, 227,
237–239, 241, 243, 258, 264
Deleuze, Gilles, 46
Derrida, Jacques
différance, 128, 129
écriture/writing, 60, 62, 64, 82, 86,
89, 109, 254
trace, 128–130
Dickinson, Peter, 178, 185, 278
Difference/in-difference, 21, 56, 75,
79, 115, 120, 127, 128, 130,
131, 145, 148, 163, 173, 187,
209, 220, 246, 254–256, 258,
260–262
Discourse, 17, 40–42, 48, 49, 51, 56,
63, 64, 72, 73, 76–79, 81, 82,
98, 104, 108, 118, 122, 124,
125, 134, 138, 160, 173–176,
178, 180–182, 186, 192, 200,
202, 205, 210, 212–215, 219,
241, 247, 252, 255, 279
Dispositif, 40, 121, 173, 175, 176,
186, 191, 192, 197, 199, 200,
225, 235, 241, 276
E Fort-Da-game, 150
Ecology, 225, 227, 231
Etchells, Tim, 6, 154, 159, 237
F
Féral, Josette, 83–85
Festivals
directors; Archambault, Hortense,
230; Baudriller, Vincent,
230; Regensburger, Karl,
48; Spångberg, Mårten, 49;
Vilar, Jean, 87, 232; Völckers,
Hortensia, 48
Festival d ‘automne, Paris, France,
42
Festival d’Avignon, France, 231
Im Puls Tanz Vienna, Austria, 48
International Dance Festival,
Dublin, Ireland, 48
Lantaren Venster Rotterdam,
Netherlands, 48
Panacea Festival Stockholm, Sweden,
49
SommerSzene Salzburg, Austria, 48
tanz2000.at ReMembering the Body,
Vienna, Austria, 48
Tanz im August Berlin, Germany,
48
Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, Austria,
48
Foster, Susan Leigh, 18, 20, 25, 206,
214, 216, 218
Foucault, Michel
on Dispositif, 40, 176, 192
Power and the Subject, 186, 188,
189
the order of discourse, 12, 13
The Order of Discourse, 77, 174
What is an Author?, 173
Franko, Mark, 130, 131
Freud, Sigmund
death drive, 149
fantasy, 191, 196
narcissism, 195
scopic drive, 194, 195

Fried, Michael, 34–36, 39, 92
G Linke, Susanne
Gaze, 2, 28, 30, 55, 63, 82, 84, 92,
113, 141, 142, 155, 156, 158,
194, 195, 197–199, 202, 249, 250
Gesture/gestus, 6, 9, 18, 27, 31, 38,
71, 75, 78, 80, 86, 87, 90–97,
156, 160, 161, 185, 190, 193,
197, 240–242, 255, 256, 263,
264, 272, 278, 279
Greek theatre, 2, 3
Greek Theatre, 236
Guigou, Muriel, 42, 43, 47
H Menke, Christoph
Haenni, Claire, 105, 106, 114, 115,
126, 127, 136, 174, 175, 227,
248
Hardt, Yvonne, 206
Hilton, Leon, 244, 245, 247
Husserl, Edmund, 109–112
I
Ictus Ensemble, 238, 241
Im Puls Tanz Vienna, Austria, 271
International Dance Festival, Dublin,
Ireland, 9
K
Kinaesthesia, 17, 18, 22, 31, 55
Kosuth, Jospeh, 65–67, 73, 82
Kruschkova, Krassimira, 123
Kwan, SanSan, 206, 212, 215, 218, 219
L Power, 7, 10, 12, 24, 34, 41, 43, 61,
Lambert-Beatty, Carrie, 29, 30
Index   285
Lepecki, André, 11, 115, 130, 192,
205
Le Quatuor Albrecht Knust, 48
Servos, Norbert, 133
Wandlung, 94, 125, 126, 131, 132,
134, 136, 217, 255
Lutz Förster, 200–202, 204
Lyotard, Jean-François, 121, 149, 159
M
Manning, Susan, 17, 24
Martin, John
choreography, 21
meta-kinesis, 28
modern dance, 18, 22, 278
capacities, 4, 259, 261
force, 259–262, 274
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 113
Michael Fried , 72
Modernism, 7, 15–17, 24, 25, 31–33,
35, 40, 50, 55, 71, 76, 79, 124,
125, 134, 144, 156, 213
O
Osborne, Peter
medium specificity, 16
post-conceptual art, 16, 68, 158
Others, 5, 7, 13, 273
P
Phelan, Peggy, 121, 229
Pina Bausch, 179, 200
Post-conceptual art, 275
Post-modern dance, 11
Postmodern dance, 62
77, 83, 85, 143, 165, 173–176,
286  Index
181, 186–190, 192, 204, 205,
207, 215, 218, 227, 242, 247,
249, 251–254, 257–259, 261,
263, 265, 276, 279
R T
Rainer, Yvonne
Trio A, 27, 28, 30
Ranciére, Jacques, 55
Risk, 12, 151, 202, 214, 216, 219,
227, 237, 238, 241, 258, 259,
261, 273, 276, 279
S Häusermann, Julia, 258
Said, Edward W., 207
Saussure, Ferdinand de
anagram, 122
sign, 119, 122
Scheie, Timothy, 86, 87, 237, 242
Seguette, Frédéric, 56–58, 75, 105,
106, 114–116, 120, 121, 126,
127, 136, 163–165, 173–175,
179, 227, 248
Sign, 272, 275, 279
Site/non-site, 63, 67–72, 82, 90, 91,
94, 98, 103, 104, 153, 157, 163,
176, 177, 187, 192, 199, 205,
206, 209, 216, 228, 230, 235, 260
Smithson, Robert, 68–72, 82, 103,
104, 154, 158
Starobinski, Jean, 122
Subject/subjectivity, 6, 7, 10, 12,
22–25, 27, 29, 30, 33, 35, 36,
38, 44, 56, 63, 72, 77, 78, 81,
84–86, 91–93, 95, 97, 104, 105,
109, 111, 112, 115, 116, 118,
122, 128, 132, 134, 135, 137,
141, 150–154, 157, 158, 160,
161, 173, 175, 178, 185–192,
195, 196, 198–202, 204, 214,
215, 227, 229, 230, 235,
238, 247, 249, 250, 256, 262,
274–276
Tanztheater, 17, 37, 39, 50, 55, 133,
178, 200, 204
Theater HORA
actors, 244, 247–250, 257, 261
Beuggert, Remo, 255
Blumer, Gianni, 253, 254, 257
Bright, Damian, 252, 255
Brücker, Matthias, 252
Hossle, Miranda, 248
Keller, Peter, 255
Meier, Lorraine, 255
Pagliaro, Tiziana, 250, 255
Theatricality
Elizabeth Burns, 84
Erika Fischer-Lichte, 83
Erving Goffman, 83
Josette Féral, 84, 92
Julia Kristeva, 199
Roland Barthes, 13, 55, 56, 65, 68,
85–87, 98, 115, 158, 191, 193,
242, 272, 275
Tim Etchells, 82, 154
W
Waldenfels, Bernhard, 111, 112
Wallin, Scott, 245, 246
Whitehead, Raymond, 9, 88
Z
Žižek, Slavoj, 150, 151, 153
Zupančič, Alenka, 160, 161, 163