The Contemporary Moment of Dance: Restaging Recent Classics

Jérôme Bel. Photo: Courtesy Herman Sorgeloos and Mussacchio Laniello.

Showtime Jérôme Bel, Sadler’s Wells, London, February 1–16, 2008; Café Muller/The Rite of Spring, Tanztheater Wuppertal, choreographed by Pina Bausch, Sadler’s Wells, London, February 13–22, 2008.

Attending a wide variety of performances over the years by the same performers, you often develop a personal relationship with those artists. Sometimes this relationship is mutually acknowledged, other times, it’s merely a spectatorial impression developed through encounter. Over three weekends in February, I began to feel that I was living at Sadler’s Wells as I returned repeatedly to visit two “friends,” Pina Bausch and Jérôme Bel.

Although I had been hearing about Bel’s work for close to a decade, somehow we had never met. He was that mythical “friend of a friend,” the one you have to meet, but never quite manage to. So when Sadler’s Wells announced Showtime, a retrospective of his choreographic work, I quickly leapt at the chance. The retrospective itself is an unusual event in live performance, while art-house cinemas regularly present thematic programs of the work of a given director or artist, it is rare to get the opportunity to “catch up” with live work in the same way. In large part, the reasons for this are self-evident: few companies maintain a historical repertory, prohibitive costs, age and company shifts mean that earlier pieces are often difficult to restage. This disappearance of early works is, however, a lost opportunity and one that speaks to the issue of “knowing” an artist. For most people, the first encounter with an artist—particularly today, amidst a proliferation of venues and competing funding systems—is not at the beginning of a career, but after she or he has begun to attract some notice. As international touring circuits become more and more fixed and as festivals rely less on the creation of new work individually, but on co-productions and similar structures of development, artists must bring their work to audiences to develop a following. Within such an economy of production the retrospective makes a great deal of sense; few of Bel’s pieces, for instance, have had prolonged runs in London, and yet there is an audience there for him, an audience who have had sporadic encounters over the past fifteen years, unless they have followed him through touring.

Four of the five performances staged by Sadler’s Wells, 1994’s Nom donné par l’auteur (Name Given by the Author), the 1995 Jérôme Bel, the paired 1997 Shirtology and a lecture-demonstration surrounding the 1998 The Last Performance, and the 2005 Pichet Klunchun and Myself were presented in the small Lilian Baylis Theatre, an intimate studio space that both ensured an immediate sell-out and helped to define the proximal relationship between performer(s) and audience. With the exception of the most recent piece, each was given for one night only, with much of the audience there for every night. Those people in the audience whom I didn’t know at the beginning of the first night felt like old friends by the end of the last. Indeed, seeing one another in the larger space of the main auditorium for the 2001 The Show Must Go On! created a shared sense of an “insider” status. This notion, while certainly nothing new in a long history of avant-garde performance work, serves to speak to the value of the retrospective in building and maintaining an audience—the sense of community and relationality developed by such an event takes 1960’s notions of communitas and combines with them a sense of contemporary debates surrounding relational aesthetics and the sense of encountering an artwork. The retrospective then becomes an ideal live performance context for the production of community.

Equally important to this communitybuilding, however, is the promise that the retrospective as a form offers of narrating a particular history, of demonstrating artistic development and change. Bel’s choreographic work began after a...