Jérôme Bel Jérôme Bel

[Dance]

With Isadora Duncan, Jérôme Bel drew up, for the first time, the danced portrait of a choreographer, focussing uniquely on the transmission of her work to performers. In this latest creation, which he qualifies as “auto-bio-choreographic”, he lends himself to his own exercise and delivers a personal account of a life of dance.

Whereas the film Rétrospective (2019) gave viewers a cross-section of the work of Jérôme Bel, this creation reconstitutes its linear logic, set forth according to a necessarily subjective viewpoint. Alone onstage, the choreographer’s performed address responds to the screening of archive footage or music extracts and brings to life memories of gestures, scores, and biographical facts brought into correspondence by the discourse itself. An eponymous project of a fundamental piece of his repertory, Jérôme Bel is, conversely, less of a return to an initial point, and even less an a posteriori summing up. Rather, it is a genealogy of the driving forces behind his work, in which the personal and the artistic come together. Indeed, Jérôme Bel tells his own story for the first time, evoking his childhood, sharing with us his doubts, failures and infatuations. Allying account and meaning, the piece articulates in this way fragments of his life, career and intellectual project in order to unveil the common structures.