3 Choreography’s “slower
ontology”
Jéréme Bel’s critique of representation
is representation, whose structure is imprinted not only on the art, but on the
entire culture of the West (its religions, philosophies, politics) therefore designates
more than just a particular type of theatrical construction.
(Derrida 1978: 234)
In order to write on the work of French choreographer Jérome Bel, it is
important to contextualize it briefly within a particular movement in recent
Puropean dance. Tam thinking here of the proposals made in the past decade by
choreographers such as La Ribot, Jonathan Burrows, Boris Charmatz, Xavier Le
Roy, Marten Spingberg, Vera Mantero, Thomas Lehmen, Meg Stuart, Juan
Dominguez, to mention just a few of the most recognizable names,' This
movement has been gaining shape, visibility, and force since the mid-1990s but it
is by no means an organized one, nor does it have a proper name2 Despite
dlifferent modes of working, different dramaturgical approaches, and sometimes
ven open antagonisms between each choreographer’s way of dealing with form,
‘liscourse, and content, it is possible to identify some quite remarkable
convergences. One prevalent concern ~ particularly significant to the question I
would like to tackle in this chapter, that is, the question of a dance that initiates
4 critique of representation by insisting on the still, on the slow, and on that
particular form of repetition known in rhetoric as “paronomasia”” ~ is the
interrogation of choreography’s political ontology. If such an interrogation has
heen carried out by many of the works of the choreographers mentioned above,
rno one has taken it to its limits more consistently and relentlessly than Jérdme Bel
since his first eveningength piece Nom Donné prar VAueur (Name Given by the
Author) (1994),
Bel’s interrogation of dance’s political ontology takes the form of a systematic
‘vitique of choreography’s participation in the broader project of Western
representation. The critique of representation is one of the main characteristics
of early twentieth-century experimental performance, theatre, and dance — at
least since Bertolt Brecht’s “urgency to understand mimesis [.... ] as historically
mediated” (Diamond 1997: viii), and Antonin Artaud’s famous manifestos for a
theatre of cruelty from the early 1930s which, as Derrida noted, not only
wmounced the “limit of representation” but proposed a “system of critiques
shaking the entirety of Occidental history” (Derrida 1978: 235, emphasis in the
original).> Theoretically, the critique of representation announces “a fractnre in
the epistemological regime of modernity, a regime that rested on a faith in the
veality effect” of representation as it secured the stability of discourse (Gordon
1997: 10). Critical theory (particularly afer Horkheimer’s and Adorno Dialectics
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(Routledge Theatre and Performance Companions) Kathy A. Perkins, Sandra L. Richards, Renée Alexander Craft, Thomas F. DeFrantz - The Routledge Companion To African American Theatre and Performance-Rou
William J. Spurlin (Auth.) - Imperialism Within The Margins - Queer Representation and The Politics of Culture in Southern Africa-Palgrave Macmillan US (2006)