Gala

Jérôme Bel is hardly in need of an introduction. Provocatively intelligent and subversively creative, his work reveals him to be one of those artists who are determined to expand the limits of the stage by playing with the audience’s expectations and perceptions. For Bel, the stage is a laboratory which he sometimes uses as a space for critiquing contemporary life and sometimes as an ambivalent threshold for questioning rather than confirming society’s prevailing views. Whatever the case, a new production by the bad boy of the French dance scene is always an event, thanks to the relationship he establishes between ‘performers’ and audience, and because the subject-matter he tackles transcends the stage and permeates into everyday life, emancipating the gaze and awakening the viewer.

Bel insists on the playful and dialectical nature of art. In this new production, he uses one of the most clichéd theatrical forms of all, the gala, to highlight something altogether less commonplace: a startlingly original ‘social’ dance stripped of stereotypes and rules of expression. In an effort to transform the stage into a snapshot of its social reality, Bel is gathering people of all ages, classes and mobility profiles. We can all take part and become researchers into our own identity and the conventions that construct it. In this production, Bel presents theatre as an ideal community, a defender of diversity, and the natural home of the Other.