The Movement of Embodied Thought The Representational Game of the Stage Zero of Signification in Jérôme Bel

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Notes

¹Equity is the UK Trade Union representing professional performers.

²Raymond Whitehead was also ordered to pay his own legal fees, and though the press did not report how much these amounted to, there is evidently also a price attached to suing the Festival for not getting whatyou expected out of an art work. However, Judge Joseph Matthews did not, for instance, reprimand Whitehead for wasting the Court's time. Instead, he praised him for being ‘a man of integrity and high principle, a person taking a stand on grounds of principle against what he considered had been a performance at a cultural event undeserving of the name’ (Managh 2004).

³Composed for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and the choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky, it remains one of the most important musical works of the twentieth century, inspiring huge controversy at the moment of its premiere on 29 May 1913 at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. The audience was scandalized by both music and dance: the violent movements of the pelvises of the dancers, an emphasis on dissonance and asymmetrical rhythm, on polyrhythms and polytonality, the scoring of the instruments of the orchestra in unusual and uncomfortable sounding registers and, in general, a shattering of most of their expectations. Loud boos and ferocious arguments in the audience between supporters and opponents of the work eventually turned into a riot and intervention by the police.

⁴For a distinction between the two forms of potentiality see Aristotle 1986: 94.

⁵A quote from Martha Graham shows how she instrumentalized the body and put it in the service of a self: ‘The acquiring of technique in dance has been for one purpose – so to train the body as to make possible any demand made upon it by that inner self which has the vision of what needs to be said’ (Graham 1974: 139).

⁶In an interview with Bel I asked: ‘Do you think that part of your artistic work is the production of discourse around your artistic work and around yourself? Or is there any difference between those two moments?’ He replied ‘My artistic project has always been to produce discourses. But unfortunately my performances produced a lot of misinterpretations until Veronique Doisneau and Pichet Klunchun and Myself that most of the people have understood. I don''t make any difference between artistic works and discourses. They are the same for me’ (see ‘Jérôme Bel: An Interview’ following).

⁷Closely related, of course, with the biological facts that urine and faeces are what remains after an organism has used all the nutritive qualities out of food and drink and has disposed of toxins and pathogens, which, treated improperly, can contribute to spreading diseases and intestinal parasites. The treatment of faeces is, clearly, a matter of hygiene.

⁸For his work's U.K. reception, see for instance Roslyn Sulcas (2008) and Debra Craine (2008). Bel is still touring extensively with most of his works, some of them dating from 1994 or 1995, which, especially in the field of dance, even more than theatre, is not a minor achievement. Numerous theoreticians, dance scholars and artists from around Europe have written articles or book chapters about his work, such as Helmuth Ploebst, Gerald Siegmund, André Lepecki, Bojana Cvejić, Bojana Kunst, Ramsay Burt, Tim Etchells, Martina Hochmuth, Maaike Bleeker, Pirkko Husemann, Gabrielle Brandstetter, Hortensia Volckers, Marina Gržinić, Adrian Heathfield. Martina Hochmuth, artistic director of one of the most important dance centres in Europe, Tanzquartier Wien, declared his Nom donné par l'auteur to be ‘a masterpiece’ of contemporary dance during the conference Inventory: Dance and Performance (TQW, 2005)