Performing Failure? Anomalous Amateurs in Jérôme Bel’s Disabled Theater and The Show Must Go On 2015

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Notes

1. Una Bauer, ‘Jérôme Bel: An Interview with Una Bauer’, Performance Research, 13.1 (2008), 42–48 (p. 48).

2. Sara Jane Bailes, Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), p. 22.

3. Della Pollock, ‘Performing Writing’, in The Ends of Performance, ed. by Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 73–103 (pp. 75–76).

4. Ibid., p. 78.

5. Bel qtd. in Patrick Gaughan, ‘Every Body on the Dance Floor: On Jérôme Bel’s Ballet’, HowlRound blog, 17 December 2015 <http://howlround.com/every-body-on-the-dance-floor-on-j-r-me-bel-s-ballet> [accessed 22 February 2016].

6. Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 97.

7. Jérôme Bel in Gina Kourias, ‘Jérôme Bel Talks about Disabled Theater’, TimeOut, 29 October 2013 <https://www.timeout.com/newyork/dance/jerome-bel-talks-about-disabled-theater?pageNumber=2> [accessed 12 November 2016].

8. Adrian Kear, ‘Troublesome Amateurs: Theatre, Ethics and the Labour of Mimesis’, Performance Research, 10.1 (2005), 26–46 (p. 37).

9. Bailes, Performance Theatre, p. 30.

10. Matt Hargrave, Theatres of Learning Disability: Good, Bad, or Plain Ugly? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 220.

11. Andre Lepecki, ‘Yes, Now, It’s Good Theater’, in Disabled Theater, ed. by Sandra Umathum and Benjamin Wihstutz (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2015), pp. 141–163 (p. 159).

12. Leon Hilton, ‘Presence, Rhetoric, Difference: Jérôme Bel and Theater HORA’s Disabled Theater’, TDR: The Drama Review, 58.3 (2014), 156–62 (p. 158).

13. Benjamin Wihstutz, ‘“And I Am an Actor”: On Emancipation in Disabled Theater’, in Disabled Theater, ed. by Sandra Umathum and Benjamin Wihstutz (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2015), pp. 35–50.

14. Jana-Maria Stahl, ‘Interviews with the Actors of Theater HORA: On Acting and Spinning’ in Disabled Theater, ed. by Sandra Umathum and Benjamin Wihstutz, (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2015), p.89.

15. Yvonne Schmidt, ‘After Disabled Theater: Authorship, Creative Responsibility, and Autonomy in Freie Republik HORA’, in Disabled Theater, ed. by Sandra Umathum and Benjamin Wihstutz (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2015), pp. 227–40. (p. 227)

16. Gerald Seigmund, ‘What Difference Does It Make? Or: From Difference to In-Difference – Disabled Theater in the Context of Jérôme Bel’s work’, in Disabled Theater, ed. by Sandra Umathum and Benjamin Wihstutz (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2015), pp. 13–34. (p. 26)

17. Sandra Umathum and Benjamin Wihstutz, ‘Interview with Jérôme Bel: It’s all about Communication’, in Disabled Theater, ed. by Umathum and Wihstutz (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2015), pp. 163–74. (p. 171)

18. Hilton, ‘Presence, Rhetoric, Difference’, p. 160.

19. Umathum and Benjamin, ‘Interview with Jérôme Bel’, p. 172.

20. Natalie I. Alvarez, ‘Authenticity and the “Divinely Amateur”. The Romantic in Richard Maxwell’ in Codifying the National Self: Spectators, Actors and the American Dramatic Text (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2006), p. 237

21. Lepecki’s emphasis, ‘Yes, Now, It’s Good Theater’, p. 143.

22. The music featured in The Show Must Go On was composed by: Leonard Bernstein; David Bowie; Nick Cave; Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox; J. Horner; W. Jennings; Mark Knopfler; John Lennon and Paul McCartney; Louiguy; Galt MacDermott; Erick ‘More’ Morillo and M. Quashie; Edith Piaf; The Police and Hugh Padgham; Queen; Lionel Richie; A. Romero Monge and R. Ruiz; and Paul Simon.

23. Tim Etchells, ‘The Show Must Go On’, RB Jerome Bel, April 2002 <http://www.jeromebel.fr/textsandinterviews/detail?textInter=the%20show%20must%20go%20on%20-%20tim%20etchells> [accessed 17 July 2015].

24. Candoco Dance Company Documentary, The Restaging of The Show Must Go On (2015). See <http://www.candoco.co.uk/productions/programmes-and-projects/past/the-show-must-go-on/> [accessed 13 November 2016].

25. Ibid.

26. Bel refers to another restaging in Zurich, with Damian Bright and Remo Beuggert from Theater HORA in Umathum and Wihstutz, ‘Interview with Jérôme Bel’.

27. Titanic, dir. by James Cameron (Paramount Pictures, 1997).

28. Scott Wallin warns against ‘settling for rather mawkish sentiments’, which might lead the viewer to find performances by disabled actors ‘endearing’. Scott Wallin, ‘Come Together’ Discomfort and Longing in Jérôme Bel’s Disabled Theater’, in Disabled Theater, ed. by Sandra Umathum and Benjamin Wihstutz (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2015), pp. 61–84 (p. 74).

29. Candoco, The Restaging of The Show Must Go On.

30. Candoco, ‘Artistic Vision’, Candoco Dance Company <http://www.candoco.co.uk/about-us/artistic-vision/> [accessed 25 February 2016].

31. Lynette Halewood, ‘Candoco Dance Company Jérôme Bel’s The Show Must Go On, London, Sadler’s Wells’, DanceTabs, 22 March 2015 <http://dancetabs.com/2015/03/candoco-dance-company-the-show-must-go-on-london/> [accessed 23 July 2015].

32. Mersa Auda, ‘Candoco Dance Company/Jérôme Bel: The Show Must Go On at Sadler’s Wells’, The Upcoming, 21 March 2015 <http://www.theupcoming.co.uk/2015/03/21/candoco-dance-companyjerome-bel-the-show-must-go-on-at-sadlers-wells-dance-review/> [accessed 23 July 2015]; and Judith Mackrell, ‘The Show Must Go On Review – Jérôme Bel Conjures Stage Magic with Candoco’, Guardian, 23 March 2015 <http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/mar/23/candoco-jerome-bell-the-show-must-go-on-review> [accessed 23 July 2015].

33. Kay Inckle, ‘Debilitating Times: Compulsory Ablebodiedness and White Privilege in Theory and Practice’, Feminist Review, 111 (2015), 42–58 (p. 54).

34. Stine Nilsen, Candoco Dance Company Documentary, The Restaging of The Show Must Go On (2015). See <http://www.candoco.co.uk/productions/programmes-and-projects/past/the-show-must-go-on/> [accessed 26 February 2016].

35. Lennard J. Davis, ‘End of Identity Politics’, in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. by Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 263–77 (p. 265); emphasis in original.

36. Ibid., pp. 271–72.

37. Ibid., p. 273.

38. Inckle, ‘Debilitating Times’, p. 46.

39. Michel Foucault qtd. in Andre Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 51.

40. Lepecki, Exhausting Dance, p. 46.

41. Ibid.

42. Kay Inckle, ‘Debilitating Times’, p. 43.

43. Bauer, ‘Jérôme Bel: An Interview’, p. 48.

44. Una Bauer, ‘The Movement of Embodied Thought: The Representational Game of the Stage Zero of Signification in Jerome Bel’ in Performance Research 13.1, 35–41 (p. 39).