As a heady intellectual type, I have a vice–I love coming out of a performance able to articulate a new understanding risen from what I have just seen. Lots of times I can’t do that at TBA and I totally understand that sometimes that is precisely the value of the art, that unintelligibility is the space where something new can happen, that at the edge of language there is possibility, and that that’s just plain sexy. But I get really happy with that moment when something I never could have said before pops right into thought for the first time, when a palimpsest emerges, image, and language, and meaning still warm with the pulse of the performance.
That happened for me with Jerome Bel. This performance seems to me to function as a thesis statement for the entire festival, for the juxtapositions, encounters, stories, and purpose of this year’s TBA.
I have noticed in performance after performance this year that juxtaposition seems to be a primary trope. In some shows it works less well than in others. Although I very much enjoyed Leesaar The Company, I found the relationship between the two strands baffling; I could pull no meaning from their proximity, nor did I find myself questioning it for long. I simply moved on. When juxtaposition works well, on the other hand, we find a conversation (generally metaphorical though here literal) in which something new is communicated both through understanding and misunderstanding.
As the two dancers sat on the stage in hesitant discussion, the misunderstood and the strange were most immediately evident. The movement vocabularies differed, and beyond that narrative form, logic, and subtext made clear communication seem almost impossible. The questions they asked each other did not meet with answers that made clear sense, but as each accepted an oblique way in, meaning opened up. There is no very good way to discuss the corner of the eye in English, nor apparently French, though it is important to the Thai dance. Yet with cobbled-together phrases real communication began to happen. As was clear in Pichet’s discussion of energy, Buddha, and architecture in response to a question about finger position, or when Jerome pointed out that instead of dancing for the glory of a king, the French had killed theirs some centuries ago, and that his project was an outgrowth of the project of democracy, dance reflects a whole world view, and the journey across the three languages and cultures was a burdensome one.
Some of the most interesting moments occurred at dead ends, when one or the other said no for reasons the other could not comprehend; no possibility existed for one in a direction wide open for the other. Yet after all, though Jerome looked blank in a conversation about representing relaxation by moving the chin in a figure eight, his “favorite” performance of his own involved standing still and moving little except for his own chin. And, perhaps most importantly, the two dancers were motivated by a similar desire. Pichet’s was to resurrect the traditional weeklong ceremonial dance which had been cheapened for tourists. Jerome’s was to find a way to break through a society cheapened by cheap representation. Each wished the other luck, acknowledging both the futility and the hope in asking dance to perform such feats.
The role of contemporary art, said Jerome, is to represent the reality of today. Because it is different from yesterday, the artist must find new thoughts and forms to represent it. What he seeks to do, he said, is to create a space in which the audience thinks together, feels together. The role of contemporary art is not to please the audience, and furthermore there must be plenty of room for failure. Because it must be new, the artist must not quite know what will happen, anymore than the audience should be able to anticipate it–if they can, it is not new.
I am uncomfortably aware that I might well be bored and irritated by the kind of performances he gave us a sample of. In fact I have experienced art this week that I was a little antsy during, that caused me to think to myself that a bit of editing or focus would make the whole experience simpler, quicker, more pleasant. It is useful to me to consider contemporary art as a search for equality between artist and audience, interesting too to consider how to be an artist in a culture stultified by representation. These are problems so large, goals so lofty, that I am inspired to find more meaning in my own unease.
Jerome said that he was jealous when he saw Pichet dance. He said he loved to dance and had failed to do so, that when he had discovered his own body it was so interesting that he was unable to do anything but explore it. That seems a useful metaphor for something here. There is great pleasure in the dancing, but the meaning, perhaps, is in looking closely, playing, seeing anew, seeing through representation to… what? A different more vital representation? Some archetypal or cultural truth? Our own bodies?
The performance ended on a moment of disjunction as the two dancers encountered the possibility of Jerome’s naked body, unmasked, danceless, which Pichet rejected. It’s because of my culture he said, and they ended their conversation in discomfort, reminding us all that there is worlds more to communicate, worlds that cannot be communicated. Jerome left us with an open space in which to think and feel.
Everybody is looking for the incredible thing, he said. He said it with irony, with humility, with refusal–I offer no such thing, he meant. And yet this performance got there, as the unintelligible hung suspended, stretched, and carried great weight between the two dancers to burst forth as new knowledge for the audience
Taya Noland
