Jerome Bel - People are still talking about it
There is still a bit of activity and conversation around Jerome Bel’s presentation of Pichet Klunchun and myself which was presented two weeks ago here at Dance Theater Workshop.
Personally, I enjoyed the evening whole heartedly. Learning about Khon, seeing Pichet’s reactions to conceptual dance, and simply watching the two performers get to know each other on stage. There are many however that disagree. So I’m opening the conversation again here, have at it.
Previous posts include:
Jerome Bel: still thinking by Sally Rousse
The Republic of Jerome Bel by Aynsley Vandenbroucke
Mesmerizing Traditional Thai Dance Versus Dumb White People Tricks by Tonya Plank
Brian McCormick (November 26th, 2007 at 10:18 am)
First I want to apologize for being inappropriately fidgety during the last 30 minutes of this piece. If I had been sitting behind me, I think I would have smacked myself in the head. It woulnd’t have been a bad thing…
Two charming men. A conversation. An illumination. A cross-cultural global dialogue. Indeed.
The first half of this event was totally engaging. Bel, acting as anthropologist/interviewer essentially provides the space and time to deconstruct and demystify ancient Thai dance, as Pichet demonstrates, then explains the meaning and derivation of various stylized movements of Khon.
This experience was like discovering a beautiful river in the midst of a dense jungle, and finding peace as the journey along its banks continued. But at the half way mark of this 2 hour lec-dem, the table turned, and Pichet became interviewer, asking Bel to explain his form.
After a while, for this audience member, already familiar with Bel’s approach to non-spectacle/non-representational performance, the journey along the river bank took a sharp turn toward modern urbania, turning less clear, and polluted with remarks that were less than those respectfully delivered by our Eastern guest. Perhaps this, too is a reflection of the West, but it still made me squirm.
Ultimately, this water metaphor, for me, turned from clear to polluted, and then into a kind of intellectual waterboarding, as Bel presented his oppositional creation on a par equal to the exotic, and unfamiliar Thai folk dance. Especially in the context of this theater, and this audience (and let’s face it, Bel’s audiences are primarily Western), I found this equalization a bit hard to swallow. Can contemporary dance really be placed on a scale of “otherness?” I think not.
However, it is now two weeks later, and I am still processing, changing my thoughts about what the message(s) of this piece are, and allowing my experience (of feeling like enough already) to inform my interpretation. As I tend to react emotionally, I know that my gut sometimes prevents my head from seeing above the canopy. And doesn’t contemporary dance exist in the margins of “entertainment” culture? Truly.
And so, despite my exasperation on first viewing, the more I think about it, the more value I derive from it.
(I also think Tonya did a great job explaining the dichotomous ideological problem presented by the piece…)
Brian McCormick (November 26th, 2007 at 2:14 pm)
NOTE: I should have referred to Khon as “classical” not “folk” dance.