Jérôme Bel
In his early works, Jérôme Bel applied structuralist operations to dance in order to isolate the primary elements of the theatrical spectacle. His interest subsequently shifted from dance as a stage practice to the question of the performer as a particular individual. The series of portraits of dancers such as Véronique Doisneau (2004), Cédric Andrieux (2009) and Xiao Ke (2020) approaches dance through the stories of those who make it, and raises the question of singularity on stage. He also presents Disabled Theater (2012) and Gala (2015), in which he offers the stage to non-traditional performers, privileging the community of differences over the formatted group, the desire to dance over choreography, to implement the means of emancipation through art. In 2017, the Festival d'Automne devoted a Portrait to him, with 8 shows. Since 2019, for ecological reasons, Jérôme Bel and his company no longer travel by plane. Since then, he has been creating his pieces remotely, and it's by virtue of this new paradigm that some of his latest shows have been conceived: Laura Pante (2020), Danses pour Wu-Kang Chen (2020). In 2023, he co-signed Danses non humaines with Estelle Zhong Mengual at the Musée du Louvre, at the invitation of the Festival d'Automne.
Cet automne
Jérôme Bel, Estelle Zhong Mengual Recommencer ce monde (les créatures fabuleuses)
Pursuing the collaboration they began in 2023, Jérôme Bel and Estelle Zhong Mengual bring Baptiste Morizot 's thoughts to the stage in order to ask questions about our place in the living world. Together, they conjure up an account or story that is told to a child by a female philosopher. The ancestral worlds it evokes set up the possibility of reinventing the present one.
Jérôme Bel au Festival d'Automne