The audience must dance on

Those attending Jérôme Bel’s ‘The Show Must Go On’ are expected to join in the fun, and help the choreographer strip the dance down to its ‘zero point’ – to a soundtrack that includes Tina Turner and David Bowie

WHEN DANCE AUDIENCES go bad, they don't just hiss or boo. Ask Jérôme Bel. He's had spectators storm the stage and kick his dancers, and physically try to stop the performance. In 2002, a performance of his work Jérôme Belresulted in court action against International Dance Festival Ireland. Now he's returning to the Cork Midsummer Festival with his most controversial work yet, The Show Must Go On.

For a physical art form centred around the body you would expect that most dance controversies are caused by a bit of nudity, obscenity or some dodgy subject matter. The less titillating reality is that the protests that punctuate dance history are usually caused by an aesthetic affront, an attack on the accepted way of dancing. The infamous riot at Nijinskys Le Sacre du Printempsin 1913 was incited not by risqué moves or costumes but by the mere sight of feet that were turned in rather than the balletic norm of turned out.

And so it is with The Show Must Go On. There is none of the constant nudity and on-stage urination found in Jérôme Bel– rather, ordinary people do ordinary things to the sound of ordinary songs. A DJ sits in front of the stage facing the performers and slowly works his way through a stack of CDs. The songs tell the story of the performance as it unfolds and the specific order creates meaning and links. At the start the stage is in darkness for Leonard Bernstein's Tonight, the lights slowly fade up for Let the Sunshine Inand the performers arrive onstage to begin moving to David Bowie's Let's Dance.

"What should take 10 seconds, the normal 'house lights off' and 'stage lights on' before dancing begins, takes eight minutes," Bel explains. Later the men leave the stage for Ballerina Girl, the DJ dances alone to All By Myselfand the stage fades to black as John Lennons Imagineis played in darkness.

Bel tries to reach what he calls the "zero point" of choreography, where dance is stripped down to its essential elements. In Jérôme Belhe reduced it to author, performers, music and lights. His name was the title and there were two naked dancers, one naked singer and a naked elderly friend of Bel's mother roaming the stage with a light bulb at the end of a wire. As it toured, he realised that the missing ingredient was the audience. That's what he has set right in The Show Must Go On.

“Everything is done to give them the code, the rules of the game,” he says. “There’ll be a succession of songs, the performers will activate according to the title of the songs, and the songs won’t be cut, so they’ll play for three or four minutes. If you’re bored, it won’t last more than four minutes.”

The songs were chosen specifically for their universal appeal. “One of the most important aspects of the performance was that I wanted to use material that belonged to everyone, the audience as much as the performers,” he says.

Sometimes, that sense of ownership goes too far: as many as 40 spectators came on to the stage during the first 15 minutes of one performance. “There are some delicious performances and some tough ones,” says Bel. “But this is the audience’s responsibility, not mine. We have toured from Helsinki to Buenos Aires and from Vancouver to Melbourne. Although the piece is still the same, the audience changes every night.”

However confrontational the minimalism, the intention is never to deliberately bore the audience. “It all depends on the audiences’ expectations. If they are expecting slick, run-of-the-mill contemporary dance, they will be disappointed. This piece asks for understanding. The audience needs to construct something new, engage in another relationship with the performance. If they want the reiteration of an experience they have already had, then they are screwed.”

CORK AUDIENCES are ready for the challenge, according to William Galinsky, director of the Cork Midsummer Festival. "Cork has a hungry, open audience for popular contemporary performances like Jérôme Bel's," he says. It also has a track record. Not only was Bel's first Irish appearance a performance of Shirtologiein Cork, but Maguy Marin's Umweltreceived a rapturous ovation during the City of Culture celebrations in 2005, months after a premiere in Lyons that featured multiple walkouts, stand-up arguments in the stalls and ripped-up ticket stubs thrown on to the stage.

Maybe Corkonians identify with Bel’s straight-talking, mannerism-free type of artistic statement.

"My project with The Show Must Go Onwas just to represent my society. Today's society, not a king of Denmark or a bourgeois from the 17th century," he says. "As Tina Turner sings [during the show], 'We don't need another hero.' "

The final performance of The Show Must Go Onis at Cork Opera House tonight.

The Jérôme Belcontroversy

THE WARNINGS in the programme were implicit. A close-up photograph of Frédéric Seguette folding his scrotum over his penis and a quotation that said, "Everything you think dance is, Jérôme Belis not." Yet Raymond Whitehead, who attended the opening night of Bel's eponymous work in 2002, decided to sue International Dance Festival Ireland for €38,000, claiming the festival had breached its contract with him for failing to make clear that the performance featured urination and nudity. The judge dismissed the case, leaving the festival with legal bills of about €10,000.

Although talk radio and letters pages focused on the nudity and urination, Whitehead’s complaint wasn’t about obscenity but whether the public had been misled by the description in the festival’s brochure.

Writing in this newspaper, Whitehead claimed that the law, as it stood, fundamentally reduced the rights of consumers to make an informed choice about the suitability of a performance for themselves or for those in their care, most importantly children. “All I am calling for is that something like a trade descriptions act be applied to theatre advertising. I am not calling for censorship.”

In response, the festival chairman, Dermot McLaughlin, wrote that arts organisations faced having to describe their work in terms more suited to consumable goods than to aesthetic intent and experience. “Can anyone foresee the day when an arts organisation is taken to court for presenting a ‘controversial’ performance that is not controversial enough for a dissatisfied customer?” he wrote.

The last word was left to the artist. In a letter to the Editor of The Irish Times, Bel wrote: "Let's keep our dignity. This is only theatre, everything is fake, the truth is outside the theatre in the street, where the situations of some people are really shocking. Who should I sue for allowing people to live in the street?"