JérÓ´me Bel's "Cédric Andrieux' at Fringe Festival

JérÓ´me Bel is that rare theater/dance artist who subverts both the received canons of art and the politics of art. His provocative forays into contemporary performance art began after a decade of mainstream modern dance, when he worked as a performer and choreographer in France in the '80s and early '90s. Bel's intentions fall nothing short of altering expectations of what performance should be, which he arrives at by questioning how performers connect with their audiences.

Bel strives to strip away artifice and virtuosity from what occurs on stage to establish a more honest connection between the doers and the watchers. At times his works anger and frustrate theatergoers, virtually insuring an animated post-performance discussion. For this reviewer, his work is surprisingly entertaining, funny and humane.

Philadelphia audiences might best know Bel's The Show Must Go On, presented as part of the 2008 Live Arts Festival performance to full houses at the Kimmel's Perelman Theater. The piece premiered in Paris in 2001 and won a Bessie performance award in New York in 2005. Its only performance with an all-American cast took place in Philadelphia, where I was one of the 20 myriad dancers on stage.

Sinatra as background

For the score of The Show Must Go On (whose title both honors and teases the ethos of performers), Bel commandeered 20 iconic pop songs— not at all what aficionados would expect as musical accompaniment, even if they were familiar with Twyla Tharp's Come Fly Away, choreographed to the crooning of Frank Sinatra. Bel used his popular music differently, not matching movement to melody (with the exception of the Macarena) but pairing action to the literal lyrics.

In The Show Must Go On, Bel directed his cast of expert hip-hop, ballet, modern and post-modern dancers (as well as the small contingent of non-virtuosos like me) to shed their virtuosity, and to refrain from overt expressiveness. The implicit charge to dancers who participated in Bel's theater of minimalism was to show that less might be more, and by doing less with exactitude, our audience might see and understand more of what was being performed.

Boredom with Merce Cunningham

Bel believes that viewers might better connect with a performer who reveals a common humanity. He conceived and directed Cédric Andrieux as an autobiographic narrative of one outstanding 33-year-old dancer. Cédric Andrieux stars as himself as he narrates his life in a flat monotone and performs excerpts of dances by various choreographers he has worked with in the course of his career. He even treats us to a rendition of the "fucking bor[ing]" (his words) movement preparatory class exercises with which he began every day of his eight years with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Bel told a Festival interviewer that he chose to build his piece on Cédric Andrieux's life and remembrances because of the dancer's personality— "not too much ego" and a "real leftish political stand." But surely Andrieux's studies at the elite Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Danse of Paris, his years with Merce Cunningham, his work with the Lyon Opera Ballet and with such luminary choreographers as Trisha Brown and William Forsythe and yes, his participation in the 2007 restaging of The Show Must Go On, certainly gave Bel the opportunity to use Andrieux to embody the dance history of recent decades, not to mention the chance to re-present a sliver of his own work in the Andrieux narrative.

Whispers from the stage

Bel's text, constructed from e-mailed exchanges with Andrieux, constitutes an unusual window into the dancer's interior life, especially the dancer as worker. Andrieux doesn't deliver his lines as an actor might; rather, he maintains a low-key, almost whispered conversation with the audience, in tones and rhythms that show little variance. This documentary narrating style communicated a matter-of-fact authenticity.

Andrieux describes the painful humiliation he suffered from teachers who denigrated him and his body— critiques that left him with lasting insecurities about a too-short torso, underdeveloped calves and inadequately arched feet. We in the audience would hardly agree with these criticisms: Andrieux is a beautiful man.

We learn of the precariousness of his life when, for example, Andrieux was grossly underpaid and lacked health insurance in his first job, with the Jennifer Munson Company in New York. His eight years with the Cunningham company left him with memories of pain in three different parts of his body— often experienced simultaneously— the result of attempting "the impossible" that he believed Cunningham asked of his dancers. Andrieux also recounts the frustration of joining the Lyon Opera Ballet for the chance to perform William Forsythe repertory, only to find himself relegated to a second- or third-tier relief team that performed only if a dancer became injured.

Attempting the impossible

With this underside of a dancer's world came revelations into the teaching process and the dances themselves. Andrieux described how Cunningham would teach a movement sequence, as if the master were sitting there directing him from the front row left of the Suzanne Roberts Theatre. He demonstrated how Cunningham broke down his complicated movement into first what the legs and feet did in sequences; then the torso and arms, choosing amongst 16 possible arm positions; and then adding head and neck movements onto the sequences already constructed. When we actually got to see excerpts from Cunningham's Suite for 5 and Biped, we could additionally marvel at these complex creations and the elegant confluence of grace and awkwardness that Cunningham achieved. The extraordinary demands on the dancer's stamina were evident from Andrieux's miked breathlessness; his pause to regain breath lasted almost as long as the dance excerpt itself.

When Andrieux's career in 2007 returns him to France, and the Lyon Opera Ballet, he discovers through Trisha Brown's choreography that dance need not be about pain, but also about the pleasures of undertaking Brown's more released technique.

From unitards to jeans

In the closing segment Andrieux relates how satisfying it was to enter into Bel's world of comfortable street clothes instead of G-strings and unitards (here he changes and decidedly relaxes into jeans onstage), no warm-ups, no injuries. With Bel, he adds, "You are a person before you are a dancer."

Andrieux ends by performing the Bel excerpt of the Sting song, I'll be watching you, from The Show Must Go On. He stands motionless at the lip of the stage for the entire song, as 20 of us did in the full production in 2008, looking directly into the eyes of individual audience members, a manipulated audience/performer role reversal.

In the performance I attended, Andrieux opted almost from the start for a smiling, charming gaze at his audience, which struck me as a bit too one-dimensional and clichéd as a performer's charming shtick. Maybe Bel will edit it down in future performances, or allow Andrieux to be himself.

Perhaps the most moving revelation of the Andrieux performance was his closing acknowledgment that in his 20 years as a dancer, he hadn't asked himself why and what he was doing as a performing artist, as he now was. It's a testament to Bel's work that the process of making and performing this piece exerted such a profound impact on Andrieux, and prompted similar self-reflection among those of us in the audience.