The Show Must Go On

17/03/2011 - 19/03/2011

Auckland Arts Festival 2011

Production Details

Provocateur and choreographer Jerome Bel’s signature piece The Show Must Go On, an award-winning work that has delighted and challenged audiences from around the globe for over a decade, comes to New Zealand for the first time.

A cult figure in the international dance world, Bel creates choreographic art that cleverly and humorously explores the parameters of dance and performance. Featuring over 18 popular songs ranging from David Bowie’s jubilant Let’s Dance to Lionel Richie’s poignant Ballerina Girl, the work playfully interrogates the traditional separation between spectator and spectacle.

Bel and his team will work with 20 New Zealand performers to create a local version of the work. The Show Must Go On explores Bel’s fundamental questions on the essence of dance. Must we dance? Why? Where do our strange and impulsive physical movements come from? How do music, lyrics and silence stir us to express ourselves?

DJ: James Wenley
Dancers: Lucy Beeler, Angie Dimery, Wendy Dodd, Paul Ellis, Omer Gilroy, Geoff Gilson, Peter Grabitz, Dave Hall, Anita Hunziker, Tama Jarman,
Philippa Johnson, Fred Lai, Kristian Larsen, Horace Luk, Tai Royal, Josh Rutter, Sapna Samant, Maria Walker, Becca Wood, Li Zuo

90 mins

Review by Bernadette Rae 18th Mar 2011

Review by Alys Longley 18th Mar 2011

It is very rare to see a dance work that is successfully challenging, moving, reflexive, confrontational, political, philosophical AND entertaining, yet Jerome Bel’s work The Show Must Go On achieves all of this with a sense of effortlessness and grace. Ten years after it’s first performance in Paris, this work is just as potent in a NZ context as it has proved itself to be through wide spread international touring over the past decade, becoming a seminal work in contemporary dance for the twenty first century.

We sing about what’s important to us. And 17 pop songs – from the musically banal (Alanis Morissette and Whitney Houston) to the inspired (John Lennon) touch on many of the themes of basic humanity – love, sex, belonging, death, silence, light, darkness, movement, stillness, family, identity. What this work aims to do (as articulated by Bel’s repetiteur of the NZ work Henrique Lopes at the Festival Lunchtime Conversation) is to open up a space of conversation that directly includes the audience in considering these themes. Consequently, audience members are not given a pass to sit in the dark and be entertained, instead, from the first moment of the work the audience is directly implicated on the kind of world that arises in performance.

For many audience members on the 19 March, this was not an expected or desired position. This show is vaguely destabilizing from an audience point of view from its first moments, when we are left with a songs’ worth of darkness. The tension this caused for Thursday’s audience was palpable, when nervous laughter echoed through the auditorium and the first of many audible negative remarks on the performance content could be heard.

The success of their provocation is part of the extraordinary achievement of Bel and his NZ cast and crew. He, and his performers, place audience members in a situation where they are called to dwell on some particular cultural signifiers that saturate the Western cultural landscape, the songs we hear in supermarkets, airports, cars, in our houses, on the television. We are called on to interrogate terms such as “thank you silence” – to do so, Bel provides us with silence and darkness. And boy, this Auckland audience would rather do ANYTHING else but dwell on silence for thirty seconds. They were so unsettled by this lack of entertainment that audience members loudly asked the DJ what they had to do to get the lights back on, and one man shone light from his mobile phone at the sound desk in order to prompt some action. Many of us (perhaps even the majority) were thoroughly enjoying the participatory tone of the performance, but enough in the audience were seriously taken aback for the tension to be palpable.

Being in an audience that were so shaken by a performance work that they moved past their usual NZ docility and were on the verge of actual booing was a new experience to me. In the 25 years I’ve been involved in performance here I’ve seen some dreadful work, but I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where an audience was so unsettled by a work that they started rebelling against it – not only by walking out, but by verbally articulating their feelings in the space of performance itself.

The performers themselves, of course, played no small part in this. Each cast member brought clarity, restraint and humanity to his or her role. A large part of Bel’s work involves the twenty strong cast creating a kind of equilibrium of the watchful gaze by standing and staring at the audience, allowing themselves to be seen, allowing themselves to see us. The nature of performance itself drives the dramaturgy of this show and if as an audience you are resistant to entering into a space of reciprocal dialogue then this work might be pretty threatening. If you are, on the other hand, up for a more experimental experience The Show Must Go On is deeply thought provoking, hilarious, layered and playful.

Bel’s choice to use a local cast when this work tours has implications on many levels – as a performance work a space of dialogue between performers and audience can be evoked most efficiently. Also, having twenty local performers have the opportunity to rigorously participate in Bel’s dramaturgy may spur the development of performance practice in our city. For me it was thrilling to see a strong sense of this locality merge with a post modern, European performance sensibility.

The FranceDanse component of this years Auckland Festival has been an inspired curatorial choice, bringing a body of intelligent, fiercely performed and strikingly provocative work to our shores, utterly embodied by the NZ production of The Show Must Go On. I am extremely grateful to the programmers of the Festival for creating this opportunity for us.

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The Show Must Go On

Show about dancing cuts to the core

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Deeply thought provoking, hilarious, layered and playful

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