Jérôme Bel, comes back to Ciało/Umysł Festival already for the fifth time, this time in order to prepare the Warsaw version of the Gala performance. This is a project combining professional and amateur dancers and it blurs the lines between failure and success in performance as it suggests that theater is community, both onstage and off.

The Warsaw Gala is another rendition of the performance originally prepared in 2015 with the residents of the Parisian suburbs and recreated in a number of other cities since then. The main principle stays the same – there are 20 performers selected among local residents, this time of Warsaw. Professional actors as well as ballet and contemporary dance performers stand side by side with amateurs, whose social backgrounds, age and life experiences are as diversified as possible, in order to form a democratic community which for a couple of days is joined together by dance without any limits.

Bel provokes us by disrupting our conventional perception of the division between the performers and the audience, the educated professionals and the amateurs lacking any technical skills, and between what is perceived as a success and a failure on stage. He shows how absurd, aimless and destructive are our pursuits of imaginary perfection and continuous need for judgment implanted in us by social indoctrination.

Bel, who is sometimes called a choreographer-philosopher, attaches great importance to embedding dance within the context of time. Through the participants of the performance, he reaches to the biological memory of their bodies, both young and old, where all the unconscious forms of movement drawn from pop-culture, dance fashions or one’s own perception of what the ballet is, are encoded. The dancers present a peculiar history of dance and its immortal canonical forms.

InJérôme Bel view, every participant of the project, regardless of their experience, is equal, since dance is a natural born ability shared by all of us and a simple expression of the relation between our bodies, time and space which art tries to convey in just a more sophisticated form. No more “I can’t dance” excuses then! In this collective mechanism, dance is thus brought back to its political and social application, its capacity to unite ephemeral communities.

The French choreographer has been a regular guest and collaborator of C/U Festival since 2001, when he presented his first performance titled Jerôme Bel. In the following years he showed in Warsaw, among others, his Shirtology performance (2005), prepared The show must go on (2012) with the participation of the Polish dancers, and presented Disabled Theatre with the actors of the HORA Theatre (2013).

The Warsaw version of Gala by Jérôme Bel. A performance which blurs the lines between failure and success in performance as it suggests that theater is community, both onstage and off

There are 20 local performers on stage: professional and amateur dancers of various backgrounds and age. They create a community, where the distinction between the artists and the audience is blurred, and a mistake is just as desired as perfection. Bel reaches to the forms of movement drawn from pop-culture and dance fashions which are encoded in the bodies of the performers and humorously applies a refreshing “amateur therapy” to the world of art.

Jérôme Bel - a French dancer and choreographer residing in Paris but working all over the world. He opposes to the distinction between the high and low art, is often inspired by pop-culture. He dissects the performance mechanisms, plays with the performance expectations and with mirror-effects between performers and spectators.
Having finished his studies at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, he worked as a dancer with other choreographers until 1991. Later, he started to create his own performances, including his widely renowned Shirtologie (1997) – where an actor peels off a t-shirt with a significant message on it after a t-shirt; or the Bessie Award winning The show must go on (2001) where 20 dancers literally perform the lyrics of the pop songs (in 2012 Bel presented the Polish version of if during C/U Festival). He directed, among others, performances with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Pichet Klunchun.  

Conception: Jérôme Bel
Assistant : Maxime Kurvers
Assistants for he local restaging : Sheila Atala, Frédéric Seguette
by and with: Mamadou Ba, Monika Chodyra, Ryszard Czubak, Teresa Ferraris, Maciej Gośniowski, Agnieszka Goźlińska, Wojciech Grudziński, Zuzanna Hartfiel, Aleksander Janiszewski, Maja Kowalczyk, Małgorzata Kwiatkowska, Natalia Majewska, Dariusz Matuszewski, Oliwia Olczyk, Franciszek Prętki, Iza Szostak, Stella Walasik, Rinaldo Venuti, Yasmina Yasa, Katarzyna Maria Zielińska
costumes: the dancers
coproduction: Dance Umbrella (Londyn/London), TheaterWorks Singapore/72-13, KunstenFestivaldesArts (Bruksela/Brussels), Tanzquartier Wien, Nanterre-Amandiers Centre Dramatique National, Festival d'Automne à Paris, Theater Chur (Chur) and TAK Theater Liechtenstein (Schaan) - TanzPlan Ost, Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, Théâtre de la Ville (Paryż/Paris), HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), BIT Teatergarasjen (Bergen), La Commune Centre dramatique national d’Aubervilliers, Tanzhaus nrw (Düsseldorf), House on Fire przy wsparciu programu kulturalnego Unii Europejskiej/ with the support of the European Union cultural program

production: R.B. Jérôme Bel (Paris)
executive direction and artistic advice: Rebecca Lee
production manager : Sandro Grando
technical advice : Gilles Gentner
premiere: Paris, 2015
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Production in Poland : Ciało/Umysł Foundation
Curator: Edyta Kozak
Production manager in Poland: Agnieszka Kiewicz
Cast coordinator in Poland: Krzysztof Kwiatkowski
Assistant: Renata Piotrowska
Polish premiere: 11.07.2017 | Nowy Teatr, Ciało/Umysł Festival