Jerome Bel's The Show Must Go On

This week, I could see that it is impossible to understand a performance without knowing its social/ cultural context. At first I watched Jerome Bel’s The Show Must Go On, I found it was experimental. However, Shirtology, Bel’s another performance, was the weirdest and embarrassing piece that I had ever seen. It was a couple of days later when I could comprehend the intention of the video where he changes his shirts for six minutes. He was challenging the capitalistic structure of choreography; he was refusing to adapt to the tastes of the audience. In Cult Plastic, Voaugust says that “his work reveals how deeply we have been socialized and colonized to experience and create performances” (Voaugust, 2017). Artists cast a doubt on the social

conditions, then seek for an escape from them. Thus, searching for the historical background enables the audience to know the question of the answer. Knowing only the answer tells nothing. I guess that’s why I failed to appreciate the contemporary dance before; I did not see what had brought them to the experiments.

As searching for some historical factors in the early 1900s, I could understand Indian dancers a bit better. Under the British policy to obliterate the Indian culture, they suffered from a famine and stigma. The continual deception and oppression of the British Government might provoke the people’s anger and need for change. In this context, the traditional dance forms could be a nail and hammer to break down the ethnocentric colonialist rules. Additionally, comparing Indian classical dancers with the Pakistani choreographers, I found that South Asian women had used dance to resist the intersectional discrimination. Nighat Chaodhry would have not come up with her performance unless she was not a woman and Muslim at the same time. Multiple historical/ social factors dwell in one’s identity, which facilitates a unique creation.