The slur of obscenity hangs around the work of choreographer Jérôme Bel, who returns to Dublin this month. Michael Seaver asks why
I actually liked the urination on stage. It was just one moment in his work, but in spite of the hoopla and column inches around Jérôme Bel's eponymous quartet during the inaugural International Dance Festival Ireland in 2002, there has been little opportunity to discuss the work.
The festival was taken to court by an audience member - Raymond Whitehead - over a perceived failure to warn audience members adequately about nudity in the show and, particularly, the moment when Claire Haenni and Frédéric Sequette urinated on stage. A court found in 2004 that International Dance Festival Ireland was not in breach of contract or a duty of care to Whitehead, but it didn't award costs in its favour, so the festival had to pay its own legal bill of €10,000.
To many, the words "urinate on stage" suggest provocation and disrespect, but, for me, the performers' actions were artistically satisfying and honest gestures that naturally followed a long period of childlike bodily exploration. I wrote that in my review at the time, but was also aware how this could be taken out of context and therefore added that there are moments of movement that cannot easily be translated on to the page. This wasn't a critical cop-out on my part.
I simply believe that in Jérôme Bel, as in many other works, the viewer is taken on a journey which ends with an action that on its own may seem incongruous, but in the context of the overall artistic statement makes another point entirely. It's like telling someone who hasn't read a murder mystery who the murderer is: meaningless information unless you have followed the plot and maybe fallen for a few of the red herrings along the way.
Coincidentally, I heard about the outcome of the Jérôme Bel case on the day I met Douglas Sonntag, director of dance at the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), when we were at the American Dance Festival. We discussed the "war against art" that began in 1989 when, also coincidentally, urine was the offender for Rev Donald Wildmon.
The director of the American Family Association, he attacked artist Andres Serrano's Piss Christ in a wide direct-mail campaign. Piss Christ is a photograph of a crucifix suspended in the artist's urine and was a winner of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts Awards in the Visual Arts competition, which is sponsored in part by the NEA. Senators Al D'Amato and Jesse Helms attacked the NEA from the floor of the Senate and called for a review of its procedures in allocating grants to artists.
THE SAME YEAR, more members of the US congress criticised the NEA, this time for supporting Robert Mapplethorpe's retrospective, The Perfect Moment, organised by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Among the photographs was one of a man urinating into another's mouth.
The Mapplethorpe and Serrano works make entirely different statements from Bel's, but he gets tarred with similar misconceptions.
Whitehead's action against International Dance Festival Ireland didn't involve freedom of speech or public funding of the arts, but merely dealt with the issue of whether patrons should be warned when a show contains nudity or urination. Judge Joe Mathews stressed that it was not an obscenity case and could "unfortunately" be judged only on "very narrow" criteria of contract law.
It was, indeed, unfortunate, because references to Jérôme Bel constantly imply obscenity and the work has never had a chance to rebut these charges. Whitehead's case claimed one of the performers performed obscene and indecent acts on stage, in particular urination and genital exposure. Writing in this newspaper he described the urination as "someone performing lewd acts just feet in front of the audience" and used the words "indecent", "obscene" and "lewd" when referring to the work. Because the festival didn't have a case to answer it didn't have a chance to put forward a defence, but in the legal vacuum Bel's work is still associated with obscenity. Nor has there been any examination of the performers' actions on artistic grounds.
The aesthetic value of an isolated act of urination may be difficult to ascribe, but Bel's use of nudity can in no way be described as lewd or obscene. Tolerance of nudity certainly seems higher for the visual arts: every gallery has its fair share. Outside the museums a postcard sent from Florence will more than likely show a naked David, from Copenhagen a topless mermaid, or from Brussels a naked child urinating. But the nude live body is a bit more problematic.
Nudity can be a strong statement when used metaphorically: the body as a new beginning, innocence, raw sexuality, and so on. But it can also be featured gratuitously and, like any element, it becomes boring when over-used or seeming to have no basis in the work. In the words of choreographer Boris Charmatz: "The naked body hides every bit as much as it reveals. Audiences notice we're naked, and then forget it." More poetically, Erick Hawkins believed that to choreograph nude dancers was "to reveal something essential about the human experience: that the body was a clear place". This is closer to Jérôme Bel's vision for Jérôme Bel. For him the nude body is not presented to titillate, but as a clear metaphoric mirror in which audiences can see themselves. Any eroticism would have to be in the eye of the perceiver - but that's true of much of dance.
EMINENT DANCE CRITIC Clive Barnes recalls New York's first mass encounter with dance nudity in 1967 when Anna Halprin brought her troupe from San Francisco to appear at Hunter College:
The performance ended with her dancers cavorting joyously naked in, as I recall it, a pile of brown corrugated paper and a blaze of yellow light. For this they were hauled up in a New York court on either obscenity or public decency charges. I was subpoenaed as a witness, and a bushy-tailed assistant DA asked, "Mr Barnes, did you find the naked women sexually stimulating?" I replied no. He then looked piercingly at the presiding judge, and, presumably noting my English accent and charming lisp, asked, in tones of Perry Mason-like triumph, "Did you, by chance, find the naked men stimulating?" The truth, I suspect, is that whatever your gender or sexual preference, you are unlikely to find naked dancing stimulating in any fashion other than the artistic.
Other productions may consciously feature nudity to present eroticism and dancers are well aware of the difference. In a 2003 production of Salome, dancers working for Australian Opera negotiated a nudity allowance of AU$50 (€30) as opposed to the paltry standard rate of AU$17 (€10). In addition, all rehearsals were clothed and the company agreed not to keep the naked scene in its filmed archives.
"A part of it is they don't want to be taken for granted," explained Nick Davison, of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, at the time. "They're not amongst a lot of other dancers - it would be different if it was a dance company and everybody on stage was naked."
Jérôme Bel returns to the International Dance Festival Ireland this year with a performance of Pichet Klunchen and Myself, a duet for himself and a Thai dancer. But he will also give a public interview on questions of the artist and censorship within an ever-changing society. He hopes not just to reflect on his Irish experience, but talk about broader issues.
"Until a few years ago the idea that an artist like myself could be censored was unimaginable," he told me last week. "But then I began to perform around the world and realised that some of my colleagues elsewhere cannot express what they want."
A globalised media means censorship can spread beyond borders. With the recent reaction to the Danish cartoons, what would be the backlash to a "Piss Mohammad"?
"But this can also happen in western Europe," Bel adds. "So I have to be attentive to any sign of censorship, either visible or my own auto-censorship."
Theorists enjoy aligning all sorts of performative practices to Bel's work, but in the middle of a conceptual battlefield the deeply personal nature of his work is often forgotten. For him the personal is political. The four naked performers in Jérôme Bel write their height, weight, age, bank balance and home phone number on the back of the stage before the performance. In a commissioned solo for Veronique Doisneau, a mid-range ballerina at the end of her career with Paris Opera Ballet, the dancer walked onstage with the bag she would take to rehearsal. She told the audience her age, salary, the ages of her two children, and the details of the operation that threatened her career when she was aged 20.
BRINGING PERSONAL DETAILS to the audience is not just a clever Jerome Bel-ism that usurps performer/audience hierarchies. It instead indicates the deep human engagement that he undertakes in creating each piece. One of the performers in Jérôme Bel is a woman in her 70s who is a friend of Bel's mother.
This gets lost in the discussions about advertising codes and indecency. Bel makes work with and about real people and refers to himself as a searcher, someone who tries to find different forms to express different ideas. But for this he needs an audience who are fellow searchers, not merely consumers.
Jérôme Bel appears in Pichet Klunchen and Myself on Apr 25 and 26 at Project Arts Centre, Dublin. He will also be giving a public interview at 6pm on Apr 26 in Project Arts Centre as part of the Art's Council's Critical Voices 3 programme. For more details, go to www.dancefestivalireland.ie