Compañía Nacional de Danza

With The Show Must Go On, Jérôme Bel dissects the performance mechanisms, staging about twenty performers and a DJ who plays the last thirty years hits one after another. He plays with the performance expectations and with mirror-effects between performers and spectators.

Where drama might demand or force my attention on a moment-by-moment basis, the gift of The Show Must Go On, in common with so much of Bel’s work, is that it gives me the space and the time to look, the space and the time to be bored, the space and the time in which to find an interest. The uniformity of the line, the slowness of change in the piece and the simplicity of movement, all hide (or rather, occasion) a wealth of vivid, amazing detail.
-Tim Etchells

The possibility of an art-piece, even a choreography, today is not to propose an utterance, but to invite the spectator to re-invent him/herself, or perhaps less utopic, to re-search his/her ideology of watching, of constructing Self, or articulating security. The artwork cannot say anything in itself, it can represent a political idea or concept, but today the artwork is a formulation of itself. The artwork can only investigate, or re-search, its own domain, and become self-conscious through reflection (per speculum in aenigmae) and through this awareness it can become an experience of the Self (the spectator) but never an experience of something else. To be part of an art-experience is always only the experience of the self.
-Marten Spangberg