MEDIATHEK

Alone, bathed in light, hanging his head, Frédéric Seguette tries on one teeshirt after another, like years rushing by. Numbers flicker on his chest like the countdown before the start of a film. But also like a hellish backtracking. The juxtaposition of shirts thus evokes the flashing by of images that supposedly happens right before death. This dreadful decomposition reveals the countless strata that make up each being’s complex sedimentation. The dancer pulls off his hides like a snake shedding skins. Or like someone desperately looking for his own skin, and nothing seems to fit. A gap emerges between the silence of his sad clown aspect, and the bright colors and glaring prints of the teeshirts. (…) It is up to the spectator to ponder over tiny details in order to reconstitute the sequence links. Each tableau is an enigma, where audacious associations of ideas are strangely stacked together, all along respecting a rigorous set-up of witty words that are here transposed into “body words”. It is a huge throbbing crossword puzzle whose tortuous connections bring about new words. We feel intelligent (in the etymological sense of the word, i.e. “in agreement with”) when we manage to decode an enigma. The effect is all the merrier when we notice that the person sitting beside us is baffled, and that the subtle shift of meaning has gone right over his head! It is wonderful how the public, in Jérôme Bel’s work, is an essential element. Its very function is challenged; its comfortable and passive position is provoked. Its voyeurism ' silent, permitted, and tolerated ' is shattered. (ladanse.com)

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ladanse.com Katya M (03.03.1999) ⎮ jeromebel.fr