Sadler’s Wells, London
October 18, 2016
Róisín O’Brien
As a critic, you are expected to observe closely, and to use your prior experience and knowledge in an evaluative manner. Expectation is unavoidable, sometimes even a hindrance. The same can be said for audience members, albeit in a less strict and deliberate way. Indeed, many aspects of our day-to-day life involve this negotiation between past expectation and present observation.
Such interactions and perceptions become particularly fraught and insightful when we discuss discrimination and taste, and dance is no exception to prejudice and cultural expectation. Jérôme Bel is evidently very aware of this. Gala predicts the critic in all of us.
Gala is a series of cues written on a flipchart: ‘Ballet’, ‘Waltz’, ‘Solo’, ‘Michael Jackson.’ The rules are clear-cut, with each dancer given enough time and space to individually respond to the cue, whether they are an able-bodied ballerina, or a dancer performing from their wheelchair.
While the joy of this piece resides squarely in the people on stage, Bel operates a symbolic onion peeler, deftly highlighting the layers we add to people, and carefully taking them apart.
First, you lose your expectation of set counts and correct rhythms. As each performer takes their own time to complete a task, so you loosen up and accept what is happening in front of you.
You then lose any sense of more ‘able dancers’. Not everyone in the company can correctly copy the ballet dancer; not everyone in the company can lose themselves in the throb of electronic dance music the way one dancer can; and no one, no one, can get anywhere near the sheer energy of a young girl rushing around the stage to Miley Cyrus. Individuals, not definitions, present themselves.
And finally, you lose your expectation of ability, when performers beautifully reveal skills, dexterities and capacities previously unseen and un-thought of.
Able and disabled bodies, professional and amateur performers, deserve equal criticism. Good criticism treats work with respect: to not critique something like Gala because its purpose is noble and its simple existence praiseworthy, does a disservice to the performers and the creator.
Nonetheless, Gala’s very existence is the dispelling of criticism, a challenge to the audience to question what they expect, and a space for them to realign and adjust their positions. The concept is simple, but it could so easily have become a mere statement of intent, rather than the perceptual unfolding it enacts.
An observation, then, if possible: Gala is a celebration of self, a defiant challenge to restriction, and a moment of pure joy.