Performing Arts

I fought the urge to walk out of my first encounter with Jérôme Bel. It was The Show Must Go On at the Pantages (through the Walker), in 2001, a show featuring a wide line of everyday/ordinary people facing and returning the blank stares of the audience and intermittently breaking into dull interpretations of club dancing. I don’t remember much else about the night, beyond thinking I’d probably never seen a show more insulting to its audience.

I likely would have relegated the evening to a dark and distant brain cell if not for Wednesday’s opening of Pichet Klunchun and Myself, the tell-and-show Bel has crafted with the Thai dancer named in the title. Bel and Klunchun sit in chairs facing one another from opposite sides of the stage. Bel interviews Klunchun about his art and Klunchun answers — sometimes cryptically, sometimes revealingly, sometimes demonstratively — before the two reverse roles. I didn’t make the connection with the evening of six years ago until Bel played David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” to illustrate his artistic motives. The 20-watt bulb flickered over my head — Ooooh, it’s THAT guy.

Bel and Klunchun are different breeds of minimalists, and their show is all about exposing the audience to their divergent artistic processes, from conception to construction to production. There’s a formal informality to their conversation — the most basic of questions lead to complicated blueprints, all delivered with an understated, patient pace that meshes well with the artists’ metabolisms.

Klunchun moves with the relaxed control of a cat, his movements so deliberate, subtle and precise that, in one work, he distinguishes one character from another by changing the relationship of his chin to his extended fingers. The audience gasped when Klunchun pulled his fingers back to make contact with the top of his forearm and again with his revelation that a complete performance, uninterrupted, would last one week.

My favorite moment of the evening came when Klunchun moved from a back corner of the stage toward the center, time seeming to stop not only between strides but during his strides. The room fell so silent that I could only hear a lone person breathing. I thought perhaps someone nearby had fallen asleep until I realized the breaths were coming from Klunchun, amplified through his body microphone.

By contrast, nothing about Bel is exacting. He took the stage Wednesday as if he’d just woken up, and even Klunchun, in his loosely scripted side of the conversation, seemed taken aback by Bel’s approach. I know this was a performance — how much truth Bel laced into his comments, I’m not sure — but Bel articulated a flippant if comical disregard for his audience. The rules of contemporary art, he said, allow him the freedom to do anything he wishes, audience be damned — and don’t bother asking for a refund. If that means lip-syncing through a song or doing nothing at all but standing there, returning the audience’s stare, well, he inferred, that’s art.

I now have context for what I’d too easily disregarded six years ago. Bel is all about effect — he wants to remove any sense of art (or, more specifically, artists) as rare, privileged or gifted. Rather, he tells Klunchun (and, by extension, his audience), he wants people watching his work to feel that “anyone can do this.” Mission accomplished. But there’s a uniqueness to how Bel delivers this message. When he plays the song “Killing Me Softly,” rather than dance, he takes the run of the song to illustrate his own death. Even Klunchun, in his scripted revelation, sees the artistry.

Pichet Klunchun and Myself is illuminating, captivating, funny and, particularly for Bel, brave. Positioning himself alongside a dancer of Klunchun’s caliber could only further cast Bel as an artistic layabout. But I came away awestruck with one artist and forgiving of the other, questioning my own boundaries of what is and isn’t art.