Jérôme Bel

Jérôme Bel was born in 1964 in Montpellier, lives in Paris and works worldwide. Since 1994 he has been developing choreographies. Through his use of biography, Jérôme Bel politicizes his questions, aware as he is of the crisis involving the subject in contemporary society and the forms its representation takes on stage. He deals with questions about what the theatre can be in a political sense. In offering the stage to non-traditional performers (amateurs, people with physical and mental handicaps, children…), he shows a preference for the community of differences over the formatted group, and a desire to dance over choreography, and duly applies the methods of a process of emancipation through art. Since 2019, for ecological reasons, Jérôme Bel and his company no longer use airplanes for their travels and it is with this new paradigm that his latest performances have been created, produced and toured. He has been invited to contemporary art biennials and museums, where he has put on performances and shown films. Jérôme Bel is regularly invited to give lectures at universities. Jérôme Bel received awards and prices, e.g. the Bessie Award and the Swiss “present-day dance creation” prize.