Jerôme Bel's "Gala" and the Spectacle of Exploiting Identity

In Jérôme Bel’s Gala there is a disturbing display of ignored identities. What is meant to be a celebration of dance and every sort of body ends up being a terrible spectacle - the result of which is generalization. "Gala" exploits cast members for their diversity by reducing them to a single identifier and ignores any intersecting factors.

This quote from Lily Kind sums up Gala:

“Gala wants to re-draw lines around what dance can be and who can do it. In that sense, Bel is at the same stage, intellectually, of a young liberal arts -educated dancer, who is just discovering dance doesn’t have to be pretty, or successful, or legible. Except that Bel is mature creator, a white male with a multi-national funding trail, who makes work that is more about celebrating his ideas as important than about researching the ideas themselves. I won’t treat him tenderly. His show Gala is cliche, gimmicky, dull, cowardly, and exploitative.”

Gala has been restaged all over the world, each time with a new cast of locals. The cast of Gala was comprised of 20 bodies, each being used to represent one facet of diversity. Present in the cast were a host of people representing every type (yay!) of human being. I could list the cast off based on what each of their signifiers were. Is it reducing them to a category by listing them off in this manner? Yes. Listing off was half of this piece.

Four or five professional dancers were in the bunch, setting the bar of achievement. Based off of how the piece was structured, the audience was given the power to assess each dancer’s achievement but was meant to feel kind-hearted in “not judging” and being okay with “failure”. I felt this work trying to redefine what is beautiful but it missed the mark. Having each participant parade one by one at a time felt like a pageant.

The piece began with a performer flipping over a larger piece of paper that read “Ballet”. Each performer in turn walked to downstage center and performed their version of a pirouette. As expected there was a wide range of approaches and the audience was so obviously meant to be thinking “these are all good and beautiful” but with the label of ballet so strongly in the foreground, there was still an expectation. This expectation was met by some (professional dancer), under par for others (adolescent girl with not much training in ballet), and then some were so far from a pirouette that is was thought as precious (6 year old boy or 65 year old woman). What was interesting about this section in particular was the clapping. In this section only some executions of the pirouette received applause and in almost every case the applause was a form of encouragement.

The same structure was then set to the expectation of "Waltz" to replace the previous Eurocentric dance form with which to judge. Next were solos. More individuality peeked through for sure. The rest of the cast tried to replicate the soloists' movement, some more "successful" than others but again "A for effort!"

Throughout the piece everyone swapped costumes, as if to say "we are all the same and it doesn't matter what we wear"... until it didn't work for one cast member. A person with down syndrome had just switched into a new pair of leggings and during all the dancing the legging weren't staying in place and the person was clearly uncomfortable. It was a moment that shed light on how we aren't all the same. Different people need different assurances set in place to feel safe.

If Jerôme Bel wanted to take a step towards a more inclusive dance world, I think he did not succeed. Rather than highlighting individuality and intersectionality he boxed people in. The structure of the piece showed a lack of trust towards the dancers. He didn't give them anything layered or complex and therefore made something easily accomplished where the audience would be proud no matter what.