Invited to do a piece for the Paris Opera Ballet by its director Brigitte Lefèvre, Jérôme Bel wanted to represent a kind of theatrical documentary on the work of a ballet dancer: Véronique Doisneau. The dancer, near retirement age, alone on stage, retrospectively and subjectively considers her own career as a dancer in this institution.
This film was shot during the last performance of the piece, on stage at the Palais Garnier. It was produced by Telmondis and the Paris Opera, and conducted jointly by Pierre Dupouey and Jérôme Bel.
Jérôme Bel (Paris, 1964)
A dancer and choreographer, is one of the most outstanding representatives of the movement of non-dance. His pieces, conceptual, moving between the theatrical, the verbal and the everyday. The body, understood as a ready-made, incorporates a record of movements that define the subject. After working with several choreographers in France and Italy, he created his first piece in 1994, Nom donne par l’auteur, in which the interaction between dancers and banal objects make up the piece. Jérôme Bel (1995), Shirtologie (1997), Le dernier spectacle (1998), The Show Must Go On (2001), Véronique Doisneau (2004) or Lutz Förster (2009) complete a job that modifies its limits under the impulse of thinking dance.