3 Choreography’s “slower ontology” Jéréme Bel’s critique of representation is representation, whose structure is imprinted not only on the art, but on the entire culture of the West (its religions, philosophies, politics) therefore designates more than just a particular type of theatrical construction. (Derrida 1978: 234) In order to write on the work of French choreographer Jérome Bel, it is important to contextualize it briefly within a particular movement in recent Puropean dance. Tam thinking here of the proposals made in the past decade by choreographers such as La Ribot, Jonathan Burrows, Boris Charmatz, Xavier Le Roy, Marten Spingberg, Vera Mantero, Thomas Lehmen, Meg Stuart, Juan Dominguez, to mention just a few of the most recognizable names,' This movement has been gaining shape, visibility, and force since the mid-1990s but it is by no means an organized one, nor does it have a proper name2 Despite dlifferent modes of working, different dramaturgical approaches, and sometimes ven open antagonisms between each choreographer’s way of dealing with form, ‘liscourse, and content, it is possible to identify some quite remarkable convergences. One prevalent concern ~ particularly significant to the question I would like to tackle in this chapter, that is, the question of a dance that initiates 4 critique of representation by insisting on the still, on the slow, and on that particular form of repetition known in rhetoric as “paronomasia”” ~ is the interrogation of choreography’s political ontology. If such an interrogation has heen carried out by many of the works of the choreographers mentioned above, rno one has taken it to its limits more consistently and relentlessly than Jérdme Bel since his first eveningength piece Nom Donné prar VAueur (Name Given by the Author) (1994), Bel’s interrogation of dance’s political ontology takes the form of a systematic ‘vitique of choreography’s participation in the broader project of Western representation. The critique of representation is one of the main characteristics of early twentieth-century experimental performance, theatre, and dance — at least since Bertolt Brecht’s “urgency to understand mimesis [.... ] as historically mediated” (Diamond 1997: viii), and Antonin Artaud’s famous manifestos for a theatre of cruelty from the early 1930s which, as Derrida noted, not only wmounced the “limit of representation” but proposed a “system of critiques shaking the entirety of Occidental history” (Derrida 1978: 235, emphasis in the original).> Theoretically, the critique of representation announces “a fractnre in the epistemological regime of modernity, a regime that rested on a faith in the veality effect” of representation as it secured the stability of discourse (Gordon 1997: 10). 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