Meeting at the summit. One of the founders of tg STAN, hand-in-hand with French choreographer and dancer Jérôme Bel, one of the great innovators who has renewed contemporary dance. The last time that tg STAN graced the stages of the Festival de Otoño was in 2014, with its experimental version of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. It was also here in 2012 and 2008. It seems fitting that the Belgian company is back for our fortieth edition, and with a double entry.

It’s not common for Jolente De Keersmaeker to leave the great theatre and dance repertory to the side, but if that’s what Jérôme Bel asks you, you’re not going to turn him down. The idea starts from using the same imagination the actress employs to shape a character with a script but, in this case, at the service of motion and not the word. Jérôme Bel has broken through many supposedly uncrossable borders in the world of dance, has worked with the negative space of dance (stillness) and the opposite of virtuosity (the spontaneity of bodies, including those not called by the ‘norm’) and his plan this time was to make an actress’s body go through excerpts from historic choreographies to take a look at the sentimental and emotional underlying meanings.

Dances for an Actress reveals – from a postcolonial discursive posture of reconstructing dancist memory – a pleasure, a freedom, an emotional surrender and genuine and incomparable intensity, as it is a simple staging, without big theatrical displays. The latter is also related to the ecological commitment taken on by Jérôme Bel, who uses lighting only when absolutely necessary and nothing more, with low power lamps, and the actress does her own costumes. The total energy consumed during the work is equal to about one hour of vacuuming. This may be a secondary circumstance, albeit one that should make us think. Progress as we have understood it leads us towards planetary destruction and we’ve got to start thinking of what is essential and eliminating the tangential. A looming debate in artistic circles.