Ageless Festival: Jérôme Bel – stage@leeds, Leeds

Choreographer: Jérôme Bel

Jérôme Bel is used to walk outs. That becomes clear in this career retrospective which he describes as ‘auto-bio-choreo-graphy’, which covers nearly three decades of work. Bel admits at the outset that this live screening/performance/archival piece, at two hours, might be too long (it nearly is). As a concession, he invites the audience to leave during the performance, as he won’t mind at all. It is easy to believe him – after all, Bel himself is not here.

His absence is no accident – as he later describes in the performance, he and his company stopped flying in 2019 to reduce their carbon footprint. Instead Terry O’Connor of theatre collective Forced Entertainment is delivering his words, introducing herself as Bel and delivering his monologue in the first person. The effect is less jarring than expected, and Bel’s presence is felt extremely clearly, both in his writing, and in the slices of archive selected for projection on a large screen at the back of the stage. O’Connor is an excellent performer, her delivery measured, even, and well timed allowing Bel’s text to land with clarity.

The piece walks the audience through the life and work of Bel, from Name given by the author, all the way up to the current piece, Jérôme Bel. The performance displays his love of choreography (‘to create performance is the most beautiful thing in the world’), his innate defiance as a creative (‘passion is weapon’) and his loathing of consumerism. It traces his socialist and philosophical approach to dance, the early rejection of audiences and critics (Bel can be as indifferent to praise as he is scorn), and moments of personal realisation around the grief of losing friends to the AIDS crisis, the joy of becoming a parent, and depression about climate change.

It is apt to describe this piece as a transmission – it has somehow travelled from Bel’s brain, his past works, and also from a possible future for embodied archives of dance performance that tread lightly on the planet. The work tiptoes right up to the line of pretension a couple of times, but Bel is about as self aware as a choreographer can get, and dryly funny to boot. His deep love of dance as a vehicle to express ideas is earnest, and his ability to evolve as a maker is an astonishing testament to the value of continuing to create as we age.

Reviewed on 10th July 2026