| Xavier
Le Roy
Self Undinished
"I looked for a way to confuse the understanding of what’s
before and what’s after, what’s going back or forward.”
"A chair, a desk, a soundtrack, that doesn't start. A dancer
in a shirt uses strong sound effects to imitate a robot. Indeed
an understandable, even conventional idea, that is until Xavier
Le Roy' s (1963, France) play turns into a gripping mental space.
Head over heels, the dancer' s body is transformed in a real time
into a series of hallucinogenic morphological aberrations, representing
images of body that reconfigures itself based to unwritten laws
and a disquieting, inhuman rhythm. It undergoes long stases, makes
infinite movements and begins to crawl abruptly. In addition to
the torsion carried out in the "spectacle de danse" (dance
performance), Xavier Le Roy taps into a new field where scientific
and social data is transferred and imprinted in imaginary representations
of the body."
Francois Piron in the journal des arts of Connivence, 6th Biennale
de Lyon
The brightly lit performing area gives no clues to "how to
read" and the mechanical - man beginning is offset with a return
to ordinary task - like activity: walk, sit, turn off tape machine.
By the time you're into the contortions with the dress, we're given
this extraordinary hybrid creature which confronts us with a multiplicity
of interpretations. For me it alternated variously as insect, martian,
chicken, watering can, caterpillar into pupa, et al. What saved
it from being a Pilobolus - like entertainment (a crowd - pleasing
American group that combines bodies to create biomorphic oddities)
were the stillnesses and extended durations. We must sit with our
attention riveted, waiting for the next stirring. Like watching
a spider or snail. Your timing in this piece is exquisite: no pandering
to short attention spans here.
Yvonne Rainer |