Le Sacre du Printemps

This “Rite” proceeds from an inversion: instead of a choreography for dancers, in an umpteenth variation of the iconic piece written by Nijinsky, Xavier Le Roy sets about staging the gestures of the conductor as he directs the performance of Stravinsky’s music. Inspired by a documentary about the Berlin Philharmoniker, Rhythm is it!, the choreographer examines the relationship between music and movement while upsetting their order of causality. For, such gestures are the real motors of music as much as they are determined by it, in a way that intention and execution seem to become mingled. What Xavier Le Roy calls the “synchronising machine”, of seeing and hearing, is thus based on the possibility of an aesthetic, temporal community between the conductor, the spectators and the musicians. The bodily experience of listening is accordingly no longer apprehended as a purely auditory phenomenon, but as an incarnated process, out-smarting the expectations of the public and reinventing the conditions of their reception.