Xavier Le Roy

On an extremely pared-back stage, with just a chair and a desk as furniture, a human being, firstly occupied by mechanical motions and sounds, interrupts these automatisms to switch on a ghetto-blaster. In this magisterial solo, which is one of Xavier Le Roy’s most famous pieces, the performer’s body becomes transformed until it reaches a radically organic state and is experienced as quite simply a living mass, at the crossroads between plant, animal and human. From torsions to tensions, and from bends to stretches, Xavier Le Roy abandons imposed orders, becoming like a “body without organs”, that figure dear to Artaud and Deleuze; in other words, freely disorganised. As these metamorphoses progress, he can then reveal his full formal potential, as a hybrid, labile figure, torn away from social significations. Grasped as an extension of time, requiring attention to be paid to each instant, he proposes a sharing of this performance and its singularities, which is totally emancipated from the dualities that generally define it (nature/culture, subject/object, human/machine, etc.).

After studying molecular biology, Xavier Le Roy achieved worldwide recognition for his critical and experimental approach to dance, which he has developed since the early 1990s. His solos and collaborative pieces test out the limits of the choreographic field, of the staged body and its actions. By placing the relationship between the performer and the audience at the heart of his investigations, he has also devised forms for exhibition spaces, presented at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, or the Centre Pompidou in Paris.