sarma

The standing man seems autonomous, as though standing for himself alone and as though still having the possibility of any decision. The sitting man exercises a pressure, his weight presents itself to the outside, arousing a sense of permanence. The way he sits, he cannot fall; he becomes larger when he stands up. The man, however, who has settled down to rest, the lying man, has disarmed himself. It is very easy to get at him in the defencelessness of his sleep. The lying man may have fallen, he may have been wounded. Before standing on his feet again, he will not be taken seriously.

(Elias Canetti, The conscience of words)

A foreign body

When the French dancer Xavier Le Roy (b. 1963), who has lived in Berlin since 1992, launched into his artistic work, one of his desires was to avoid having ‘a style of his own’; he wanted to evade any kind of ‘signature’ or ‘label’ in order to chose his own free and creative course instead of any path marked out in advance. Circumstances decided otherwise. When the first organiser who invited him to perform asked for a CV, he found that Le Roy had bidden farewell to a career as a scientific researcher in microbiology to become a dancer; this fact was included immediately in the first article on Le Roy’s work to be published, thereby creating his ‘label’: the dancing scientist, a foreign body in the world of movement. As such, Le Roy himself became a ‘product of circumstances’.
This is also the title he gave to one of his first performances: Product of Circumstances (1999), an autobiographical, scientific lecture with illustrations – slides of microbiological processes and short dance demonstrations. A scientist in the theatre: it is not such an odd notion. In the 17th and 18th and late into the 19th century, researchers performed demonstration experiments in theatres; Fahrenheit, for example, earned his living by such scientific performances; dissections and other anatomy lessons were eagerly attended by a usually wealthy audience.

From science to dance

Other motives were involved in Le Roy’s move from science to dance, however. The idealism with which he started out on his research career was soon quashed: he quickly discovered that in our society science has nothing to do with searching (for truth), but only with producing, publishing, etc., with market-oriented thinking in which career, power and hierarchy are major concepts.
The more Le Roy became aware of this in his laboratory, the more dance lessons he started to take outside it. Would he be able to escape this sort of mechanism by switching to dance? Was art outside this economic system and the behavioural codes that ensued from it? In the end it was not, but on the basis of the experience he had gained, and driven by an ever-increasing interest in physical activities, he ultimately decided to examine the medium of dance from the inside and if possible to make modifications to it. Art cannot change the world, but perhaps it can change the understanding of that world.
The theatre is a place where this sort of discourse can be carried on. It may not be possible to aspire to a Utopia, to create another world (as Harry Potter – of whom Le Roy is a great fan – is able to do by using his magical powers), but one might make proposals regarding methods, organisational systems and concepts that may activate our perception of this world. At this point the options taken by Le Roy the scientist and Le Roy the artist coincide: renewal, in both science and art, are usually a matter of ‘cette transformation du regard’, which takes place at that particular moment in the artist and the scientist, i.e. the creative capacity to see a familiar reality through different eyes.

Conditions for and ways of producing

Le Roy initially set up a one-man company: he started work entirely on his own, as he himself says, ‘in an exclusive collaboration with myself’, to see where it led. But the performing arts do not lend themselves – unlike the world of writers or sculptors – to one-man production. However, working with several people or groups, working methods soon arose that clashed with Le Roy’s need for opposition and criticism. He became increasingly convinced that ways of production had to be revised in artistic activities too: after all, ways of producing determine the product, the result, the performance (surely this is a very Marxist line of thought?).
It is not enough for a production to be critical in content; it must also have a critical effect: this effect is determined by the relationship that those involved in the artistic activity enter into with each other, by the way the author positions himself, by the way the relationship with the audience goes, etc.

 Performances

Xavier Le Roy’s purpose in his various projects is to translate this and many other ideas into performances. Here is a selection of his productions:

Self Unfinished (1998) is set in a completely white room in which Le Roy is joined by a table, a chair and a radio that does not work. On the basis of the extremely simple poses of standing, sitting and lying, he uses his clothes to transform his body so much that the audience no longer knows what sort of creature they are looking at; sometimes he is a two-legged monster, half man, half woman, at other times his naked torso, whose head has apparently vanished, looks more like a plucked chicken.
‘The order of movements,’ he says, ‘is determined largely by the objects that dominate our lives, e.g. by the fact that I have to take my shoes off before my trousers.’ Self Unfinished is a funny show about a living sculpture, which leaves the audience with such questions as ‘am I really seeing what I see?’, ‘what is male and what is female?’, ‘what is the characteristic nature of the body if it can so thoroughly surprise and alienate itself and me, a spectator?’, etc.

In 2000 the French choreographer Jérôme Bel asked his favourite colleague Xavier Le Roy to create a piece for him. At that time, Bel was asking a great many questions about the position of the author and the matter of copyright. Le Roy created the piece and was paid for it as an ‘employee’, but Bel put his signature to it and thus also held the copyright. This undermined the notion of authorship, defined as it usually is in our society by market-oriented thinking. The piece was given the title Xavier Le Roy, and the choreographer Le Roy thereby created something that commented on an earlier piece by Jérôme Bel, Le Dernier Spectacle. The spectator is not only again faced with the confusion surrounding authorship, but also with the imperfection of his senses (‘am I seeing what I see?’) and also with the confusion between man and woman, and above all with questions of repetition and difference.
After all, every repetition of an action differs from ‘the previous time’. There is no repetition without difference, nor is there difference without repetition. Le Roy here touches upon profound questions which such philosophers as Kierkegaard and Deleuze have also considered.

Giszelle (2001) is a two-part solo that Le Roy created for the young Hungarian dancer Eszter Salamon. The title naturally refers to Giselle, one of the classics of the romantic ballet repertoire.
In addition to a quotation from classical ballet, the piece also contains a whole series of recognisable images of movement from yoga and the disco world, among other things, while Rodin’s The Thinker, an anthropoid gradually starting to walk upright, and a shooting cowboy also make occasional appearances on stage. In this performance Le Roy has worked mainly with filmic concepts: camera angles, editing techniques, montage, etc. It is not the combination of disciplines, as often occurs in multimedia performances, that interests Le Roy, but what one medium can use or borrow from another.

Project is Le Roy’s latest piece, and here his researches take him into the field of play. There is no play without rules. Actors play on a stage, but this sort of play is governed by different rules to those of the football field or the sports hall. In the theatre, the rules consist of the agreement the actors and audience make with each other on the basis of the actors’ ‘pretending’ and the audience’s ‘awareness that this play is not real’.
In Project, Le Roy puts variable teams of players on the stage: sometimes they use a ball, sometimes they don’t; sometimes they execute previously arranged movements, at other times the game of ball, with its own rules, goes its own way; the rules also become more complicated as the game/performance progresses. Just like the use of film techniques in Giszelle, Le Roy’s intention is to examine how principles of play behave in a choreographic context, which back-and-forth movements can be initiated between these two fields of human activity.
Thought and movement remain inseparably linked in Le Roy’s work. Thinking is a physical activity. Wittgenstein walked up and down his room when he was trying to formulate his ideas. Le Roy sees the creator of dance as a researcher whose terrain extends over the whole world.

‘To summarise, as far as form is concerned, one can call play a free action which, as ‘unintended’ and outside normal life, is deliberate, which nevertheless is able to completely absorb the player, in which no direct material advantage is involved, or benefit obtained, which takes place within a specifically defined time and space, which runs in an orderly fashion in accordance with certain rules, and calls communal ties into being, which likes to surround itself in secrecy or accentuate its difference from the ordinary world by means of disguise.’

(Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play Element in Culture, 1938.)

(Translation Gregory Ball )