Self-Unfinished
One can view Berlin-based choreographer Xavier Le Roy as a mere contortionist extraordinaire.
But Self-Unfinished, his 50-minute treatise on the human form, revealed meanings of the physical body through and beyond its sheer corporeality.
A blinding-white clinic with a fluorescent canopy, a table and chair: the spartan stage where the ex-PhD researcher in cancer turned the theatrical scalpel on his own body under scrutiny.
In operation, Le Roy’s theatre could not be more complex as it was radically basic, and entertaining too.
Free from any canonised dance idiom, his self-possessed dance was maximal minimalism, based on the playfulness and power of paradox and illusion.
Calculated and calibrated to masterful precision, he cut movement into discrete units, dispassionate, de-eroticised yet lyrical.
He began with a mock action of turning on a mini-compo. And in the ensuing silence, chilling but wondrous, his body orchestrated movements to its interior symphony of music and tempo – often truncated and repetitive, even mysterious.
Here, the cross between spectacle and profundity was as seamless as his double-jointed body-stunts. Re-mapping the same simple choreographic lines, repetitions and acute discipline in Self-Unfinished played on variations of speed and time within a bound trajectory.
He propelled his body in mechanical droll, revealing at once the technologies of material body, self and society. He invited observation in the fundamental mechanism behind a head-tilt, a muscle-shift and the excruciating simplicity of even backwards.
By turns astonishing, elegant and comic, he formed, deformed and re-formed his body into continuous tableaux.
At one revelatory point, bending his body over in an inverted-V – hands and feet on floor – Le Roy kept his pants but donned his upper body in a long black lycra dress. And voila! He represented both male and female in a grotesque and sexy fun-game of treading feet!
His journey into the physical and metaphysical world of mirrors and inversions led gradually to total nudity where his body transformations became perceptual haze and delight.
Squatting on shoulders, head and legs tucked beyond audience view, his arms became legs and his buttocks became shoulders. Waddling across the stage, the meat puzzle literally overturned the table. This 15-minute yogic virtuosity enacted rebellion, struggle and liberation in a seeming world of dystopia.
Closing Self-Unfinished by re-dressing himself, short and pants over lycra dress, and then re-setting the table, he delivered a clever self-reflexive construction of his performance, and also hinted at power tectonics under camouflaged surfaces.
He turned on the mini-compo again and exited through the audience. Real and jaunty music played and intensity broke.
Le Roy threw his last smug game on the audience, but not without a final sinister undertone in this truly original project – where perception is a dynamic process and unfinished.