Xavier Le Roy
Xavier Le Roy discovered dance late in life, when he was writing a thesis in molecular and cellular biology. It was the solo Self Unfinished, built on a gripping principle of anamorphosis, that revealed him to the public in 1998. All the work of this dancer and choreographer remains marked by his early scientific training. Approaching creation as others would conduct a laboratory experiment, he shifts the centre of attention, generally focused on the finished product (the piece) to the development process which seems equally rich to him. For Xavier Le Roy, choreography is always a way of questioning the conditions under which a form appears, whether it consists in stressing the work process in Produit de circonstances (1999) and Produit d'autres circonstances (2009), in the E.X.T.E.N.S.I.O.N.S projects (1999-2001), as well as in Projet (2003), or in questioning the connection between seeing and hearing, listening and watching, for example in Le Sacre du printemps (2007) or even in drawing our attention to how we look at a body, in Self Unfinished (1998), Giszelle, premiered in 2001 at the Festival d'Avignon in the framework of Vif du sujet, and today in low pieces. Constantly redefined, his work turns the traditional forms of presenting a show upside down and proposes a renegotiation of the contract that links the performers with the public. The resulting loss of points of reference generates in return, from the spectator, a sharpened attention and questioning, full of bracing instability.
MF, May, 2011.