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London,
Sarah Frater's rating
Reader rating
Description: Contemporary solo dance piece exploring metamorphosis.
Phone: 07530 366262
Website: http://www.theatrescience.org.uk/india-in-london
Email: mail@theatrescience.com
Something a little different: Xavier Le Roy
For all our supposed modernity, we prefer art as a comfort blanket than a hair shirt. Atonal music and fractured narrative are too feather-ruffling, which is why the market for linear plots, melodic music and colourful abstraction is so buoyant (Damien’s dots, anyone?).
We know experimentation pushes art forward and we’ll even fund it in a small way via Arts Council England. We’d rather just wait for the conceptualists to filter down to the mainstream than be challenged by them on a cold Saturday night.
The “but” is that art is meant to challenge this complacency, and if we don’t see it raw we shouldn’t see it at all. Which is why an experimental choreographer such as Xavier Le Roy is essential viewing.
The Frenchman’s 50-minute solo is not so much performance as un-dance. It has no steps you’d recognise, no set, no costume, no music, no lighting, no proscenium arch. There’s not even a curtain to go up and come down.
Instead, Le Roy sits on a boggo chair at a boggo desk and contorts and inverts himself into shapes and patterns that could be something, or could be nothing.
The first scene involves him moving like R2D2 with his own DIY sound-effects mimicking robotic hydraulics. He stands up and sits down, and then freeze-flows to one side of the stage before freeze-flowing back. He could be pillorying the robots that are nowhere near as good as the human body, or re-working a parlour game he played as a child.
Following scenes include Le Roy lying down near the stage back wall; taking off his shirt to reveal a stretchy tube vest, and taking off his trousers, pants, and vest, and shape-shifting around the stage in a shoulder stand, with his (naked) pelvis looking like shoulders and his shoulders like a pelvis.
Some relished the theatrical non sequiturs, and the absence of all visual and aural anchors. Others were exacerbated by the choreographic goat-getting.
However, the gag is a good one. Choreography is about the potential of the human body. You can dress it up as swans and swains, or metamorphose it unrecognisably, and it still speaks of what we are and what we feel.
Le Roy made the point more conventionally when he put his clothes back on, and exited via the audience while Diana Ross sang Upside Down on his boogie box.
Le Sacre du Printemps, 23 and 24 February, sadlerswells.com. Le Roy also performs at Tate Modern 20 &and 21 February, tate.org.uk.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
