Xavier Le Roy
Dancehouse, Melbourne, December 5
Artists, when painting an object, often turn the object or the painting upside down in a bid to divorce themselves from what they know about the object and see it instead as only a collection of forms and shapes. In other words, they attempt to paint what they see rather than what they know – the knowing gets in the way of seeing the object properly.
Xavier Le Roy’s solo, Self – Unfinished, is similarly disorienting. Perhaps Xavier le Roy’s background in molecular biology has given him similar familiarity with the idea of viewing things as a collection of shapes, in his case with the objects being the basic structures of life.
Roy spends most of his solo upside down, his head out of view, in seemingly impossible positions. It is astonishing how the removal of the head from the audience’s sight makes all the difference to our perception and focuses our view on the body as a shape. He becomes amorphous - his buttocks and legs swap place with his shoulders and arms, he wanders around on all fours like a headless beast, sits on his shoulders with his back to us, his arms like frog legs, conjuring an array of impressions – for me of an undeveloped or alien life-form. At times his fists are eyes on stalks. At times he looks like a plucked chicken. Mostly he looks like nothing human at all.
Self-Unfinished could be just a contortionist or circus act, except it is achieved with no lighting effects or music and performed with utter seriousness. The stage is white. His costume is black trousers, shirt and sneakers. He strips down to a stretchy black top with he uses to cover his head. Eventually he is naked. He has a very straight up-and-down torso, which aids in his ability to turn himself upside down and still look (possibly) the right way up.
The only stage furniture is a plain table and chair. He begins seated at the table, and his first movements are robotic, accompanied by robot sounds he makes himself, like a child would. It is difficult to understand the link between this section of the work and the rest. He uses the table as an anchor, alternating between sitting on the seat and lying wedged between the corner of the floor and the back wall, his back to the audience, face and arms hidden, incongruous. As the “alien” creature he sidles under the table and kicks it apart. He finishes by putting his clothes back on and returning to his “normal” self.
This hour-long solo is not dance, but it is a mesmerising and intriguing piece of physical theatre, impressive for Roy’s amazing athleticism and for its imaginative play with illusion and reality.
- KAREN VAN ULZEN
Xavier Le Roy is in Australia as a CREATIVE DIALOGUES joint initiative of the French Embassy in Australia, MPavilion, The Victorian College of the Arts - University of Melbourne, ACMI and Alliance Française Melbourne, led by Dancehouse in Melbourne. He is in residence at Dancehouse until December 12, and is giving public lectures. See dancehouse.com.au