Keren Cytter “Show Real Drama” – excerpt from based in Berlin on Vimeo.

“Dog, Shit, I love you…
I was told to say these lines. I can make it fun for you.”

A broken relationship? Or a fragmented one? What happens to human interaction when we examine ourselves so closely, dissect ourselves into minimal pieces, re-play them, let ourselves loose?

Full review available at Garage Magazine: http://garagemag.com/docs/editorial-layer/keren-cytter

Performance took place on October 10th at the Islington Library as part of Dance Umbrella 2012 Program.

Full review available on BellyFlop.

Peggy Moffitt: The Total Look on Nowness.com.

Please find full review on this is tomorrow.

Read here: Creating a Living Archive

Irving Blum on Sleeping Girl on Nowness.com.

What a wonderful glimpse into the world of 60s Pop.

Xavier Le Roy: low pieces at Festival d’Avignon, Avignon, France
August 2011

There has been much talk in recent discussion of visual, time-based, and performing arts of the certain situation-ism. As old and staid categories of conceptual, performance or dance become burdensome, artists and critics alike fall bravely into qualifying work as none other than situations. As creative practices have become ever so fragmentary, splitting and reflecting the paradigms of post-modernism to nth degree, so has the spectatorship modified her highly attuned focus to demand ‘art’ messages to be delivered effectively. Museums, galleries, concert halls, temporary stages and shows are almost always complicit with textual paraphernalia that manifests on walls as contextual or informational plaques, countless specialize programs, maps, and, of course, catalogues. Yet, in a frenzy of a large festival one might fortunately surpass it all for the particular diversion of an encounter – that is the ‘situation’ each scheduled event presents.

Last month, Festival d’Avignon presented a few such instances, including the visual work of Tino Sehgal, appropriately titled This Situation, Meg Stuart’s intensely physical Violet, and Romeo Castellucci’s politically conscious, if controversial, examination of human and familial relationships in Sur le concept de visage de fils de Dieu. However, a quieter, and perhaps most strikingly moving work title low pieces was conceived by Xavier Le Roy, a French biochemist-cum-choreographer who has redefined contemporary approach to thinking about dance and movement.

Xavier Le Roy has been working at the conjunction of interdisciplinary research to explore the possibility of knowledge production via body and movement. While his earlier work dealt primarily with dislocations and disjunctions of body trajectory in space, particularly in such pieces at self unfinished (1998) and Product of Circumstances (1999) where he proposed a further fragmentation and mechanization of everyday task-oriented movement originally pioneered by Yvonne Rainer in the 1960s and 1970s. With low pieces, Le Roy adjusts his investigative approach in an attempt to question the creative and collaborative processes and communication as a whole.

We enter the performance space, piling in closely on makeshift seating arrangements of the small intimate auditorium at the Gymnase du lycée Mistral.  The room is lit with equanimity, the floor constitutes a stage, painted black from walls to ceiling, and all one can define are the presence of bodies: the audiences – on bleachers, the dancers – sitting pensively at the front of the stage. There is a feeling of being watched, of watching – one is engulfed in this natural atmosphere of observation.

As soon as the public is settled, or rather squeezed, into spaces that grant acute closeness to the experience, a man on stage begins to speak. It is Le Roy, who announces, or rather proposes for us to have a conversation, a discussion without any particular topic or purpose, no amplified sound, just idea exchange. He also offers to translate French to English, or vice versa, as may be required for the effective delivery of thought. He also informs us that after fifteen minutes the lights will be shut off, not to be afraid, the show will go on.

Thus, one finds herself amidst the situation, now Pandora’s box has been opened and chaos, anarchy, possibilities of say-what-you-wish takes over. The public is appalled. A French man is outraged that the performers seem to be turning the tables onto the audiences and making them work. Yet, others are curious to learn the objective behind this strange exercise, they want to know how Le Roy’s work will be affected; how, why and what kind of conversation should we be having, and whether paying for a dance performance should really be involving such practices. Meanwhile, the exercise begins to resemble a game with unspoken rules which all adapt to their behavior: taking turns in speaking, making our voice heard, trying to develop a sensible sentence or conversation in a non-sensical set of circumstances. The lights go off and the murmurs, voices continue, the audiences are caught in the game.

It may be mistakenly observed that the appearance of language in dance and movement based practice has been a regressive step away from the purity of classical form and towards theatricality. This conversation, on the contrary, suggests the possibility of language of making us think, clouding our vision, enveloping our prejudices in darkness, we can only distinguish our own presence in making our voice heard. In this improvisation, Le Roy draws us out of the statis of spectatorial, even if informed, cultural consumption. We are no longer passive observers, we are implicated in the magic of the moment of creation, and we are emboldened by the challenge and are embodied in it by our immaterial voice.

Low pieces continues in silence. The four sequential dance episodes resemble exquisite tableaux vivantes, which captivate and entrance, cleanse our minds and draw ourselves to physical presence. An hour long silent performance makes one shift and adjust in the seat, hold breathes, align gazes and focus awareness. If one is careful and disciplined enough to maintain composure, then the last part comes as a relief. Once again, lights go off, and after a soothing stillness we hear voices again. The dancers are somewhere in the distance, the voices seem ever more distant as well, yet each is distinct and more crystal in clarity. Each thought is suddenly ever more self-conscious, precise and alert.

Xavier Le Roy upcoming performances

16 -17 September – More Mouvements für Lachenmann (2008) |The Arts Bank Theater, Live Art Festival, Philadelphia, PA
19 September – More Mouvements für Lachenmann (2008) | fi:af, Crossing the Line – New York, NY
20 September – Produit de circonstances (1999) | fi:af, Crossing the Line – New York, NY

“the present state of society is iniquitous and ought to be destroyed.”

While in those days it may have been the case that “theatre is in decline because on the one hand it has lost any feeling for seriousness, and on the other for laughter. Because it has broken away from solemnity, from direct, harmful effectiveness – in a words, from Danger,” have we worked through our duty AGAINST theatre. It strikes me that any effective production now attempts to tease ‘laughter through tears’ (as the old saying goes. We exercise extremes in reality, fiction, and virtuality. We polarize ourselves in order to feel, to prove to ourselves that we remain human and alive. We speak and act in ironies because we cannot find other way to move beyond the Existentialism and Post-Modernism of thought. Our feelings have become loaded with thought, dogma, and caution. While thought has become fractured in the rhizome of the Western World, a move towards what we call ‘extremism’ and ‘fundamentalism’ emerges at the contrast. We cannot see beyond this desire for wholeness, a human condition of trying to lick the self-inflicted wounds of our ‘advanced’ and ‘progressive’ world. So we busy ourselves with attempts to reach for the insoluble in all its seriousness. We create despite our pain. We create despite futility. We create and then we laugh at ourselves for our incapacity to NOT. We endanger ourselves time and again, because as Phillippe Petit, the Man on Wire, observed: “Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion: to refuse to tape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge – and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope.”

Quotes taken from Antonin Artaud, Production and Metaphysics from The Theatre and its Double, p. 29; and Phillippe Petit, from Man on Wire (2008) Documentary Film.