IDFB Guest Blogger Nicky Getgood went to see Xavier Le Roy perform his solo piece Self Unfinished at Ikon Eastside during the Festival. She was told to ‘expect the unexpected’ and here’s what she thought of the one-man show.
The first thing I noticed was that the gallery smelled strongly of paint – bright white paint. The second was Xavier Le Roy sitting in the corner of the stark white research lab he’d fashioned for himself – a bare room with just a table and chair in one corner, and a ghetto blaster in the other.
When Xavier started to move, it didn’t seem to be Xavier moving, but a hydraulic robot with uncannily authentic noises to match. Robo-Xavier pumped and clunked and shifted across the room, until he got to his ghetto blaster and pressed play to give us…the deafening sound of silence. Absolutely nothing.
This, Xavier later told me, was a trick to ‘sharpen your perception and your relationship to listening and seeing’. It worked for most of us but proved to be a little too much for three girls in the front row who were already shaking with laughter.
One had mild hysterics poorly disguised as a coughing fit and this was the cue for all of them to creep out. I was disappointed by this – no-one seemed to be bothered by their giggles, least of all Xavier himself, and I think the commonly held misconception that contemporary dance takes itself so seriously audience members shouldn’t be amused is one of those invisible barriers that prevents people from going. Dance, like other artforms, can see the funny side and doesn’t mind a bit of mild mirth.
Plus, those girls missed the best bit – when Robo-Xavier was replaced by a strangely indeterminate, breathing, changing and evolving life-form. Xavier used his clothes and incredibly bendy body to morph from one being into another, each spending a fair while moving around the research lab and exploring the space.
And now it was my turn to start giggling, because Xavier Le Roy’s bare, upside-down back, with obscured legs and tiny arms poking from the bottom looked for all the world like a big plucked chicken.
This is the beauty of Self Unfinished – what Xavier is or resembles is entirely up to the audience, who each add to his performance with their own imaginations, so everyone walks away having seen their own interpretation of his show. Xavier later told me there was no intention behind the shapes he created:
‘There is not from my side the aim to make you see something precise, like the chicken for example. I don’t think about the chicken, I didn’t see the chicken myself the first time, so it’s very much about…the reception that you have as a spectator whilst you are watching it. You as a subject, you are different from your neighbour, and you have a different background, and you have a different imagination, etc. So you are using the performance differently, so the work is very much about these differences.’
Self Unfinished is, Xavier said, a palindrome – starting backwards and moving within its sequence before changing direction and moving forwards. When going forwards, Xavier walks up to the ghetto blaster and presses play one last time…
Upside down
Boy, you turn me
Inside out
And round and round
Click here to listen to Nicky’s interview with Xavier.
