:: back Self Unfinished 1998 Sat 11.10. 8.00 pm Sun 12.10. 9.30 pm Podewil Ticket for 1 performance: 8/6 Euro Evening ticket: 12/10 Euro "A chair, a desk, a soundtrack, that doesn't start.A dancer in a shirt uses strong sound effectsto imitate a robot. Indeed an understandabl, even conventional idea, that is until Xavier Le Roy' s (1963, France) play turns into a gripping mental space. Head over heels, the dancer' s body is transformed in a real time into a series of hallucinogenic morphological aberrations, representing images of body that reconfigures itself based to unwritten laws and a disquieting, inhuman rhythm. It undergoes long stases, makes infinite movements and begisn to crawl abruptly. In addition to the torsion carried out in the "spectacle de danse" (dance performance), Xavier Le Roy taps into a new field where scientific and social data is transferred and imprinted in imaginary representations of the body." Francois Piron in the journal des arts of Connivence, 6th Biennale de Lyon, 2001 Product of Circumstances 1999 Sat 11.10. 9.30 pm Podewil Circumstances: "I began to take two dance classes a week at the same time that I started to work on my thesis for my Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology. It’s been now eight years that I have submitted my thesis and stopped to work as a biologist. Since I work as a dancer or choreograph I am very often presented as an atypical dancer or as a dancer molecular biologist. It became my currency in the "Society of the Spectacle". I was invited to prepare and present a lecture for an event on theory and praxis in performance ("Body currency" Wiener Festwochen June ‘98)..." Product: Biography as theory. An autobiographical conference becoming a performance. My body as raw material of social and cultural organization and as the practice of critical necessity. Xavier Le Roy Sun 12.10. 8.00 pm Podewil A performance by Jérôme Bel, Conception: Xavier Le Roy, Music : Bernard Herrmann, Thanks to: Silke Becker, Jérôme Bel, Katrin Busching, Rebecca Lee, Pascale Paoli, Petra Roggel, Frédéric Seguette, Maximilian Stelz, Nobert Strache, Tino Sehgal, Claudia Triozzi "Le dernier spectacle", in 1998, was supposed to have marked his farewell to the world of dance after just three personal creations. It was meant to have been his last piece, but no such doing. Yet how is one to continue, when one has chosen to pull out, programmatically speaking, as the theme of the show, which ended up leaving the choreography to the spectator? The French choreographer Jerome Bel’s piece consisted of a four-fold repetition of the overture sequence from Susanne Linke’s solo Wandlungen. For the fifth reprise, he had the dancer disappear behind a black curtain, letting the audience complete the choreography by drawing on their memory. Nevertheless, Jerome Bel came up with a device to keep on going. He asked his colleague Xavier Le Roy to develop a choreography in his vein and with his dancers, which he then signed, the way an artist signs a painting. The choreography is called Xavier Le Roy – the name of the artist who has been appropriated, and who has carried out another’s concept. But it is Jerome Bel who claims authorship. Jerome Bel’s pieces always involve an ironic play upon the notion of author. In his works, the author is no longer an autonomous creator, constantly making art out of nothing, a myth that keeps clinging to French dance milieus, after the creative explosion of the 80’s. With a nod at Roland Barthes’ semiotics, the name Jerome Bel – the author’s signature which became the title of the second piece – serves as a discursive field, in which different codes, stemming from all conceivable cultural domains, get intertwined. The author’s name thus turns into an empty form, spread like a second body. www.insituproductions.net Photos: Katrin Schoof :: back