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Le Roy, Xavier
Xavier Le Roy (born 1963 in Juvisy sur Orge) is a dancer, choreographer, and director. The paradigm of his performances indicates how society and social relations are continuously produced and reproduced through actions performed by each and every individual. Le Roy is often called an atypical dancer because of his past as a molecular biologist. His career as a dancer started in 1991, and he began to develop his own work and research reflecting the social and cultural conditions of his autobiography in 1993. Bodies are the starting point for infinite possibilities of (self-)images and (self-)constructions and (self-)deconstructions, but, on the other hand, are involved in and limited by social practice, its conveniences and contingencies. “Le Roy taps into a field where scientific and social data is transferred and imprinted in imaginary representations of the body.” (Francois Piron, Journal des arts of Connivence, 6th Biennale de Lyon).
In 1999, he formed the group in situ productions together with Petra Roggel, and invited choreographers, dancers, theorists, and video-artists to work on the experimental project E.X.T.E.N.S.I.O.N.S. The year 2003 marked the debut of the Project: “I’m interested in the similarities and the differences between some games or sports and art performances (like dance, for example), given that both are spectacles. [...] So play is accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality or of a free unreality, as opposed to real life, but the most interesting thing to me is that it indicates the passage from ‘unreal’ to ‘real’ or from an ‘unreal fiction’ to a ‘real fiction’, which is also a characteristic of choreography and dance in its present(ce).”
Recently, he began collaborating with the composer Bernhard Lang and staged “Das Theater der Wiederholungen” (The theatre of repetition) at the Steirischer Herbst in Graz (2003), as well as the opera scenario “imposters” at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin (2005). Last year he experimented with compositional approaches and the hidden theatricality of concerts to create “Mouvements für Lachenmann: Staging of a Concert Evening”, with music by Helmut Lachenmann, in Vienna (2005).
Since 2004 Xavier Le Roy has been involved in various educational programmes, and will be associate artist at the Centre National Choréographique de Montpellier in 2007 and 2008.
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