Produit de circonstances (1999)

The twofold education of Xavier Le Roy —  in molecular biology and contemporary dance — has often meant that he  has attracted the atypical description of a “scientific” dancer. Invited  for this reason to present a talk about the relationships between art  and science, as part of the Body Currency event at the Vienna  Festival in 1998, he took the opportunity to go back over his arrival in  the world of dance, while humorously misappropriating university codes  of address. His presentation, Produit de circonstances, is a  performed autobiography, during which his own body becomes the  reflection of a social, political and cultural organisation, whose  hierarchies he intends to deconstruct. Sensitive to the influence of  systems of control, common to dance studios, the public space as well as  scientific laboratories, his embodied discourse acts as a resolutely  critical practice which attempts to free itself from the conventions of  the spectacle so as redefine the circumstances that make it possible.

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.

Press extract

Marija Krtolica  About Product of Circumstances (1999) – NYC September 2011
Although  Le Roy’s work is often humorous, it invites serious investigations of  the subject in relationship to the apparatuses of control within the  scientific environment, in dance studios, and everyday public areas.   The explicit choreographic statements are followed by the  understatements. These latent meanings instigate the viewer to register  the projections appearing in the interstices between hierarchies, needs  and desires, produced as well as obscured  by the dominant structures.   Le Roy’s performance is a space of philosophical investigations which  through micro actions perform subtle subversion of hierarchical  organizational forms. These performative acts inspire awareness of the  ways that hierarchies manifest themselves in the society today, and of  the complex of rationalizations that give those manifestations support.
Source: website of Xavier Le Roy