Self-Unfinished (1998)

“A chair, a desk, a soundtrack, that doesn’t start. A dancer in a shirt  uses strong sound effects to imitate a robot. Indeed an understandable,  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 begins 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

The  brightly lit performing area gives no clues to “how to read” and the  mechanical – man beginning is offset with a return to ordinary task –  like activity: walk, sit, turn off tape machine. By the time you’re into  the contortions with the dress, we’re given this extraordinary hybrid  creature which confronts us with a multiplicity of interpretations. For  me it alternated variously as insect, martian, chicken, watering can,  caterpillar into pupa, et al. What saved it from being a Pilobolus –  like entertainment (a crowd – pleasing American group that combines  bodies to create biomorphic oddities) were the stillnesses and extended  durations. We must sit with our attention riveted, waiting for the next  stirring. Like watching a spider or snail. Your timing in this piece is  exquisite: no pandering to short attention spans here.
Yvonne Rainer (email 22.12.1999)

Source: website of Xavier Le Roy