Conducting Movement: Xavier Le Roy and the Amplification of Le Sacre du Printemps

Le Sacre du Printemps (2007)

Concept and Performance: Xavier Le Roy

Music: Igor Stravinsky

Sound Design: Peter Böhm

Recording: Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Sir Simon Rattle

Premiere: June 27th, 2007, Festival Les Intranquilles, Les Subsistances, Lyon

1. Prelude

Experimenting with Le Sacre du Printemps

Looking at the mesmerizing performance of Simon Rattle conducting Le Sacre du Printemps, I felt he was dancing with the music as much as he was directing the orchestra . . . The 120 musicians required to play this music are like an audience in front of this man who "performs" for them. But what does he perform?

(Xavier Le Roy, in Le Roy 2007; translation by the author)

There was something wonderful about the titanic struggle which must have been going on in order to keep these inaudible musicians and these deafened dancers together, in obedience to the laws of their invisible choreographer.

(Valentine Gross [1913], in Buckle 1971)

New York City, November 15, 2007

The dancer, Xavier Le Roy, walks with a calm yet deliberate pace across the empty stage toward its center, where he stops, with his back facing the audience. ¹ He slowly lifts his arms in front of him and, after a brief moment of suspension, makes a hand gesture, as focused as unexpected, as if channeling a stream of intensities—a gesture to which the music responds. Echoing Le Roy's movement, Igor Stravinsky's most notorious score, Le Sacre du Printemps, begins its first notes. The performer goes on gently whisking the air, with a fluid yet measured pace, and thus engages an uncanny dialogue with the recorded symphony by conducting the seemingly empty space before him.

Yet, with the task of choreographing Le Sacre du Printemps in 2007, the dancer faces anything but an empty stage. Cited by many as the first modern piece in dance history, Vaslav Nijinsky's disjointed and angular choreography has, since its creation in Paris in 1913, been reinterpreted and reimagined in more than two hundred versions across different geographical sites and movement traditions. ² At the time of Le Roy's performance at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York, at least three other choreographic renditions of Le Sacre du Printemps were taking place across the city: Yvonne Rainer's feminist take on the work's aesthetic of scandal was premiered midtown at the Hudson Theater ³ ; Bianca van Dillen's contemporary narrative tableaux were performed downtown at St. Mark's Church ⁴ ; and Royston Maldoom's community project with teenagers from Harlem was presented uptown at the United Palace Theatre. ⁵ What might the coincidence—here understood etymologically, as simultaneity of incidents—of these four performances, with distinct artistic and critical agendas happening on the same weekend in Manhattan, singularly suggest? What can the recurring, redundant subject that is Le Sacre du Printemps, and the ways in which the field of dance has rehearsed its narratives and forms over nearly a century, propose for choreography today? ⁶ Through its proliferation of conceptual trajectories and diverse aesthetics, one might say this iconic piece of dance modernism still emerges as deeply contemporary: as a generative and self-propagating forum for choreographic thought and practice. Characterized by its daunting multiplicity as it crosses historical and spatial territories, Le Sacre du Printemps nonetheless offers a common ground: the work might thus be grasped as an overarching collection of ideas, univocal and nonspecific, yet one that is singularly actualized via a series of choreographic variations. To put it differently, for contemporary creative practice such a haunting presence of a work from the past might function, as Mark Franko proposes, as "a foil for a heightening of the unrealized political possibilities in the original" (Franko 2007, 15). Drawing on Franko's insight, I argue that Le Roy's radical choreography operates as a critical re-evaluation of Le Sacre du Printemps and of dance history, as it takes up the question of dance's political possibilities. What Le Roy's idiosyncratic solo does, I suggest, is to expand, via a series of critical and creative gestures, the field of...