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XAVIER LE ROY, Temporary Title, 2015, six-hour performance for Kaldor Public Art Projects at Carriageworks, Sydney. Photo by Michael Young for ArtAsiaPacific.
Twelve naked men and women, moving about on their hands and knees for six hours like baboons, comprise the latest offering from French choreographer Xavier Le Roy, which is currently taking place in Sydney in collaboration with the local Kaldor Public Art Projects (KPAP).
Two years ago Le Roy presented Untitled (2012) as part of “13 Rooms”—another KPAP program—in Sydney, which featured installations and performances by 13 international artists. For Le Roy’s work, two people, who appeared to be enclosed in a large sack, writhed across the floor in a room so dark that movement was sensed rather than seen by the spectator. The performance was neither dance nor choreography in the traditional sense, but seemed to dabble in some alchemistic reduction of the two.
The exhibition “13 Rooms” (2013) originally began as “11 Rooms,” conceived by curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenback, which has become a global phenomenon that adds an “additional room” for each new iteration of the program that is held. In 2012, KPAP founder John Kaldor referred to “13 Rooms” as a “living sculpture” and a new way of looking at art. Obrist and Biesenback’s 2015 edition of the exhibition, “15 Rooms,” recently closed at Shanghai’s Long Museum.
Le Roy has been pursuing this new way of looking at art since relinquishing an academic career in 1991 to pursue a path in dance. Gradually he—along with several other practitioners working independently—established a medium that, while anchored in performance, owes little to the body and instead favors movement itself.
This month Le Roy is in Sydney working on another Kaldor project called Temporary Title (2015). Much like Le Roy’s previous work, Temporary Title explores transformative relationships between the choreographer and his collaborators, who also helped to realize the piece. Le Roy’s working process, which relies heavily on the performer’s intuition and interpretative input, ensures that every iteration of the work will be different and, to a large extent, unique. There are no outcomes other than the fact that the work exists in the moment, and that a moment in Temporary Title goes on for 6 hours—a feat of endurance that is shared between 18 performers, of which 12 are on the floor at any given time.
Nothing in Temporary Title is scripted; not even the choreography is notated. The only guidelines for the interpreters are that everything during this marathon work exists within a series of rules—albeit, loose ones. “Everyone must be naked. No one can stand up. A decision is never definitive,” Le Roy told ArtAsiaPacific at the open rehearsal. There is no sound other than incidental noises from the audience, such as coughing and shuffling. Sitting on the floor around the space, viewers can arrive and leave at will.
The naked performers move with an extraordinary “pack mentality,” appropriating the movements of animals in a strangely compelling and cohesive way, and at times exhibiting a startling synchronistic, homogenous group response to unseen cues. There are, Le Roy insists, no external cues offered to the performers. They roll on the floor, preen themselves and each other, sit in repose like a satiated pride of lions, meander individually or in a coordinated pack across the space, break off to engage with the audience, huddle together in tight knit groups, become alert like meerkats while remaining on all fours, with their knuckles folded into their hands like great apes, conspicuously and unselfconsciously naked, all while Le Roy, fully clothed, hovers on the fringes of the group.
The nakedness is a critical part of the work’s realization, says Le Roy. “If you use clothes in the work then you are a human being in clothes. We try to do things that escape being human, trying not to use any human attributes, and for this the skin is the best costume.”
Even so, looking at the male and female performers, it is evident that neither sex can escape their obvious gender-specific selves. Human flesh moves in a distinct and individual way: breasts sway; buttocks tighten and slack off; genitals are subject to gravity; and limbs, both male and female, are as sinuous and smooth as those of the Parthenon marbles. If there is a weakness in Temporary Title, it is its attempt to deny these human traits and its slavish adherence to animalistic references. The work may suggest a Garden-of-Eden-like innocence, but one could see that the temptation of the apple is not so far off in the distance.
However, there is no denying the work’s extraordinary, mesmerizing power. Le Roy was one of the first artists to bring movement and dance into the gallery and museum space, which—as Kaldor rightfully observed at the opening of the performance—was a paradigm shift. Kaldor calls Temporary Title an exhibition rather than a performance and, as he told AAP, “This is where art is going in the 21st century. It is a mixture of everything where all barriers are broken down.”
As for the performers, after six hours of walking about on their hands and knees, their main concern seemed to be where they would be able to find a Band-Aid.
Temporary Title is currently on view at Sydney’s Carriageworks, until November 22.
XAVIER LE ROY, Temporary Title, 2015, six-hour performance for Kaldor Public Art Projects at Carriageworks, Sydney. Photo by Michael Young for ArtAsiaPacific.