Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy

In the context of the Colombia–France Year, NC-arte opens its 2017 season with a project of the choreographer and scientist Xavier Le Roy, who, along with 13 artists from the Interdisciplinary Master’s Degree in Theatre and Living Arts of the Colombia National University, will carry out a continuous performance from February 18 to March 25, in which he will enquire about how we produce and use our time. 

The title of this exhibition is Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy with students of the Interdisciplinary Master´s Degree in Theater and Living Arts of the Colombia National University. In this exhibition, choreographies designed by Le Roy from 1994 to 2014 take a breath of fresh air when being appropriated by Colombian artists who will choose fragments or phrases of those pieces, and decide which data of their biographical information they will link to them. Every moment of this performance is permeated by the ephemeralness of seconds and movements, a subject that Le Roy has emphasized since the moment he decided to leave his profession as a molecular biologist.

Visitors to the Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy will decide from where and for how long they want to watch the performance, as well as the series of proposed movements. In addition, they will be able to move in the middle of the dancers as much as they wish, because there are no restrictions for the public. Curator Claudia Segura states that “the freedom, both of performers and visitors, becomes essential in this piece that proposes new ways of perceiving choreographic work in contemporary art exhibitions.”

Both levels of NC-arte will provide the public with diverse experiences. In the first floor, visitors will see this corporal setup, and, in the second one, there will be a space for the dancers to rehearse and rest where, if they wish, visitors will talk with them about the performance and even look up for references in some computers that will be available. The intention is for the public to understand the process of this type of actions: creation, rehearsal, and the possibility for the piece to change each day.

Alejandro Penagos, Ángela Marciales, Catalina Contreras, Francisco Arrieta, Gabriel Abello, Héctor Orjuela, Isabel Villamil, Jesús Martín López, Juanita Delgado, Natalia Peña, Paola Correa, Santiago González, and Zoitsa Noriega were the artists selected from the Interdisciplinary Master´s Degree of the Colombia National University to participate in this Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy. 

The mission of these 13 local artists is to bring their own stories to the Colombian context and to their lives, through the movements choreographed by Le Roy. In the same way, the exhibition plays with the word “Retrospective,” so commonly used in museums and art institutions, that here is applied to a piece that is ephemeral itself, which questions the authorship and the production of knowledge through the body.

Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy has been previously performed in the Taipei Biennial, Pompidou Center (Paris), MoMA (New York), National Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul), among other contemporary art institutions.

Who is Xavier Le Roy?

He obtained a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Montpellier and has worked as a choreographer and dancer since 1991. He has made performances with several renowned theater companies and choreographers. From 1996 to 2003, he did a residence in Podewil, Berlin. He was afterwards associated artist of the Choreographic National Center of Montpelier, as well as a resident artist of the program of Art, Culture and Technology in the MIT. Retrospective has also been in the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, the Museum of Art in Rio de Janeiro, TheaterWorks in Singapore, and MoMA PS1, among many other institutions of contemporary art in the world to which now NC-arte is added.

Le Roy began to take dance lessons twice a week while he was writing his doctoral thesis on cellular and molecular biology. He declares that he lost the specific belief that most of scientists have that science is the right to accessing the truth and a different world; when he began to devote himself to dance, to think became a corporeal experience.