Xavier Le Roy »Salut für Caudwell«, extract of »Mouvements für Lachenmann, Inszenierung eines Konzertabends«, »Le Sacre du Printemps«

Salut für Caudwell

Production, choreography: Xavier Le Roy
Music: Helmut Lachenmann
Guitar: Gunter Schneider, Barbara Romen, Tom Pauwels, Günther Lebbing
Dramaturgy: Bojana Cvejić, Berno Odo Polzer
Sounddesign: Wolfgang Musil

Le Sacre du Printemps

Conzept, performance: Xavier Le Roy
Music: Igor Strawinsky
Director of sound: Peter Böhm
Artistic assistance: Bojana Cvejić, Berno Odo Polzer
Recording: Berliner Philharmoniker under the musical direction of Sir Simon Rattle

The evening will present the two latest works by Xavier Le Roy that intend to be comprehended as a research about the generating of movements and about the relationship between music and movement within concert and theatre conventions.
The perceivable gap in-between a motion - which generates sound and thus the ultimate resulting sound - serves Le Roy as a starting point to carry on with the approach of Helmut Lachmann’s Salut für Caudwell by dissolving the mimetic relation between note, action and sound into motion. All possible forms of disassociations of what can be seen, heard or silenced unfold into an alignment created by the scheduled concert.
Having seen the film Rhythm is it! in which Sir Simon Rattle conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra during a rehearsal of Le Sacre du Printemps, Xavier Le Roy decided to indulge into the classics of Igor Strawinski. His interest of assignment lay in the observation of the conductor’s movements. In a laborious process, Le Roy closely studied the means of interpretation the conductor applied, as if he would carry out his own choreography. In doing so, an inversion between cause and action was disclosed: The gestures and movements that are intended to activate the musicians’ performance seem to be simoultaneously created by the music itself.
When do you play, when are you played, by this music which is to a great extent capable of generating unconscious, involuntary movements? Which one is the moment prior to and after the sound momentum, the movement, the intention to make a movement, the coordination of orchestral play? What do the musicians, the conductor or the spectators hear when the result of listening becomes part of a physical and unavoidably individual internalized experience of motion and sound?