Xavier Le Roy: Le Sacre du Printemps

Observing the Berlin Philharmonic during a rehearsal of “Le Sacre du Printemps” in 2003 (documented in the film “Rhythm is it!”), Xavier Le Roy decided to work on Stravinsky’s classic from an interest in the movements of conducting. Having no musical training, Le Roy ventured into a laborious process of studying a conductor’s interpretation as if it were a choreography of its own. An inversion of cause and function unfolds: the gestures and the movements that are meant to prompt musicians to play appear at the same time to be produced by the music they are supposed to produce.

When is one playing and when is one being played by this highly motile music? What is the moment before and after the sound, the movement, the intention to move, the motorics of the play? How much is our pleasure in listening to music rise in live performance conducted by a desire for, and a trouble about, the synchronicity of a well-functioning machine?

There are as many bodies as there are different roles and perspectives in listening: what do the musician, the conductor or the spectator hear when hearing as a result becomes part of an embodied, inevitably visceral experience of movement and sound?