Xavier Le Roy's first impression of Indonesia came months ago in the form of a message from event organizers who insisted that his two most celebrated solo pieces - Le Sacre du Printemps, an exploration of the role of conductor choreographed to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and Self Unfinished, an experimental take on the human body - would be too difficult for an Indonesian audience to understand.

Apparently, in speaking for an entire nation, the organizers seemed to forget that dance and music have the power to transcend definitions made by culture and language. As Le Roy points out, "I would think that the content of these pieces is quite universal, as the more than 150 performances in more than 50 different countries in the world can attest."

Fortunately, this is just the kind of debate, replete with questionable and imposed assumptions about what is normal, that is at the guts of his work. Now more curious than ever about his reception in Jakarta, Le Roy will be performing his piece Product of Circumstances at the Goethe Institute next month, a performance based on his own "autobiographical story and how the passage from one field to another unfolds how a subject is constructed and constructs itself".

As a former microbiologist who started taking dance classes while working on his PhD thesis in molecular and cellular biology, Le Roy's is, after all, a story about thinking for himself and pursuing curiosities. And all he asks of his audience is to do the same: "Just come and be curious, and don't expect me to do big jumps through the room."

Looking forward to his upcoming visit to Jakarta, Xavier Le Roy piques our curiosity by explaining how research is like "entering a black box and looking for a way to get out of it", why it is important to consider the representations of what "bodies can be", and why he chose dance over science.

Who?

I took my first dance class because a drummer friend of mine was playing the music for it and told me that I should come with him. After that I continued to join dance classes as a hobby. When I started to work on my thesis in molecular biology and biochemistry I was working in a laboratory. It was my first professional experience in the field and I got very frustrated because of the hierarchy and power relationships involved. .

I guess I probably had a very utopian view of what research is. I wanted to do research because I thought I would look for ways to heal people, and thought of research as like entering a black box and looking for a way to get out of it, while at the same time making this box full of light. So, a totally romantic way of thinking.

I had a sort of a belief that I would work to make progress but I realized that I was only being asked to produce results and not to search. It was all about looking for proof that I was working on a productive topic. Instead of spending a long time on a problem without results, we were encouraged to look for a subject where we were sure to regularly publish some results even if they were not really needed or necessary.

Now I think I do research with a relationship to product and production that is looser and which I can slightly transform. In the field I work in there are ways to find spaces where you are not exclusively submitted to the norms of production and commodification. It's impossible to escape this 100 percent but slight deviations are possible.

So eventually I took more and more dance classes and I went to a lot of workshops. After three years in the lab and more dance practice I decided to quit my career as a molecular biologist and go for dance.

Why?

Because I can find some freedom of decision in what I do. I do work in the field of choreographic art because it's a field that allows me to work on and to question body representations. Representation of bodies follow and are produced by normative rules of the control society we live in. It's important to produce other representations and activate a heterogeneity of these representations in order to make it possible for minorities to survive. By producing and questioning body representations one can give other images about what the "bodies can be" and not only what bodies should be.

At the same time, it's a field where I can think about how I want to work in such a way that everything is not imposed on me. It allows me to research and experiment and have a critical practice. I do what I do because this activity deals with movements in general terms and movement implies transformation that gives possibility to change. Because movement implies that one think in terms of duration and time and not only in terms of space.

How?

In general my work produces debates and discussions, which I consider as the best kind of reception. With Product of Circumstances, although it's a piece that is unusual - being done in the format of a lecture but presented as a performance - it often produces identification for spectators who recognize that they have had a similar shift in their life.

And it's great when somebody during the discussion at the end of the piece says something like, "I'm not a dancer and I've never studied science, but I used to be a nurse and now I design gardens. I encountered the same questions and difficulties as you did, so it's great to hear it and share it with somebody else..."

Coming to Jakarta!

I am very curious because of the encounter with a different culture. I am wondering what kind of questions the spectators will have and I hope that this experience will help the organizers who didn't want to show the work change their mind and be willing to invite me to perform Le Sacre du Printemps or Self Unfinished, which would have maybe been a better introduction to my work. But I am very much looking forward to it and very curious about the reception.

Xavier Le Roy will perform Product of Circumstances at the Goethe Institute in Jakarta on Oct. 8, 2009.

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