Xavier Le Roy

Xavier Le Roy is one of the world’s most influential conceptual choreographers. A trained molecular biologist, he has been creating works for stages and exhibition spaces since 1991, has been professor at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen since 2018, and has been a guest at Kampnagel on multiple occasions; as part of the Summer Festival, he presented the exhibition RETROSPECTIVE at Deichtorhallen in 2013. Le Roy returns to Hamburg with a solo piece that emerged from a lecture on the staging of monstrous bodies. Le Roy explores how monsters come into being, how they escape from fantasy worlds and invade our daily lives to be among us and within us – and how they might help us overcome our fears. In the neutral, non-theatrical setting of the museum, the versatile and disarmingly direct performer Le Roy succeeds, using simple means, in transforming the space together with the audience. As in many of his works that have become classics of performance art, he opens up a space of experience together with the audience, in which the principles of performance itself become visible and theory is conveyed sensually through the means of live performance.