The French molecular biologist turned dancer and choreographer, Xavier Le Roy, will premiere his latest performative collaboration in Sydney with the help of 18 naked adults. Invited to Australia by the arts patron John Kaldor, Le Roy visited Sydney and Melbourne in April to audition performers for his new work, Temporary Title.
It will be staged at Sydney’s former railway workshops, Carriageworks. The performance space will be dimly lit, allowing the performers’ bodies to assume non-human shapes in the imaginations of the viewers. “Nudity allows us to work on the idea that we all have the same costume, but different,” Le Roy says. He chose performers of all ages and both sexes who were not necessarily dancers but who would be capable of communicating the idea of “transformation” of the human body into “other things”.
Kaldor predicts no one would be offended by Temporary Title. “If nudity is very much part of the work and not bringing attention to it, then it just blends in like a landscape,” he says. The work will be performed for six hours a day from 20 to 22 November; visitors can watch for as long or little as they like.
