Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2012
The dancer, Xavier Le Roy, walks with a calm yet deliberate pace across the empty stage toward its center, where he stops, with his back facing the audience. He slowly lifts his arms in front of him and, after a brief moment of suspension, makes a hand gesture, as focused as unexpected, as if channeling a stream of intensities—a gesture to which the music responds. Echoing Le Roy's movement, Igor Stravinsky's most notorious score, Le Sacre du Printemps, begins its first notes. The performer goes on gently whisking the air, with a fluid yet measured pace, and thus engages an uncanny dialogue with the recorded symphony by conducting the seemingly empty space before him.