In the frame of Thomas Oberender / Tino Sehgal: Welt ohne Außen. Immersive Spaces since the 1960s. Xavier Le Roy: Le Sacre du Printemps. 04.08.2018, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin.
Waiting in lines, musical lines, well known, hard to follow, and hard to tell how the performers kept track of the tune, and by tune, I mean nothing other than the once-insurrectionary Rite of Spring, and by performers, I mean none other than Xavier LeRoy, Scarlet Yu, and Alexandre Achour.
Xavier’s delicate fingers touch his ear alongside a brow furrowed in satisfaction, Scarlet throws head and hand back with a seldom-seen freedom in one of the seldom-occurring gestures that unmistakably was not conducting an orchestra. Alexandre’s physicality lifted me but was nothing compared to his quiet-bodied pure smile – a smile to a peer, a smile for the experience of sheer excellence, a smile of, “we are sharing this exquisite moment”.
Indeed, it was beyond us, there was nothing we (them the performers, us the audience, and the conservatory-trained invisible orchestra members in lineage with colleagues from 100 years ago who, by playing this piece, risked their careers and lives) could do but appreciate this piece of music by seeing it from a new perspective. That feeling when a thing charges forth, holding itself together only because the conductor manages to contain the entire beast while simultaneously seeing it all escape into what-was. What love.
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