TOWARDS:2025 is a cycle of intensive workshops that include physical praxis, evening lectures, video screenings, and live performances. It’s the metaphor of aiming at something – to expose and engage ourselves in physical investigations and conceptual challenges that can foster creativity and encourage discoveries. TOWARDS:2025 see pedagogy as a continuous intellectual provocation, an occasion for inspiration through paradoxes and awakenings and as a desire to overturn common sense and question what we have learned.

TOWARDS:2025 offers the occasion to explore the work of renowned international artists Xavier le Roy (FR/DE) and Scarlet Yu (HK/DE), gaining an insight into their practice and methodologies as well the philosophical and poetic worlds that trigger their creative research.
The project started in August 2018 with Julyen Hamilton’s workshop, “Making Dances – compositional and poetic richness”. In 2025, an individual workshop “Embodiments and exhibitions” of Xavier le Roy and Scarlet Yu will set the stage for an exciting continuation of the cycle in 2026. The workshop week will include:

• A lecture sharing choreograph’s theoretic perspectives and/or an evening video screening
• Performance “Monsters of Circumstances” by Xavier le Roy
• Informal showing of the workshop in the end of week to bring the work of workshop to local public

TOWARDS:2025 WORKSHOP: Xavier Le Roy & Scarlet Yu | “Embodiments and exhibitions”

This workshop extends the experiments developed for works (such as “Retrospective” (2012- 2018) and “Temporary Title, 2015” ) conceived for the times and spaces of museum exhibitions. To this aim the group will work on materials developed for these situations and the ways in which they can be interpreted. The workshop participants will explore the interpretive potential given by spaces without architectural pre-given front, or 4th wall, how the possibility for visitors to enter and exit at will induces choreography without being able to decide the time, duration, beginning and end of the visitor’s experience, and how the oscillation between proximity and distance between performers and visitors becomes a choreographic parameter.

The workshop participants will get to work on 2 or 3 movement materials and specific modes of embodiment/incorporation. Alternating between the roles of performer and spectator, participants will explore how these materials can also produce specific qualities of relationship between the performers and between the spectators and the performers, i.e. how one choreographs the other and vice versa. To complement these explorations, at the end of the workshop, a public showing/sharing will allow participants to present their work in a context similar to an exhibition.

Xavier Le Roy holds a PhD in molecular biology from the University of Montpellier, France, and has been working as an artist since 1991. Since 2018, he has been a professor at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen, Germany. He has been artist-in-residence at Podewil in Berlin (1996-2003), associate artist at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier (2007-2008), artist-in-residence at the MIT Program in Art Culture and Technology (Cambridge, MA) (2010), and at the Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, Paris (2012-2015).His experimental works are motivated by the need for transformation and questions about the notion of movement and what it produces. They are guided by a desire to transform our understanding of dichotomies such as Human/Non-Human, Subject/Object, Passive/Active, Normal/Abnormal, etc., and to bring together beings or understandings of the world that are usually separated by various norms and inheritances. Her latest works are often developed for exhibitions, museums, or other public spaces that explore the particularity of the times and spaces of these places. The intention is to create relationships between spectators and live artworks that allow a multitude of ways of being together to coexist.

More information about Xavier le Roy: https://www.xavierleroy.com/

Scarlet Yu Mei Wah was born in Hong Kong and currently lives in Europe. As an artist and mother, Yu Mei Wah’s practices prioritize the principles of sustainability and coexistence. She is committed to questioning established narratives, particularly in the form of embodiment. She is interested in the paradoxical aspect of memory, the system of heritage, the dramaturgy of self-narration, transformative identities, and co-subjectivities in autobiography. Her collaborative and solo works have been presented in
various contexts, including museums, galleries, theaters, and public spaces. Yu was a member of the jury for Tanzplattform Germany 2018, rehearsal director for Arts Fission, Singapore (2000-10), and theater program manager for Skyhigh Creative Partners HK (2011-12). She was selected as an artist by ADAM (Taiwan) Artist Lab and Hombroich Summer Fellows 2017. In 2015, she obtained a master’s degree in choreography from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.

More information about Scarlet Yu: https://www.scarletyu.com/

Image: Emma Pike

Organised with support of Västra Götalandsregionen.