http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/arts/dance/xavier-le-roys-retrospective-at-moma-ps1.html 2014-10-06 23:33:22 Xavier Le Roy’s ‘Retrospective’ at MoMA PS1 “Retrospective,” Xavier Le Roy’s curiously absorbing exhibition at MoMA PS1, features excerpts from his solos, memorized and reproduced by a cast of 16. === At MoMA PS1, you walk into a gallery empty save for people. One person is sitting immobile and apart, like a sulking child. Another is pretending to be a machine, mouth noises and all. A small crowd has gathered around someone else, listening to him speak and watching him dance. Suddenly, a few of the people make a loud buzzing sound and race out of the room. This is “ But those individual works register much less than Mr. Le Roy’s thoughtful choreography of the visitor experience. There are two more galleries. One contains objects from Mr. Le Roy’s 2005 work “Untitled”: at least three dummies, which, in the room’s near darkness, you might suspect of being alive. In the other are two dancers, clearly animate: One is there to answer your questions; the other is watching Mr. Le Roy’s work on video. The main event, however, is the first room, where you unavoidably participate in the work’s multisided reflection on time and Mr. Le Roy’s way of thinking. One performer is as still as a sculpture, stuck in an extracted image (the sulking child, for example). Another, like a video, repeats a loop of choreography (the machine). A third tells a personal retrospective, connecting the story to the extracts of Mr. Le Roy’s works that the dancer performs. Only this last performer does not stop when a new visitor enters the center of the room, which is the sign for the others to buzz, scatter and restart. Stay long enough, and you can figure all this out. (Or you can just ask.) What I found most striking was the gravitational pull of storytelling: how visitors huddled around the campfire intimacy of the personal retrospective, and how, out of interest or etiquette, they stayed until that person’s time was up and the storyteller released them by freezing like a statue in a fairy tale. On Friday, the second day of the exhibition, many of the links to Mr. Le Roy’s works felt flimsy or forced, and references to his name sometimes made him sound like a cult leader. But there was an intriguing ambiguity between the Le Roy excerpts and the personal material also performed. The personal stuff, as in Mr. Le Roy’s performance-lecture “ These disclosures (which, like the stories, may or may not be factual) are endearing, and Mr. Le Roy has cast his exhibition with smart, likable, articulate performers able to captivate by explaining the unlikely series of events leading someone to become a dancer in a piece like this. The mechanism of the exhibition brings you close to them, but it also inserts interruptions and noisy distractions. Whether you like it or not, it whets the appetite for more.