The Sensuousness of Silence

Abstract

In his Le Sacre du Printemps (2007) Xavier le Roy performs what appears at first to be a crazed and rather comical ‘version’ of a conductor, leading us, his audience and orchestra, through the drama of Stravinsky’s great work. Le Roy’s Sacre was inspired in part by a film made of the conductor Simon Rattle performing the work with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. The film, Rhythm Is It,¹ gives a privileged glimpse of the conductor from the orchestra’s perspective, with the front of his body, and his face in particular, unusually visible. Having begun with his back to us, Le Roy turns to give us a similarly face-front view. Somewhere towards the middle of the performance, he stops. Alone, and in ordinary, everyday clothes, he stands and slowly and carefully looks at us, scanning through and across the serried ranks, before the music begins again and he returns to the frenzy of his conducting. A small, quiet moment, it not only signals its difference from what comes before and after, but also an intimacy between and amongst us; we are ‘in’ its silence in a manner which even the amplified music in which we are otherwise immersed does not quite seem to achieve.