MTalks—Xavier Le Roy in Dialogue: What Matters • 12 Dec 2015

In these times of global economic systems and the effect of the material on contemporary culture, what does it take to imagine and invent spaces where we can experience collective generating, sharing and discussing under the title of ‘art’? What if artistic practices worked on freeing themselves from the logics of commodification? Listen to the third and final in our series of salon conversations with acclaimed French choreographer Xavier Le Roy, co-presented with Dancehouse, that aim to link dance and choreography to current issues in arts and society, highlighting the connections between the thinking and moving body and contemporary aesthetic, cultural and political issues. Xavier and a panel of local artists—led by Angela Conquet, artistic director of Dancehouse, and including French artist Mathieu Brand, choreographer Matthew Day and Joeri Mol, senior lecturer in organisation studies at the University of Melbourne—explored ways of talking about, making and experiencing art that really matters. If the idea of ‘artistic modernity’ isn’t an outdated historical program but rather a promise yet to be activated, how can we find a way to rearrange the rhetorical contradictions about ‘dialogue between cultures’ that modern-day conversations produce?