Abstract

Xavier Le Roy’s performance Self-Unfinished is emblematic of how contemporary dance’s resistance to the submission of the body to a codified ideal body model manifests itself through the staging of bodies “beyond codes”, i.e., bodies that take surprising, sometimes even apparently “monstrous” shapes. The purpose of this article is to investigate the “monstrosity” of Self-Unfinished and to sketch out an analysis of it following Hermann Schmitz's theory of the Leib and Tonino Griffero’s account on atmospheres.