[ KINK Section ]

[ slovensko ]

SKRITO | HIDDEN
Working title (ŠIBKOST | SCHWÄCHE | WEAK POINTS)
International dance creation (Berlin | Ljubljana)

Tour:

26 July: Tanzhaus NRW Düsseldorf
25 June: Studio 1, Tanzfabrik, Möckernstr. 68, Berlin
29 March: Milchhof, Schwedter str. 234- 236, Berlin
28. August: TanzFabrik, Berlin, Studio 1 at 4:00 pm as part of the Off programme
[ Tanz im August ]
3. September: [ Nagib ], Experimental Movement Festival, Maribor, Small stage of Slovene National Theatre Maribor at 8:00 pm.

Authors, choreographers, dancers: Leja Jurišić (Ljubljana) & Hanna Sybille Müller (Berlin)
Concept: Leja Jurišić & Hanna Sybille Müller
Concept discussion with: Rok Vevar (Ljubljana)
Music Composition: Žiga Predan (Ljubljana)
Light design / Scenography: Florian Bach (Berlin)
Production: Zavod Exodos (Ljubljana)
Co-production: Društvo Pekinpah, KINK Section (Ljubljana), Tanzfabrik (Berlin), City of women (Ljubljana) in Dance theatre of Ljubljana

CONCEPT

The dance work “Weakness” will approach its central theme from several angles as it explores a range of dance, theatre, and performance genres by means of which weakness conceals its vulnerability. The work will examine the fundamentally relative nature of its central theme, for weakness is always something that presupposes someone or something else. Weakness is born in the encounter with the Other. The work will treat such questions as why, in fact, does weakness so rarely allow itself to be vulnerable, and what prevents it from doing this. It will look at what weakness means in dance and how dance uses different techniques to control or overcome weakness. The dance work “Weakness” will investigate the vulnerability of its primary instrument – the body, which in its terminal nature is destined to suffer the ultimate weakness, for it must always succumb eventually to the strength of time and death. The work will feature two dancers, who will investigate the concept of weakness on the bodily, material, existential and social levels.


With hidden noise, Marcel Duchamp, 1916

Weakness is an expressly relative category – a judgement or feeling. As with many other things, weakness presupposes the Other: as model, contrast, or judge. It presupposes an Other who is everything the weak person is not, everything weakness is not – strong, solid, constant and stable – or who at least seems this way. When weakness refers to a thing or idea, the Other is present as the criterion of “quality”, as unbearable difference. Weakness implies trembling, wincing; it speaks of something that relents beneath the force of pressure, something that yields to that which comes from elsewhere, from someone or something other. Weakness speaks of flimsiness and delicacy, of a structural “damage” that unsteadies it with the promise of collapse. It speaks of the terminality we would rather avoid, which causes us to try to protect weakness and make it unending. But weakness can be protected only by resorting to a substitute solidity. – This substitute solidity is, precisely, the gap between solidity (or strength) and weakness. A characteristic of weakness, then, is that it always falls short of fulfilling the almighty criterion of solidity. But this it knows only by comparison, only by entering into a relationship with someone or something else. – Dance is always something weak. For it is conveyed by the terminality that we call the body. And by the body’s exhausting and inconstant strength. Ever since antiquity, European civilisation has strived to make the body infinite, eternal. It was the weakness of the body that drove the engine of science and medicine. Today the pharmaceutical industry and other commercial fields concerned with “human health” make enormous profits off human frailty and the body’s weakness. People, after all, would like to compensate for the gap that separates them from solidity, constancy, and preparedness – that separates them from eternity. They would like to be “strong, unyielding men of steel”, and also to defeat the unyielding forces of time. – Without weakness there can be neither art nor science, nor any other sort of creativity. The creative motive always emerges from weakness, and never, so to speak, from strength. Strength needs no supplement. Or, from a different perspective, the strength of thought resides solely in the weakness of thought, and not in the constancy of knowledge. Strength resides in the weakness of dance, and not in the solidity of fixed choreographic regimes. Strength resides in the weak and terminal nature of the body, and not in the eternity of prepared dance discourses. – But every weakness, with all its motives, can also be dangerous. For it strives to overcome, to equal, and to master the Other, whom it sees as representing strength, solidity and constancy. Very often the Other represents to weakness the frustrating phantasm of solidity. Weakness knows how to set in play a battery of devious motives and at the same time protect itself through various mimetic strategies that serve to span the yawning gap dividing weakness from solidity. On the battlefield of the world, weakness can disguise itself in a costume of solidity, so we are often very much in doubt when, without any hostile intention, we wish to expose it. We cannot tell which of the chairs, all boasting of stability, will collapse when we sit down. We do not possess the proper information about when they last repaired the bridge that sways with deceptive solidity above the sharp rocks of the mountain stream. We can never know if the tree we intend to lean on for support might not be rotting away beneath its seemingly healthy bark. For weakness is a consummate actress, and she has at her disposal an entire wardrobe of solid-looking costumes. – Weakness knows how to be vulnerable, but is just as often a first-rate strategist whose offensives may sometimes end in tragedy.

Rok Vevar
Translated by Rawley Grau