Frédéric Tavernini

Weak Messages Create Bad Situations by Frédéric Tavernini

Our society is slowly slipping towards a slope of violence and intolerance, but are we aware of our part in it? We live in a system that encourages us to think for change but the system itself puts us to sleep rather than waking us up. In a world mediated by a never ending stream of persuasive language and propaganda, Weak Messages Create Bad Situations, asks ‘What about bodies?’ What about information that is shared through the sense of touch, through the skin, through vibration? What does it mean to act out against systems of control or stifle our impulse to act? What if we have become so numb that we have lost our ability to see our own prejudices and susceptibility? Weak Messages Create Bad Situations poses the question: What part can dance and choreography play in bringing awareness and change to the current world order?

If we consider our biology to be our biography (that our experiences shape the way our bodies function and move through the world) how are our bodies written by avoidance, uncertainty, and violation? Through movement research we will investigate distinct movement qualities and physicality produced by observing bodies that are at the mercy of the system, are the system, and that move within the system. To understand our object of investigation we look to the disenfranchised (whose rights are being taken away one by one) – the outcast, transient, and displaced. We look to the powerful global resurgence of the extreme right and their unshaking conviction to maintain borders and homogeneity. And we look to those who sit idly by in opposition with no will to act. We produce bodies that confront and demand, seduce and linger, tremble and jerk, or retract into numbness.

How do we become desensitized to systems of control within society? Through slow muddy movement cut off by jerks; like a bad dream emerging from sleep. Through an uncertain life permeated by structural violence and social injustice, deprived of fixed reference and assured identity. Through a dull atmosphere of manipulation interrupted, from time to time, with the sound of sirens and bombs.