Joshua Walter

DeRonde/Deroo (NL) It really hurts when your head hits the concrete

A man drags his companion around like a rag doll; a 70 kilo body tethered to him. Lost and looking for the way, he deploys the rag doll as a living Swiss army knife. Tap on his head and water comes out, climb on his shoulders to look around. But what if your companion no longer wants to play along? It really hurts when your head hits the concrete embodies in a humorous and poetic way how we all carry our history with us. In this physical performance you are immersed into an absurd world in which the internal struggle of a man becomes personified. Expect a deluge of images that reads like a poem and takes you to virtuosic acrobatic highlights. ---------One day you feel your history much more than any other day. But the weight your carry is always there. Some days you feel the wind under your wings, a push in the back but other days you feel the heaviness of just waking up. With children we talk about having a backpack, adults use the word 'history' and more pessimistic we talk about 'trauma' but we can also speak about 'experience'. The multiple words we can use also points out the abstractness. We translate this everything to 'what do you carry with you', literally. An extra body that makes it all tangible. How many times don't you hear people say: I've lived many lives. And we translate this to a past that looks like a rag doll that you carry with you. The rag doll is being dragged but not only as a dead corpse. It lives, it blocks, it initiates. it inspires. It acts as a Swiss Army knife to guide the way. You can climb him like a firehouse to look over the people. But if you pull his arm, there's water that comes out of his mouth so you can refresh yourself. But the rag doll starts to have more and more of an impact and suggests more and more. It makes itself as heavy as lead, it copies the man, it acts like a fish on land. And so the question rises: is it time to cast away that part of yourself or do you have to keep on fighting with it. We don't want to tell a story that's quite dramatic. Sometimes the two have dramatic encounters but they resonate comically. We want the audience to leave the performance with a feeling of recognition about that weight that we all carry. And that we don't always have to look at it as something negative. Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up,but a comedy in long-shot- Charlie Chaplin

SPOFFIN 2024
Discipline:
Duration: 30 min
Language: -
Age: ALL

 DeRonde/Deroo