Physics of Vulnerability | Uscite di Emergenza | Corpo Mobile Festival

Sunday 5 May 2024 | Teatro di Villa Lazzaroni, via Appia Nuova 520, 522, Roma.

There is a moment of suspension, when you become aware of your state. Liquid, heavy, helpless. This is not the telling of a story, it is the description of a moment that appears on various planes. That moment of apnoea at the bottom where you do not define the rules. Defining vulnerability as a flaw in the protection system is only a partial truth. What happens when we go ‘face down’? Physics of Vulnerability recounts the time bubble in which all protections are suspended, walls collapse, and the innermost part is listened to in order to build an ascent. A journey through the nakedness of the psyche told by corporeity and emotionality. Listening is the preparation for a vigorous re-emergence.

Physics of Vulnerability is the new experimental idea designed by the company Uscite di Emergenza and choreographer Davide Romeo. The work starts from a corporeal choreographic research that subsequently wants to contaminate itself with the objects, images and proposals of the project members. The work is based on the idea of vulnerability as an emotional and existential state linked to bodily states, images and suggestions that one would like to recreate on stage. The inspiration comes from reading the book “Rising Strong” by Brene Brown. Hence the quotation that acts as a tagline for the project. Water becomes the focal point of the corporeal research and the transposition of the concept into images, dwelling on the sensorial condition of vulnerability that it creates by acting on our psychophysical state in a situation of apnoea and stasis.

The work on everyone’s vulnerability and the search for Brown lead us to a single definition of vulnerability: a state of delicacy and caution.

The scenic transposition of this concept are the 30 glasses filled with water on stage. The dancers will have to perform their physical and dynamic choreographic actions without undermining the delicate balance of these glasses. The result is the re-creation of a precarious condition where the slightest movement could create chaos.

The glasses and the dancers create ever new and dynamic compositions until the turning point comes like a revelation in a journey: becoming aware of the inner void changes our whole view of vulnerability.

At this point, Brown’s own words suggest one of the many paths to take, and accompany us in the acceptance of a catharsis that is anything but obvious, pointing the way to a vigorous re-emergence.

All this is accompanied by a dynamic choreographic research that aims at the restitution of reality in movement and gestures, with particular attention to the floor, which becomes a surface where new dynamics of body-gravity relationship are played out.