2011 You Must

Concept and Choreography Fernando Belfiore Dramaturgical Advise Katarina Bakatsaki and Ivo Dimchev Music Advice Tian Rotteveel Production Dansmakers Amsterdam

In our times when time is money and space is private choreography can give us not hope but a slight shift, to put attention on “seeing differently”. By seeing different one has the power to act differently, by acting differently one is producing difference. “In order to achieve social liberation we must first liberate ourselves from the inner hold of consumer society” Slavoj Žižek, THE SUPEREGO AND THE ACT

You must is a performance solo that exposes materiality and craft to trigger the exercise of sensation and imagination. It proposes a body seeking being able to re-discovering, re-patterning, re-encountering the world. How can we transcend established boundaries ? It is a construction of a universe of intensity and fragility.

You Must premiered in the Melkweg for the Brazil-Holland Festival in October 2011, it was presented at Forum of live Arts in Amsterdam and Volksroom (workspace of Ivo Dimchev in Brussels), I Like To Watch Too Amsterdam, Festival Contemporaneo de Danca de Sao Paulo, Rough Cut Festival in Frankfurt, Mandala Performance Festival in Wroclaw, Spider Festival, Ljubljana and Manifestação International de Performance3, Belo Horizonte.

FLAM (Forum of Live Art Amsterdam) is a week of international live performance art presentations, happening in Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam.The aim of this week is to promote performance art, bring artists from different cultural backgrounds together and build up an international network of artists working with live art. Performances by Moritz Ebinger, Guilherme Peters en Fernando Belfiore.

‘A stronger “story”, without empty moments is brought by fernando Belfiore, recently graduated from the school for new Dance development in Amsterdam. In his performance You Must he shows, with strong images, what the homo sapiens actually stand for. If you forget the sweet romance and flickering lights, the love and peace of the Aquarius era or even the spirited beat of the Samba, you’re left with the uncultivated seed, coarse and rough, unashamedly and also aggressive, illuminated by merciless light.

With his cap over his eyes, he moves across the stage, which is dotted with small toy pigs, black of rolling in the dirt. Our man pricks them with his stick and leaves his dick hanging out of his fly. Strange that some audience members, mostly women, leave the hall at that moment; apparently a naked man who masturbates in front of you is more border poignant than an actor who molests and insults you.

As in a ritual this black sheep slowly becomes a black pig himself. He besmirches his face with black paint, stuffs the animals under his t-shirt. The ending is unexpectedly fragile, even tender, when he complements highly polished piano playing (Bach) with his playing on the squeaking pigs as a quatre mains, which creates some hope for the future. He is a performance talent to be monitored.’

Mirjian van der Linden translated from De Volkskrant 13 October 2011