The Punk / Punch - Market, Khajuraho

Alina Belyagina

What is a figure that exhibits itself to the authority, looking for an agora to spread its teaching to the collective, but yet in the eye of the cyclone, remains invisible to surveillance ?

Clowns and fools are the anomalies that slip through the net, finding the many stages and agora’s of a spectacle driven late stage capitalism, to spread a salutatory feeling of laugh and connection, mixed with a slight feeling of aversion and danger.

Fools represent what the (controlled/obedient) collective ceased to see in themselves. They are the outskirts of the norm, bending rigidity with unexpected energy, laughter being the least predictable, because perfection in contrast, is control.

Where the gazes meet, the trickster is the outlet for repressed collective emotions traumas and protests, in an affective accessible form. Publicly defying obedience, without being obviously caught, is what being a fool really means.

Embodying the trickster today, is remembering that you can always actually brake a rule.

From court Fools in the Middle Ages, to Folk tales like Petrushka and modern amd contemporary clowns, the archetype of the Fool lives through our culture, and finds a new translation in today’s control society, in being a punk, in being a queer, in being too much of yourself fpr the authority.

The jester plays, when the doll stops being a toy.

In this residency performance Belyagina works with the method of becoming a punk, with simultaneous moments and affect.

Creating a Punktum, inviting a classical male ballet dancer to the vegetable market in Khajuraho to move between a gesture and krump, continuing becoming. Belyagina herself performs the sound on a DJ Track and dance on it.