A project of Ruggero Franceschini and Alberto Franceschini
Crowd Control is a playful criticism of the fluid and purposeful way in which actions are perceived and evaluated in contemporary society.
In an urban space of pedestrian transit (a plaza, a narrow road), using belt barriers (those that are used in museums), a performer will improvise a purposeless, fluid labyrinth to configure patterns of circulation with random audience passing by. The surrealist situation is marked by a monkey mask, worn by the performer on top of his head, as a sort of hat.
Crowd control set into question how movement in public spaces is shaped by ideological systems of control and regulation that normalize the way in which we perceive our surrounding reality. In responding to the call of Marten Spangberg (“Choreography is an organizational capacity that needs an expression into the world”), Crowd control tries to make choreography free from dance and looks to to choreography as an organizational practice applied to the creation of purposeless spatial and purpose-free social relations.
A performer wearing on top of his head, as a sort of hat, a monkey mask (a detail marking the peculiarity of the situation) engages in a multi-layered practice that will bring him to relate to his mask, the public, and the street, using a set of belt barriers. These objects are tools that create patterns of use in public spaces, they are symbols of an authority that imposes a behavior. They canalize and rank. Through the use of belt barriers, the performer will instead work on constantly (dis)organizing and (de)structuring the circulation of bodies in the public space.
