Wea(k)pon

Wea(k)pon joins two words, weak and weapon. It is an ongoing performance project that Zhang Yixin and I develop together, and it changes with every site and every time we perform it. It has taken place in a car-wash garage and a children’s playground; this, its fifth presentation, took place in an art museum.

With sports marking tape and metal thorns, we built a temporary arena inside the museum. The performance begins with the sword and the bubble as its basic “weapons”, which keep changing over successive rounds of combat, drawing out improvised confrontations and a back-and-forth of force.

The sword and the bubble are opposites, and also the same thing. Fired from a gun, a bubble of soap solution takes on the meaning of attack, yet it is iridescent, light and fragile. The sword, cold and heavy, extends the body and reaches to pierce what cannot be held. When the sword touches a bubble, holds it up, wears it down, or only comes near it, the two seemingly opposed materials suddenly align: the thinnest of boundaries catches the light, flickers at the moment of contact, and leaves a faint but visible trace on the metal blade.

Treating opposites as one, the two of us become each other’s point of reference, trying to grasp something light, naive, cold, heavy and cruel. Between a body and its extension, between chasing and being chased across the arena, we look for unity in displaced functions. Aggression can be carried out by what is soft, fragile and unstable, which is also what the Doppelgänger, one body in two, comes to mean here.

In a performance without dialogue, everything rests on our unspoken understanding and trust. A serious duel becomes a light game, the naive setting reflects back the cruelty of the duel, and aggression passes to what is fragile, soft and unstable.