Record
What does a hikikomori dream about when they sleep? How do they perceive the outside world? How many times can someone fall in an hour? What record would a stuntwoman set with respect to the challenge of falling and getting up and falling and getting up and falling and getting up? With performance project Record, involving the characters of a hikikomori (a social recluse) and a stunt woman, Francesca Grilli wants to present the delicate and fragile way of life that is typical of adolescence – an age balanced between the desire to throw oneself into life and the desire to withdraw from it.
While a stuntwoman takes the risk of dying, but survives her extreme actions, a hikikomori avoids the risk of death through complete inactivity and the rejection of every social challenge. The hikikomori lives the most extreme solitude as someone who experiences the potential of failure as unbearable. Nevertheless, they dream, they feel, and they take part in life. In less severe cases, a hikikomori acts in the world through an avatar, an alternative body, a powerful alter ego that replaces them in ‘dangerous’ activities. The avatar is a sort of imaginary stunt double who lives adventures in their place. The hikikomori and the stunt woman are the two specular sides of the same conflict, and adolescence is connected to both of them. In a society that makes death and failure two of its biggest taboos ever, teenagers are about to jump in life and take the risk of it all and, at the same time, are afraid to come out to the world.
In Record, a choir of teenagers will sing a composition of texts inspired by a hikikomori’s confessions. The scene is focused on a single action: falling and getting up again – trying, at each performance, to break a new record. It sums up the moment we are living in, in which we are all involved, with hardships and joys, mixed feelings and bewilderment.
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