Avoir du Pois

Promo Video

Avoir du Pois -  performed by Brandy Butler

Conceptualized by Brandy Butler and Jeremy Nedd

Dramaturgy: Ante Heckman

Stage Design: Laura Knüssel

Light Design: Ueli Kappeler

Digital Effects: Juan Ferrari

Additional Conception: Dominik Hartmann

The heaviest punishment that the old gods could bestow upon someone as strong as Atlas was to literally carry weight. Weight as in mass. Mass being the measure of Matter. Matter being defined as the heaviness of things.

In our society we often look as weight of an indicator of behavior, especially in relation to how fat someone is because of it. 13% of the world’s population is considered obese. Yet in today’s society there is a constant push by societal structures to prioritize non fat bodies as the only bodies that are acceptable and truly worthy. The current movement of “body positivity” has made obesity more visible, fatness still remains the generally undesirable outlier of human form. 

AvoirDupois, or simply translated “the weight of things,” is a critical performative solo piece that blends together movement, text, music and physical experimentation by the Zürich based performance artist, Brandy Butler. In her first solo piece, Butler queries the oversimplification of fat body and weight. Avoirdupois questions what function does weight serve in our society, what projections do we make on a weighted body and for whom are we actually weighing bodies.

Avoir du Pois runs between 40 and 50 minutes.