Bodybuilders: La forza della fragilità

The article examines With All My Strength, a choreographic work by Martina Rota that brings three bodybuilders into dialogue with pop music, sculptural posing, and affective excess. Set to All the Things She Said (2002) by t.A.T.u., the performance stages an ambiguous encounter between hyper-built bodies, choreographic attention, and a generational pop reference tied to non-normative desire. Through the lens of “synthetic becoming,” the piece foregrounds bodies as constructed, porous, and continuously negotiated formations shaped by discipline, desire, and cultural norms. Drawing on bodybuilding as a subcultural practice of bodily fabrication—through training, nutrition, and chemical enhancement—the work reframes muscular artificiality not as exception but as an intensified version of processes that structure all bodies and identities. The collaboration between choreographer and performers emerges as an assemblage driven by a shared, obsessive orientation toward a future that is never fully attainable, articulated through repetition, posing, and sensory feedback. In this encounter, boundaries between disciplines, biographies, and normative codes begin to dissolve. With All My Strength ultimately proposes choreography as a synthetic practice in a double sense: artificial and constructed, but also combined and relational. Through mutual symbiosis between bodies, voices, materials, and water-filled PVC cushions that function as prosthetic extensions and mutable ecosystems, the performance articulates a collective tension toward “not enough,” opening speculative futures that unsettle bodily intelligibility and dominant regimes of normativity.