Works
Alexandra Bachzetsis
(b. 1974, Zurich)
Private Song (2017)
Performance
Municipal Theater of Piraeus, Piraeus
Private Song (2017)
Performance
Henschel-Hallen, Kassel
Concept and Choreography: Alexandra Bachzetsis; Performance and Movement Research: Alexandra Bachzetsis, Thibault Lac, Sotiris Vasiliou; Research Curator: Paul B. Preciado; Dramaturgy: Tom Engels; Collaboration Research Rembetiko Culture: Alkistis Poulopoulou, Sotiris Vasiliou; Music: Tobias Koch; Recorded Musicians: Avgerini Gatsi, Kostis Kostakis, Fotis Vergopoulos, Giannis Zarias; Voice Training and Coaching: Theodora Baka; Communication Design: Julia Born; Editorial Coordination Private Song Book: Henriette Gallus; Greek Editing Private Song Book: Sotiris Vasiliou; Photography: Otobong Nkanga and Nikolas Giakoumakis; Costume Design: Cosima Gadient in collaboration with Yonatan Zohar; Light Design and Technique: Patrik Rimann; Stage Design and Production Assistant: Peter Baur; Production: Association All Exclusive; Production Management: Anna Geering
Commissioned by documenta 14
Supported by: Schering Stiftung; a cooperative funding agreement between the City of Zurich, Canton of Basel-Landschaft, Canton of Basel-Stadt, and Pro Helvetia–Schweizer Kulturstiftung; Stichting Ammodo; Co-produced with: Volksbühne Berlin, Frans Hals Museum/De Hallen, Haarlem
Thanks to: Paul B. Preciado, Hendrik Folkerts, Shannon Jackson, Mia Born, Oleg Houbrechts, Otobong Nkanga, Daphni Antoniou, Kelly Tsipni-Kolaza, Lenio Kaklea, Evangelia Karakatsani,Verena Bachzetsis, Jannis Tsingaris, Sakis Bachzetsis
Studies for Massacre—Seven Stages (2017)
Two-channel digital video, color, sound
98 min.
Studies for Massacre—Seven Stages is based on the work Massacre: Variations on a Theme, originally commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York
documenta Halle, Kassel
Video concept and choreography: Alexandra Bachzetsis; Directed by: Alexandra Bachzetsis in collaboration with Glen Fogel; Camera: Glen Fogel; Editing: Glen Fogel; Sound Design: Tobias Koch
Performers: Alexandra Bachzetsis, Clara Becker, Nuno Bizarro, Margarita Bofiliou, Simon Bucher, Mischa Cheung, Yumiko Funaya, Lenio Kaklea, Antria Kyriakidou, Tobias Koch, Patrik Rimann, Alexandra Rogovska, Sofia Simaki, Alma Toaspern, Sotiris Vasiliou, Dimitra Vlachou, Yonatan Zohar, Bree Zucker
Costume Design: Cosima Gadient; Costume Assistant: Yonatan Zohar; Collaboration Costume and Body Painting: Margarita Bofiliou; Costume and Body Painting Assistants: Sofia Simaki, Antria Kyriakidou; Lighting Design: Patrik Rimann; Makeup and Hair: Olga Patsiou; Video Assistants: Pepi Levogianni, Andrew Kerton; Set Runner: Romnick Palo; Production Management: Clara Becker; Production Assistant: Sotiris Vasiliou; Production: Association All Exclusive; Association Management: Anna Geering; Communication Design: Julia Born
Commissioned by documenta 14
Supported by Kooperative Fördervereinbarung between: Stadt Zürich, Fachausschuss Tanz und Theater BS/BL, Pro Helvetia-Schweizer Kulturstiftung
Special thanks to: Andreas Melas and Stuart Comer
Alexandra Bachzetsis takes the emerging systems of communication that have come to define contemporary culture—pop music, the mass media, and the internet—as the true sites within which contemporary dance is produced. She construes dance as an intersectional language, the result of the criss-crossing of various systems of representation: painting, drawing, architecture, photography, literature, cinema, television, video clips, advertising, fashion, pornography, and YouTube tutorials. Throughout, she documents all forms of contemporary embodiment, from workout routines to rebetiko, to create a living archive of social scores.
Bachzetsis launched her choreographic practice in 2001 with Perfect. Since then she has collaborated with numerous artists on more than twenty-five pieces, including Gold (2004), Show Dance (2004), Undressed (2005), Dream Season (2008), Étude (2012), From A to B via C (2014), and, more recently, the solo PRIVATE: Wear a mask when you talk to me (2016), which splices postures from yoga, porn, football, and other sources to form a kind of report on the formation of gender and desire under a neoliberal regime via ritualistically repeated gestures.
For Bachzetsis, Fred Astaire, Bob Dylan, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Michael Jackson are as important as Trisha Brown—or Lina Bo Bardi. Her dance engages with the transversal history of image production, from preperspective and medieval flatness to the languages of contemporary art, but also graphic design or digital media, and in so doing she radically displaces traditional accounts of space, movement, body, and subjectivity. Her work demonstrates that the images of mass culture are based on abstract models of vision and movement codified in terms of gender, race, class, age, or disability that constrain bodily action and normalize subjectivity.
Born in Switzerland to a Swiss mother and a Greek father, in 1974, Bachzetsis claims uprootedness, rather than origin and identity, as a political and aesthetic site: “I didn’t have a sense of belonging within language or place; therefore I wanted to establish one for myself, to produce a space where I could exist.” The question she poses is how to produce agency, how to recuperate the erotic, affective, and micropolitical power of gesture within a regulated regime of visibility. From her works’ formal sophistication, from the random flow of codes within and against the tacit score of the normative, streams a sheer unexpected beauty. The endless possibility of improvisation and revolt within a given system of rules radiates from each distorted image and pattern, composed of apparently preset series of bodily interactions.
—Paul B. Preciado
