Private Song Excerpts is a performance by Alexandra Bachzetsis with Theodora Baca, Sotiris Vasiliou, and Evgenios Voulgaris. In a continuation of her project Private Song commissioned by documenta 14, Alexandra Bachzetsis proposes a performance informed by rebetiko tradition challenging our views on gender-specific practices at Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation. Zeibekiko, a rebetiko dance, is a recurrent element in the work of Yannis Tsarouchis. Tsarouchis often depicted soldiers and sailors dancing zeibekiko. He presented them on a black-and-white ceramic floor, which resembles the floor of a folk taverna and inspires a sense of domesticity characteristic of suburban life.These paintings where mostly created from memory while he was in Villeneuve-les-Sablons, in the suburbs of Paris, distancing himself physically from his Greekness, in order to reinvent it.
Private Song Excerpts inhabits Yannis Tsarouchis house for a unique performance which proposes framing as a perceptual strategy for questioning, underlining, or neutralizing the spectator’s relation to moving bodies on stage. Popular rebetiko songs from the 1940s and 1950s composed by Giannis Papaioannou, Vassilis Tsitsanis, and Giorgos Mitsakis are introduced in the piece—not as a narrative motif but as a means of juxtaposing the singular voices and codified gestures stemming from oriental and modern dance.
Free entrance; limited capacity
