2020: Obscene
Alexandra Bachzetsis’s new piece 2020: Obscene uses body, text and image to explore the ambiguity of ‘scene’ and ‘obscene’. Together with three co-performers, she focuses on the relationship between the staging of the excessive body and its consumption by the coveting gaze and the overwhelming textuality. On the one hand, the work examines the problems of theatre as a manipulation machine with regard to seduction, attraction and games of sexual identity; on the other hand, it explores the performing body itself as a place of alienation and limitation of the human being. The performers are confronted with their own corporealities – with the contradictions between intuition and gesture, light and night, score and script, norm and form, conception and action. The piece, thus, not only questions the subversive and the normative in performance art but also addresses itself to communication through excess as a radical interruption of formats, gestures, cultural patterns and archetypes.
is a choreographer and visual artist based in Basel and Zurich. Her practice unfolds at the intersection of dance, performance, the visual arts and theatre, generating a conflation of the spaces in which the body, as an artistic and critical apparatus, can manifest. Much of Bachzetsis’s work involves choreographies of the body and, in particular, the way that popular culture provides source material for the gesture, expression, identification, and fantasy as we continually create and re-create our bodies and the way we identify. Her latest performances have been co-produced by Tate Modern, Documenta 14, MoMA NY, the Art Institute Chicago and Centre Pompidou.
Credits
Concept, choreography Alexandra Bachzetsis Collaboration, concept, stage Sotiris Vasiliou Collaboration, concept, dramaturgy Dorota Sajewska Creation, performance Alexandra Bachzetsis, Owen Ridley-DeMonick, Tamar Kisch, Konstantinos Papanikolaou Sound design Tobias Koch Costume design Christian Hersche, Ulla Ludwig, Laurent Hermann Progin Communication design Julia Born Photography Melanie Hofmann Hair, make-up Delia Sciullo Technical direction, light design Patrik Rimann Technical team Alban Schelbert, Jon Brunke, Phil Hills, Valentin Biller
3-Channel Video Work
Concept Alexandra Bachzetsis Cinematography Michał Englert Directed by Alexandra Bachzetsis in collaboration with Michał Englert Camera Michał Englert // Video editing Sotiris Vasiliou, Alexandra Bachzetsis Performance Alexandra Bachzetsis, Owen Ridley-DeMonick, Tamar Kisch, Sotiris Vasiliou // Hair, makeup Delia Sciullo, Giada Marina Giorgio Camera assistance Paweł Żelasko Digital imaging technician Marcin Boguszewski // Sound composition, editing Tobias Koch Sound recording Arian Frank Costume design Christian Hersche, Ulla Ludwig, Laurent Hermann Progin Production tour, management Association All Exclusive, Franziska Schmidt Production assistant Juliana Simonetti
Special thanks to Delgado Fuchs, Jia-Yu Corti for participating in the Open Studio research; Bernhard la Dous, Charlotte Holstein Supported by The cooperative support agreement between the City of Zurich, the Canton of Zurich, and Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung, Jacqueline Spengler Stiftung
Co-produced by Kunsthaus Zürich, Kaserne Basel, Dampfzentrale Bern, L’Arsenic – Centre d’art scénique contemporain Lausanne, ADN Neuchâtel, Tanzquartier Wien, Gessnerallee Zürich. This performance is a co-production in the frame of the Programmers’ Fund of Reso – Dance Network Switzerland, supported by Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council
In English