Private Song
Art, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida suggests, depends on its framework, which defines what can be seen. In her piece, Private Song, artist and choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis proposes ‘framing’ as a perceptive strategy in order to examine, underline or neutralise the relationship between audience and the bodies on the stage. To this end she draws on apparently heterogeneous sources, confronting the singular voices and codified gestures of popular Greek rebetiko songs with wrestling, Hollywood role models and the visual history of love and war.
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. During her years of training, Bachzetsis began to work as a dancer in the contemporary dance and performance context, collaborating with Sasha Waltz & Guests and Les Ballets C. de la B., a. o. Collaboration, transference and a plurality of voices and bodies have informed Bachzetsis’ work ever since and is often thematized as a method of developing new work in her practice.
Much of Bachzetsis’s work involves choreographies of the body and, in particular, the way that popular culture provides source material for gesture, expression, identification, and fantasy as we continually create and re-create our bodies and the way we identify. Bachzetsis has created over 24 pieces, often working collaboratively, which have been shown in theaters, festivals and public space venues worldwide. In addition to this, her work has been exhibited in a variety of contemporary art spaces and museums. Private Song was developed at the invitation of documenta 14 and premiered in Athens and Kassel.
Credits
on behalf of documenta 14
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