2020: Obscene | Alexandra Bachzetsis
Is it a scene from Blowup, Michelangelo Antonioni’s renowned film, or maybe a studio where a porn film is shot? The setting of 2020: Obscene, with its bright colors and cameras recording everything, is on the edge. Like everything else happening during the 85 minutes of this performance that comments on lifestyle sadomasochistic eroticism’s fetishism.
“I am a woman, not a fool,” proclaims Alexandra Bachzetsis and stages a performance which serves as a manifesto for the extremeness of bodies and gazes.
Alexandra Bachzetsis, a Greek-Swiss performer, choreographer, and visual artist based in Zurich, who has notable landmarks and collaborations throughout her career – MoMA New York, Tate Modern, ImPULSTanz Vienna, Julidans Amsterdam, among others – in 2020: Obscene uses body, text, and image to explore the ambiguity of ‘scene’ and ‘obscene’.
Together with three co-performers she is focusing 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 theater 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 corporeality – 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.
PHOTO: MELANIE HOFMANN