From A to B via C explores the transposition of roles and identities through the appropriation of—learned and borrowed—movements, habits and skills. Alexandra Bachzetsis, in collaboration with Anne Pajunen and Gabriel Schenker, investigates the basis of interpersonal communication through the immediate documentation of performance. Here, one’s own—or borrowed—movement is trained and passed along from interpreter to interpreter so that each dancer can become an expert in appropriated movements, and, for a moment, embrace a desired identity.
Bachzetsis’s interest lies in the merging of what happens between the theatre space (the place for performing arts) and the museum space (the place for the visual arts), as two parallel institutional mechanisms that have a certain influence on the social body. This blend results in a third space that is tied to a live durational experience and is transformed by the architecture of exhibition and vice versa: performance.
How is knowledge transferred through the arbitrary collection of signs and indicators we call language? What is the language of the moving body?
In Alexandra Bachzetsis’s performance and installation work From A to B via C, three bodies move from and towards each other, acting as each other’s mirror image, yet mediated and unsynchronized. The mirror image becomes a site for transposition where various elements are transferred, leaving corresponding traces. Throughout the performance, three dancers use each other as instructional mirrors in their attempts to compose scenes of true virtuosity that can only exist for a brief moment, as if achieved by accident.
As it progresses, the performance changes into a different version of itself, more true than its purest original. The changing scenes are indicative of a desire to belong, to communicate and embed one’s own identity. In this setting of instruction and virtuosity, the dancers’ bodies—their interior and exterior—are the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax with which to transfer knowledge and information. Ultimately, they enact their own transposition into each other, blurring the lines of autonomy, individual agency, and the hierarchies between their bodies. For Bachzetsis, language is conceived as something physical and embodied, yet the work also raises questions about translation.
Museo Jumex presents the third version of From A to B via C after being presented at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, and online as part of the Tate Modern’s Performance Room series. In addition to the six performances presented at Museo Jumex, a new video installation piece created by Bachzetsis is on view.
- Bachzetsis, Alexandra
Concept and Choreography: Alexandra Bachzetsis
Creation and Performance: Alexandra Bachzetsis, Anne Pajunen, Gabriel Schenker
Research Curator: Hendrik Folkerts
Costumes: Cosima Gadient
Music: Tobias Koch in collaboration with Dan Solbach
Concept communication design, photography and cinematography in collaboration with: Julia Born, Gina Folly and Miriam Leonardi.
Technique: Patrick Rimann
Production: Association All Exclusive
Production Manager: Anna Geering
Commissioned by: Tate Modern, Centre D’Art Contemporain Genève and Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo
Coproduced by Theatre Kaserne Basel and Theaterhaus Gessnerallee Zürich
Supported by Stadt Zürich Kultur, Kanton Basel-Landschaft, Kanton Basel-Stadt, Pro Helvetia -Schweizer Kulturstiftung