Alexandra Bachzetsis, PRIVATE: Wear a mask when you talk to me, 2016 (photo © Blommers & Schumm)
The High Line at Fourteenth St.
June 25-29, free with advance RSVP, 8:00
www.alexandrabachzetsis.com
art.thehighline.org
Swiss choreographer and visual artist Alexandra Bachzetsis, who explores the human body, gender identity, and the concept of beauty in her performance art works, will present two related pieces on the High Line next week. Inspired by Trisha Brown, the fifty-three-minute PRIVATE: Wear a mask when you talk to me, taking place June 25 and 27 at 8:00, involves a wide range of movement based on various cultural memes (yoga, drag queens, Michael Jackson). “PRIVATE does not mobilize techniques of parody that have been developed within feminist and queer cultures during the last years,” writer and curator Paul B. Preciado explains on Bachzetsis’s website. “It doesn’t aim to represent the process of embodiment of gender and sexual norms, but rather it explores the instances of performative failure and inner transition that allow for agency and resistance to emerge. How much history of discipline and dissidence can be encapsulated within a single gesture? Can movement activate the memory of the subaltern bodies that have been buried underneath hegemonic codes?” On June 26 and 28 at 8:00, Bachzetsis’s Private Song features Bachzetsis, Sotiris Vasiliou, and Thibault Lac and music by Giannis Papaioannou, Vassilis Tsitsanis, and Giorgos Mitsakis, investigating the rebetiko tradition. Again, Preciado points out, “With three performers, Private Song re-frames some of the elements that were part of the solo performance Private: Wear a mask when you talk to me. While the solo performance uses self-mutation as a technique to explore gender and cultural constructions through the ritualized repetition of embodied gesture, Private Song proposes framing as a perceptual strategy for questioning, underlining, or neutralizing the spectator’s relation to moving bodies on stage.” The performances are free, but advance RSVP is recommended.