By Aoife Rosenmeyer
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Performance of Alexandra Bachzetsis's 'The Stages of Staging' (2013) in Zurich. Photo: Melanie Hofmann
When the doors opened into the Gessnerallee Theatre in Zurich, all ten performers, clad mostly in tight-fitting sportswear, were already engaged in intent motion. On a stage that was bare but for a pile of exercise mats and a few inflatable balls, a woman in white undertook yoga contortions, one man performed balletic manoeuvres with a ball, another tested his balance on one foot. It was a notional gym scene with different actions taking place concurrently, so one could at first overlook the fact that amid the sports activities some of the actors repeatedly dropped to the floor as though they had been shot, their falls caught or cushioned by colleagues who would, in turn, fake their own deaths. Thus began Alexandra Bachzetsis’s new work ‘The Stages of Staging’, a performance that lasted the better part of 90 minutes.
Since September 2013, The Stages of Staging has been performed in this 90-minute form in Basel, Berlin and Bern, as well as in an extended ‘museum version’ that extends to some five hours, first undertaken at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The work does not expand or resolve a narrative arc, but consists of a series of exercises carried out in turn so that even the theatrical version tests the stamina of its audience to a degree, and certainly that of its performers. A commonality between physical and artistic practices is evident, as the actors test, repeat, hone and perfect various corporeal movements. Moments of diffuse action across the stage are interspersed with group choreographies, such as when one performer rallies the others to catch him and then raise him aloft, tossing him in the air; or when all the performers move around the mats that, held up, work as scenery flats. In the interim, individuals operating alone can be engrossed in their activities; duos compete or collaborate in other sports.
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‘The Stages of Staging’ by Alexandra Bachzetsis. Photo: Melanie Hofmann
The sound is restrained: periods of exercise are accompanied only by the breathing of the actors; occasionally the seemingly organic evolution of action is interrupted by one participant commentating, ‘Stretch, yeah,’ à la an aerobics instructor, or another directing a sequence: ‘Go – actually, stop. I want to complicate things’. At one point half the cast, off-stage, voices the impacts of cartoon violence taking place in action tableaux in front of us. All this is punctuated with moments when individual actors sing to a camera set up at stage right (songs such as Prince’s ‘You’ve Got The Look’), creating a live feed projected onto a mat.
Toward the latter part of the performance the action takes a definitive turn from the gym to the club, the contortionist lip-synching to Giorgio Moroder’s remix of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ while she is borne about by others, or the whole group dancing in a frenzy to Black Legend’s ‘You See the Trouble with Me’ and ‘Gimme Some Lovin’’ by the Spencer Davis Group. Stretches turn to gyration and it’s a swift segue from hair-eography performed with gusto to choreographed intimacy, each dancer peeling off a layer of clothing.
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‘The Stages of Staging’ by Alexandra Bachzetsis. Photo: Melanie Hofmann
The closing was (disappointingly) featured in the work’s trailer, a scene in which the group sings Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ a cappella while teasing out the hair of a male and female dancer who lie on a mat. The audience sees this from the camera that has been moved to observe them from above. The frisson – and skip to the next paragraph if you’re likely to see the work live – is the girl’s last gesture. Left alone, the last person in the camera light’s beam, she reaches up and turns it off, a movement that suddenly clarifies a key contemporary relationship of individual to (web) camera.
The connection of the individual to his or her context and the crowd has been continually reconfigured throughout the work. Repeated gestures at first exemplify the actions of an exerciser focussing on their personal experience, till disrupted by group movements to remind us of the planned nature of the performance. When the flexible woman in white mouths Donna Summer’s lyrics it makes for a horrible ‘and then she woke up and had her cornflakes’ moment; the excruciating possibility that the performance to that point could have been a narration of her fantasy. Thankfully this is swiftly followed by another scene that corrodes the fourth wall and makes the audience squirm yet more, when each dancer’s interaction with the dance music, which endures longer than most scenes, is deliberately self-centred, making us feel like the squares we are, glued to our seats while these people achieve some state of transcendence through the music.
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‘The Stages of Staging’ by Alexandra Bachzetsis. Photo: Melanie Hofmann
Five paragraphs in, this text still reads as if Bachzetsis presents the genres of fitness and clubbing, both with their promises of liberation, as if they were not coded. This would be nonsense in relation to filmic mores or much online self-portrayal, and of course it can be found in fitness and dance, too. For a start the costumes, so purportedly neutral, speak volumes about presentation as well as performance. There are gestures from the gym that relate to vocabularies of defence and attack; tensing and twisting are only a few turns from sexualized gyration for the benefit of an audience. And these genres are not only coded but commodified too. One performer is in a Chicago Bulls jersey, many miles from Illinois but still in official merchandise; enthusiastic bouncing becomes cheering, the marginal female sport aligned with male teams that front multimillion-dollar entertainment corporations.
These are a few iceberg tips from a dense performance, one better served as its own representation than an inadequate translation to text. But if that diverse density has to be reduced to one thought, perhaps for Bachzetsis it is that the body is a sketch of a project in continual development: the body as a site of covering and re-covering, of adopting and rejecting gestures, a body that can be an agent or a pawn; the body at the mercy of outside influences, but always propelled by the possibility of euphoric, and subjective, physicality.
Aoife Rosenmeyer is a critic, curator and translator based in Zurich.
Alexandra Bachzetsis’s ‘The Stages of Staging’ will be performed at Pôl Sud Strasbourg on11 and 12 December 2013, at Théâtre Sévelin 36 Lausanne on 24 and 25 March 2014, and at ADC Geneva, on 27 and 28 March 2014.
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