A second chance to watch Alexandra Bachzetsis’s performance of From A to B via C captured live on Thursday 23 October 2014 at Tate Modern
About the performance
Alexandra Bachzetsis presents From A to B via C, a new work created for three dancers for a theatre, and further transformed for an exhibition space and performed live to an online audience as part of the 2014 Performance Room series.
From A to B via C explores the transposition of roles and identities, exercised through the appropriation of borrowed and learned movement habits and skills. In collaboration with Anne Pajunen and Gabriel Schenker, Alexandra Bachzetsis investigates the communication from performance existing as documentation to the live interpretation of it. The owned or borrowed movement material is shared, trained and passed on from performer to performer, with the aim of mastering the adopted movements to the point where the pretending is no longer obvious; rather, it becomes a complete embodiment of a desired identity at a given moment in time.
Bachzetsis’s interest lies in the unification and interplay of the theatre space, as the place for live arts, and the museum space, the location for visual arts, as parallel institutional mechanisms, both enhancing and maintaining power within the social body. This consolidation results in the emergence of a third space, bound to a durational live experience of the performance, transformed through the architecture of exhibition and vice versa. This new performance draws on Bachzetsis’s ongoing interest in the codes that govern gestures in both everyday life and on stage.
Alexandra Bachzetsis lives and works in Basel and Zurich. She is an artist and choreographer whose practice spans performance, theatre, dance and visual arts. In particular her work creates an inquiry into the similar influence between gesture and movement in 'low' genres such as romantic comedy or hip-hop music videos and in high art forms such as ballet and performance. Her performances also question stereotypical representations of the female body in contemporary popular culture. Typical gendered clichés become tools of self-reflection and empowerment. Bachzetsis has been working independently, producing and presenting her work in theatres and contemporary art venues since 2003.
Recent works as choreographer and performer include Mainstream (in collaboration with Yan Duyvendak, Zürich 2007), ACT (in collaboration with Lies Vanborm and Tina Bleuler, Dresden 2007). This side up (single-channel video and text print in collaboration with Julia Born, London, 2007), Soirée (in collaboration with Lies Vanborm and Tina Bleuler, Zurich, 2008), Dream Season (Zurich, 2008), Dancing (with participation of students of Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam 2009), Bluff (Zurich, 2009), Rehearsal (Ongoing) (two-channel video, Glarus, 2010) and A Piece Danced Alone (Zurich, 2011). In 2007, Bachzetsis received the Migros Kulturprozent Jubilee Award. In that same year she co-founded the artists collective Company together with Lies Vanborm and Tina Bleuler. In 2008 she took part in the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art and had a major solo exhibition SHOW, curated by Adam Szymczyk at the Kunsthalle Basel, where she premiered a new performance Dream Season. She won the Swiss Art Award 2011 and was nominated for the DESTE Prize 2011 in Athens, Greece. In 2012 she won the Swiss Performance Prize and her work Etude was included in dOCUMENTA (13 ), Kassel 2012 and The Stages of Staging, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 2013.
Performance
Audiences are invited to enter the online BMW Tate Live Performance Room via www.youtube.com/user/tate/tatelive at 20.00 in the UK and exactly the same moment across time zones on the specified times:
15.00 on the East Coast of America
21.00 in mainland Europe
23.00 in Russia
Live Q&A
The global online audience are encouraged to chat with other viewers via social media channels during the performance and to put questions to the artist or curator for the live Q&A following, using their Twitter, Facebook or Google+ accounts. The latest updates will be available by following @TateLive using #BMWTateLive, Tate Facebook or Tate Google+.
Credits
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 Management: Anna Geering
Commissioned by: Tate Modern, Centre D'Art Contemporain Geneva and Fondacion Jumex Arte Contemporaneo
Coproduced by Theatre Kaserne Basel and Theaterhaus Gessnerallee Zürich
Supported by Stadt Zürich Kultur, Kanton Basel-Landschaft, Kanton Basel-Stadt, Pro Helvetia - Schweizer Kulturstiftung
BMW Tate Live is curated by Catherine Wood, Curator, Contemporary Art and Performance, Tate and Capucine Perrot, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern.
BMW Tate Live is a partnership between BMW and Tate, which focuses on performance, interdisciplinary art and curating digital space.