Michael Turinsky: Precarious Moves (2021)
Saturday, 23 November at 8:00 p.m.
solo dance performance
The Old Power Station
Duration: 75 min.
In Precarious Moves, choreographer and dancer Michael Turinsky exposes the critical modality of actions through »the tension between movement and environment, between gesture and milieu,« and in this way uses his own case study to articulate »urgent collective needs and necessities with regard to mobility and mobilisation.« He has participated at CoFestival twice already. The first time, with the solo Second Skin: Turn the Beat Around (2016), and in 2019, together with Doris Uhlich, he performed in the duet Ravemachine (2014). This year, he is bringing his solo Precarious Moves (2021) to CoFestival, the work which earned him the Nestroy Theatre Prize in 2021 for best non-institutional production in Austria.
Turinsky uses the circumstance of physical disability as a material and conceptual departure point to explore the boundaries that emerge between the body and the environment in cases of bodily mobility, and »continues his investigation of resistant choreographic positionings through designing political aesthetics.« The boundaries of different spaces and places only become entirely apparent when they are used and inhabited by different bodies with their own specific needs and characteristics. These questions perhaps seem contradictory in that they neutralise the normativity of such boundaries and potential political character with non-accountability.
In the past years, treatment of one’s own body, albeit always nurtured by the art of performance, has taken root in all popular literary genres of the so-called autofiction and theoretic self-treatment, which gives new methodological potentialities to the essay of the US feminist Carol Hanisch from 1969, dubbed The Personal Is Political. And the solo Precarious Moves in its sprawling position between »the organic and the organised (…) unveils the ironic and socially engaged nature of that strange loop that connects the body with the sensual world through which it moves,« in a searching movement in which »the untamed gesture discovers its choreographic milieu, and at the same time opens our sensitivity beyond the same.«
Performance, choreography, text, lyrics: Michael Turinsky
Music, lyrics: Tian Rotteveel
Set and costume design: Jenny Schleif
Lighting design: Sveta Schwin
Photo, video: Michael Loizenbauer
Dramaturgical advice: Gabrielle Cram
Production management: Anna Gräsel / groundworkers.at
Production: Michael Turinsky and Verein für philosophische Praxis
Co-production: Tanzquartier Wien, HAU Hebbel am Ufer
* Stroboscope is used in the performance.
*This performance is in English.
Organised by: Kino Šiška and NDA Slovenia in collaboration with Bunker
Supported by:
Michael Turinsky is supported by »DANCE ON TOUR AUSTRIA« – Tanzquartier Vienna project in collaboration with the Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs.