Performance
Work Body
Michael Turinsky (Vienna)
Duration: approx. 85 min.
Language: English and Italian (with German and English subtitles)
Audience: 16 years and over
Sensory stimuli: loud music / noises, use of stage fog (haze)
About the Performance
Work Body is inspired by Pier Pasolini’s poem “Gramsci’s Ashes” which was dedicated to the co-founder of the Italian Communist Party Antonio Gramsci, who was also physically disabled. Turinsky uses Pasolini’s sensual and intellectual homage to the Marxist philosopher in Work Body to find an answer as to why there has been a general shift to the right in the working-class milieu that is permeated by fantasies of masculinity.
Gramsci always emphasized the “the authentic core,” i.e., the buonsenso (good sense) in proletarian experience. What about the latent longing to live autonomously and associate with one’s own kind? What about the erotic—but also narcissistic—undertones of camaraderie and brotherhood? And how does communist desire relate to sexual desire?
Through building, singing, speaking, dancing –in defiance of the capitalist division of labor– Turinsky not only subverts the divisions between mental and manual labor, but also the boundaries between choreographic intervention, concert, and political agitation. Work Body creates a space for resonances between the “disabled” and “working” body, thus shifting the physicalities that are usually pushed to the margins of representation to the center of our attention.
About the Artist:
Michael Turinsky is a Vienna-based, physically disabled artist and theoretician working at the intersection of contemporary dance and performance, disability, as well as political/aesthetic theory.
After studying philosophy at the University of Vienna, Michael began diving into the world of inclusive dance in 2006. Later, he started questioning the use of the term ‘inclusion’ and developed his own term “Crip Choreography” to describe his unique artistic practice of engaging the specific, resistant materiality of the body in processes that subvert, de-organize and re-organize dominant forms and qualities of movement.
His solo work Precarious Moves was awarded the prestigious Nestroy Prize for the best off-production in 2021. In 2023, the Austrian Ministry of Arts and Culture bestowed him with the “Outstanding Artist” award.
Cast & Credits:
Concept, choreography, text, performance: Michael Turinsky
Musik, lyrics, performance: Tian Rotteveel
Set design, costumes: Jenny Schleif
Light design: Max Rux
Dramaturgical consulting: Chris Standfest
Artistic assistant: Liv Schellander
Production manager: Anna Gräsel
With the support of the Department of Culture of Vienna and the Federal Ministry for Art, Culture, Media and Sport (Rep. of Austria).
Photos © Loizenbauer