Mainstream

Aptly titled MAINSTREAM Alexandra Bachzetsis most recent collaborative performance project is an at times hilarious, fatalist tango.–It is also both artists most concerted effort to date at dismembering and reconstructing, mainstream cinema as the prime nexus of popular culture’s standard view of “gender trouble”. Clocking in just under an hour, MAINSTREAM presents the story – or rather, the starkly linear suggestion of a story – of a Man and a Woman: their meeting, courting, falling in love, making love, loving and living together, falling out of love, and final mutual destruction – all seen from the formulaic vantage point of mainstream movie plot thinking.

Bachzetsis and Duyvendak’s blatant exploitation of the narrative formulas for cinematic success is an obviously ironic affair; at the same time – in a pleasurable twist of ambiguity that has become typical of much of both artists work – however, it also shows them flirting with the actual possibility of definite mainstream success. This enables MAINSTREAM to operate both as a critical reflection on the tightly disciplined production of standard (i.e. normative) narrative forms, and as an authentic celebration of the artistic and emotional possibilities afforded by the performers’ enthusiastic identification with the roles prescribed by these forms.