Etude

For some time, Alexandra Bachzetsis’s work has involved the exploration of pop and vernacular phenomena so as to render more clearly the subtle gestures, styles and attitudes, which define the contemporary persona – a persona which is perhaps most real and authentic in the moment of performance and mediation. The question, which lurks in the background of this research, is one of virtuosity: In a hyper-mediated world of borrowed styles, can we still consider virtuosity as a category of performance and presence?
Etude is a work, developed from observation, transcription and translation processes that the artist has devised to explore this question in depth. It involves five performers, musicians and dancers (Bachzetsis included), in developing a vocabulary of movements and attitudes performed together and in isolation. Repetition of minute details of behavior is doubly deployed – as a learning tool (in rehearsal) and dramatic device.
At times, evocative of the casual curiosity of Andy Warhol’s screen tests, in other instances, achieving a complex canon-structure of musical and dance solos, the entire performance attempts to make space for a kind of study in motion, where performers and audience – each in their own roles – achieve a fuller sense of self.
 
Text Monika Szewczyk