UNDRESSED: ALEXANDRA BACHZETSIS UNPLUGGED

What, in the hieratic world of dance, gesture and performance, constitutes an event? What, in fact, is an event, period? According to French philosopher Alain Badiou, an event is an occurrence which transforms a given situation in such a way that a new world, so to speak, is born from it – events, in short, are life-altering by definition. No small wonder, then, that the rhetoric of the event has been such a powerful critical force in much recent art discourse: we naturally (for various reasons which must remain undisclosed for now) long to see our life altered, and this longing surely has played a major role in the establishment, throughout the last decade and a half, of audience participation-based practices in a wide array of fields of cultural production. “Undressed” is probably Alexandra Bachzetsis’ most far-reaching exploration into this minefield of genre-bending challenges to authorship, and it is striking that this experiment has produced an event which may at first seem so wholly underwhelming that we will probably only (much) later recognize it as an ‘event’ – in short, a ‘piece’ in which nothing seems to happen at all, certainly nothing in the way of traditional ‘movement’, if a recognizable sign language of body movements is what we expect from stage arts. The performance starts as the audience enters an empty white space or deserted black box – obviously an art environment: anything can happen here, and anything can be projected onto the white screen of the stage – in which only a DJ stands behind his decks, serving a brooding, bass-heavy cocktail of dance tracks that ooze aural innuendo. To the right and left sides of this pristine white cube we find bar tables stocked with sleek martini glasses, shaken not stirred – in short, it looks like we’re about to attend the opening of some sort of blue-chip conceptual art show. As the audience continues to swell, however, here and there we see people starting to strip. Ten seconds of confusion and possible irritation later, we see that they are not really stripping – exposure and nudity are of no real concern to their ‘performance’, and the dynamic tension of voyeurism and exhibitionism that is such a fertile force in much of Bachzetsis’ other work is conspicuously absent here – but merely undressing to exchange their clothes with someone else. And even though this bewildering ritual of soundless disrobing and identity-swapping is really the well-choreographed group performance of thirty volunteers who sneakily mingle with the regular crowd of onlookers, a magical whiff of contagion quickly turns the latter into participants: before we (they?) know it, we are all stripping down and swapping clothes in what truly constitutes a social event – an experience that will leave us literally altered, namely just having become ‘other’.