Instinctive Gestures: An Interview of Alexandra Bachzetsis

text by Summer Bowie 

In utero, all of our body’s desires are met by the host body we inhabit. Upon our emergence into the world, we find ourselves still dependent on this body that we cannot yet distinguish as separate from our own. When we suckle our mother’s breast, a hormone called cholecystokinin is released into the intestine, which is responsible for satiety and sleepiness. Without it, we feel a novel, existential pain called hunger. And when its reserves are particularly low, our eyebrows turn red, our fists clench, and finally we discover our voice. Our bodies communicate their desires to our mothers as a mechanism of the survival instinct that we depend upon until we are capable of verbalizing them. This basic, primal lexicon that defies cultural distinctions is one aspect of Bachzetsis’ practice that I find most compelling. Conversely, her investigations into the gendered gaze, the performance of identity, and the appropriation of gesture give the work a fractalized complexity that exponentially opens new windows of inquiry into the kaleidoscope of human impulse.

SUMMER BOWIE You're both a visual and a movement artist. How did you know that both these mediums would be the basis of your career? 

ALEXANDRA BACHZETSIS I have been a dancer since I was a child. It was always my first passion. To respond with the body is super instinctive. It’s what you learn from childhood—even people who are not performing artists respond with their bodies. At the same time, I was starting to draw a lot. I studied visual arts in high school. But dance was always there simultaneously. 

BOWIE And you play a lot with different forms of movement that are not often viewed on the proscenium stage: folk dance, athletic movement, very pedestrian movement. Where did your training get started? 

BACHZETSIS I started with classical ballet at around four years old. I trained a lot in acrobatics, and I went to a physical theater school that was very circus focused. In the beginning, I wasn’t so sure how my career would evolve. But I felt like the contemporary dance field was more open for change than the contemporary circus field at that time. In contemporary dance, I could integrate different themes, physicalities, and body practices. My own practice has been equally situated in the visual art context and the theater context from the beginning. I focus on what the piece is about or where the research of the work leads to. I'm particularly obsessed with where movement comes from—which gestures are inherited versus those trained and learned. I was always interested in the legacies of the radical performance artists from the ’60s and ’70s, such as Yvonne Rainer, Yoko Ono, Trisha Brown, Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, Simone Forti, Bruce Nauman, and Bob Fosse.

BOWIE Postmodernists like Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti were so adamantly anti-virtuosic—yet you tend to incorporate both virtuosic and pedestrian movement so fluidly.

BACHZETSIS When I started professionally dancing in the mid-90s, most contemporary choreographers and performers worked around the idea of rejecting dance. It was all about thinking before you move. That slightly forced cerebral approach made me realize there were other modes of expression necessary to integrate into a dance practice. I wanted to free myself from the dominant mood of that time. I started to investigate more passionate or lustful journeys of adapting movement, being physical, or thinking of physicality in general. My first solo piece, entitled Perfect, was both an attempt at virtuosity and abandoning virtuosity at the same time. In this piece, I formulate a loop of excessive fitness routines borrowed from gestures belonging to the ballet vocabulary, the fitness studio routines, the kung fu practice, the disco dance floor, the catwalk, and the rehearsal studio. As I repeat each section, the movements evolve and transform slightly, almost an invisible accumulation of gestures and attitudes. In the rigor of things, transformation can take place. In 2001, for Perfect, I was looking at how the virtuosic could be combined with questions of emotionality and physical endurance. But I was also attempting to formulate a score for female empowerment, working through the blood-sweat-and-tears nature of show business and the construction of the perfected image of a body, toward a different, more daily gestured version of self.

BOWIE Your use of repetition, or accumulation, and the connection you draw between automatism and eroticism is really interesting. 

BACHZETSIS I always wonder why certain genres or types of dance are judged inferior. Why is ballet praised while pole dancing, or stripping, is considered vulgar? What I do is try to balance these disparate dance practices by appropriating them, studying them, training in them, repeating them infinitely, and making them my own. So, for instance, the erotic of stripping becomes very physical, almost acrobatic, while the grace of ballet loses its idea of sublime in the gradual deconstruction. 

BOWIE Right, these hierarchies are sort of arbitrary, but they don't come from the movements themselves. 

BACHZETSIS No, they come from the history of Western culture and judgmental Western society.

BOWIE I want to talk about the formation and expression of desire. You talk a lot about the way that our desires are a product of social conditioning. How do we know which aspects of our desires are unique to us as individuals, and which ones are a product of conditioning? 

BACHZETSIS Maybe it's interesting to think about motherhood—when you have to feed a child. We come into the world hungry. The biggest desire is to feed and to survive. At the same time, young children are eager to get in trouble and throw themselves out of windows (laughs). As a mother, you must constantly figure out how to save these humans from killing themselves. So, it's a paradoxical function you undergo as a woman: having your own agency and then having to be there for someone else. And I feel those questions are very much related to the primer of desire: how do I shape codependency and become something for somebody else to exist? My whole performance practice is like that. I can’t perform without an audience, and an audience will receive nothing without me. There is also this feeding on what you need in order to construct this idea of desire. For me, these impulses are instinctive. 

BOWIE You explore this a lot in the piece, Private: Wear a mask when you talk to me, which you did in 2015, before Covid. 

BACHZETSIS That piece I created in dialogue with Paul B. Preciado. We were asking questions about privacy and exposure, the appropriation of other bodies, and the performance of masculinity. It also went into how others see you—not the way you are, but the way they imagine you. The title is also related to intimacy: how can we truly be addressed, or address someone else, maybe not when being exactly oneself, but an idea of the self in the eyes of the other? 

BOWIE You work with a lot of popular music and costumes that harken popular archetypes, but then you establish a sort of individualized dialect with the movement. Would you say that this individualized flourish is our most honest expression of individuality?

BACHZETSIS Context is everything when it comes to the flourish. When something makes sense, it usually has to do with who is listening, who is watching, and who the dialogue partners are. These elements are in a certain dynamic with one and another. I don't feel we can think of ourselves as individuals with a singular pleasure—it's a singular pleasure rehearsed with another individual. 

BOWIE You've worked a lot with Paul B. Preciado. How was that relationship established?

BACHZETSIS Adam Szymczyk, the artistic director of documenta 14 invited Paul to curate the public programs for Athens and Kassel, and Paul was also assigned to me as research curator for the work I was developing for the exhibition in both cities. That’s when we started working on the diptych, Private: Wear a mask when you talk to me, and Private Song. Later, we continued the collaboration for Escape Act. For that piece, Paul offered me a poem as a score entitled Love is a Drone. He generated this poem in dialogue with an artificial intelligence. I used the poem, an excessive pornographic vocabulary culled from the internet, in alphabetic order, to create and rearrange pop songs and rap songs that we reformulated, staged, and performed during the performance. 

BOWIE Escape Act very interestingly addresses identity and the way that we can feel caged by our identities—particularly the way people project an identity onto us. Have you found that this is something you struggle with? Or is that something you feel confined by? 

BACHZETSIS I struggle with a permanent judgment and interpretation by other people of my persona and my background. Growing up with a mixed cultural background has been quite a strange journey of feeling othered because of your origins and looks, and feeling exposed as exotic fetish simultaneously. The fact of being a woman, identifying as such, being super feminine, but also at the same time very athletic and physical in a liberated manner that is conventionally reserved for men, triggers a lot of criticism, sexual patronizing phantasies, and jealous adoration in people.

There are all these conditions of entrapment that society puts on the body. Desire gets commodified in multiple ways. First, it’s the status, the looks and the attitude, then the talent and the knowledge, and finally the function and duty. As a woman who isn’t forever twenty-five, as an artist and as a mother, I do get a lot of irritating comments about my still existing physical practice and my intense stage choreographies. As if one represents a threat to society when enduring a physical practice. In my work, I formulate identity as a playground of possibilities for a different future. A possibility for freedom of expression, freedom of body, freedom to touch.

BOWIE Dorota Sajewska wrote about your work, saying, “The body becomes a physical archive of other bodies.” Do you think that muscle memory is an instinct that functions as a way of archiving that which is most ephemeral? 

BACHZETSIS Yvonne Rainer in her best-known dance, Trio A (1966), explores a simultaneous performance by three dancers that included a difficult series of circular and spiral movements. It was widely adapted and interpreted by other choreographers. Muscle memory, or physical memory, is crucial while dancing. It’s also very interesting how it conditions the movement patterns in relation to an architectural space and how architecture is perceived through the visiting or inhabiting body. Dance happens where bodies remember how to perform in space. If you revisit a space later, your body may not remember, but as soon as you put your body into the space, into the same conditions, and sometimes even the same angle, you immediately understand what it was. So, there is something like body memory for sure, which is intelligent and hidden; we don’t rationally understand it. These are interesting problems that are related to dance. When you train your whole life to remember steps or to remember how to evoke and affect emotion, or how to present a certain repetition of a theme, and those emotional landscapes are not forgotten—you carry them with you. 

BOWIE Can you talk a little bit about the contradiction between intuition and gesture as it was explored in your piece 2020: Obscene?

BACHZETSIS This piece works with explicit language, explicit gestures, explicit violence, explicit erotic tension and beauty, and exaggerated male and female roles. And it asks questions about archetypical behaviors, gestures, and patterns, which are recurring elements in the history of body. The performers in the piece do everything intuitively as themselves, working on specific characteristics as elements of language, not so much on construction of a particular character. It's this game of going in and out of characters that makes the performer intuitively feel what is needed and how much of what to offer. So, it's a very demanding score—you must physically and emotionally engage fully all the time; yet at the same time, you're never playing a role. 

BOWIE Working with those extremes, do you find that you need to establish boundaries, or safe words, with your actors when they work together? Or is there a certain level of trust established? 

BACHZETSIS We did not have safe words, but if people did not feel good about something, we talked about it. If people wanted to leave the project, they were free to do so. A lot of the current dogma of political correctness and having a safe space everywhere you go is a little bit problematic for freedom of artistic practice. Where can we still be physical, or ourselves, or work out tensions that are necessary regarding the expression of extreme states? From the beginning of the research, Dorota Sajewska, the dramaturge and I were very open and transparent with the performers. We told them we were interested in questions of violence and obscenity. As a performer, you need to be determined and know that this is the aim for the performance—that what you do on stage is performative in public, not private, yet you work with your own private access to questions of obscenity and violence. We also looked at obscenity in sculpture, painting and film—for instance in the work of Hans Bellmer, who created a mechanical doll in the shape of a girl, with ball joints in its limbs, as a substitute for the human body that he could use as model in photographs and drawings, performing it and living with it. This was a fascinating part of the research while looking for excessive body practices and how they have been represented. The dialogue on these sensitive topics is important through the experience of staging them, interpreting rather than canceling ideas beforehand. Humans are individuals and each of us has different types of boundaries. There isn’t a rule that works for all of us. It’s important to keep the conversation about taboos and rules open.

BOWIE Many folk dances are embedded with gendered social cues, like Hula, for example—the women are supposed to keep their feet together as a gesture of modesty and the men maintain a wide, powerful stance. On a more contemporary level, it’s not so prescriptive, but it’s there, and you play with this a lot. 

BACHZETSIS I was very fascinated with the research of a German artist and writer Marianne Wex. She was a feminist, social anthropologist of sort, and made an important publication called Lets Take Back Our Space (1979). It's an amazing anthology of photographs and comments on behavior and gestures in public space. Her intention was to undo the patriarchal structures by showing and presenting male gestures, like manspreading, which take up much more space than female gestures. I use the vocabulary she nailed down often in my work. For instance, what's classically in the male wardrobe and what's in the female wardrobe, and how can we create tension with one or the other? 

BOWIE That's very evident in the scene in Private: Wear a mask when you talk to me where you are in this skin-tight black latex dress with your high ponytail and dramatic makeup dancing to “This Is a Man’s World.” Both the costuming and opening movements are hyper-feminized in accordance with the male gaze. Then, you hike up your dress and start doing pushups, which is so masculine under the male gaze. 

BACHZETSIS When I perform, I focus on my own relationship with the gaze. What's my gaze on the body? What's the female, or the male gaze, and that of the audience watching me? There is often this reversed aggression, or a question of violence, in the construction of the gaze. When we see someone, what do we want to see in this person? What do we want to get out of the person? That's completely what I focus on. Why do we expose ourselves to be observed or create scores on social media for social exposure in a kind of of mental collective stripping?

BOWIE Your piece, An Ideal for Living asks questions about stealing and inventing gestures. Do you feel like you've ever stolen a gesture, or do you feel like you'll ever invent one? 

BACHZETSIS First ideas or gestures are difficult to trace back in the construction of body language. How are they produced or invented? What are your references or how do these references change as time goes by? I think this is a recurring theme: the analysis of the time you live in. And how do you establish a language that you work with—one that becomes your own language? I don’t have the pressure of having to invent something unique as much as I try to create a set of questions that allow for experimentation. There’s an emphasis on practice. I think appropriation is something that happens to all of us all the time. It can become a very political conversation, especially when it comes to cultural appropriation. At the same time, I think all performativity is an appropriation of something that exists, because how can you produce something new if you don’t appropriate what is there? It would mean the complete death of performance if appropriation wasn’t allowed. In order to work on the construction of a new language or different ideas of a future, the historical dimension must be explored first. It’s in evolving through what is established and through what we experience that we can become other.

BOWIE It’s difficult to know where the lines should be drawn in that regard. It often feels like we’re all just following each other's cues on what we find permissible? 

BACHZETSIS It’s important to figure out individual statements and individual language in the present era of political control and internalized habits of self-control. It’s crucial to explore ways of formulating some kind of personal freedom that transgresses collectivity. I feel like it’s necessary to look into particular situations, individual cases, specific questions of appropriation, and how these can become a language—a sensitive language, a common language, an outrageous language that can break walls.

BOWIE It also comes back to why we instinctively feel compelled to appropriate something. Why do we choose various gestures or archetypes to play with?

BACHZETSIS There is always this connecting of elements between differences, or between diverse forms of otherness. What makes people feel other, or why are they excluded because of being other? What's integrating otherness and what's excluding otherness? And I feel appropriation, per se, is not necessarily exclusive. It could also mean making people part of something, together. And at the same time, there is this question of where these elements start to work together or against each other. And that's why I think it's important to stay open there—to maintain a space for interpretation. 

Rebuilding the Model: An Interview of Contemporary Choreographer Chris Bordenave

 

text by Summer Bowie

 

How could anybody forget Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings of Loie Fuller at the Folies Bergère, or Picasso’s myriad costumes and set designs for the Ballets Russes? Even if they've become less household over the years, those images made an indelible mark on mainstream society. Then there's the almost completely forgotten gems, like the stage set that Jasper Johns created for Merce Cunningham’s Walkaround Time, a pastiche of images from Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped By Her Bachelor’s” in clear plastic pillows. The 20th century offered a spoil of fantastic collaborations between the visual and performing arts: Eadweard Muybridge’s iconic photos of Isadora Duncan, Léon Bakst’s costumes and set design for Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun, or Isamu Noguchi’s set for Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring  – just to name a few. Unfortunately, I find myself hard-pressed to find any similar contemporary examples, which is why I was so pleasantly surprised to discover Chris Bordenave.

A classically trained, multi-disciplinary choreographer, who is one of the 3 founding members of a dance company called No)one. Art House., Bordenave has recently been working with a number of musical artists, such as Anderson Paak, Mayer Hawthorne, and more recently Solange and Kelela. He has also been creating site-specific works for institutions such as the California African American Museum, Hauser + Wirth, and Solange’s SAINT HERON House. I caught up with the young choreographer at the Annenberg Beach House, one beautiful autumn day, where he was rehearsing. We discussed his early training, the current state of dance affairs, and dance’s ceremonious relationship to visual art. Whether this current century will bear witness to dance and art finally renewing their vows is still a mystery, but if it is the case, Bordenave is one choreographer making a clear gesture that he's ready to meet in the middle.

SUMMER BOWIE: I want to start by asking you about your performance this past weekend at the Hollywood Bowl with Solange, how did it go?

CHRIS BORDENAVE: It was good. She brought me on to help with coordinating the additional performers that she had. She had twelve or fourteen extra horn players and she had a full string arrangement. I was just helping out with getting their choreography and their entrances and exits together. Just kind of helping out with whatever else she needed.

BOWIE: Is that your first time choreographing musicians in their movements, or is that something you’ve been doing?

BORDENAVE: I’ve been doing it. I’ve worked with Mayer Hawthorne, Anderson Paak, Empress Of, and a few other artists, just choreographing them in music videos. It was my first time doing a live performance — actually no that’s not true, I did Anderson Paak on the Ellen Show.

BOWIE: What are you rehearsing for right now?

BORDENAVE: Right now we are doing a performance at the Bootleg Theater. It’s going to be me with a vocalist and she made some songs out of these old black poems about the Great Migration. So this performance is one man’s journey through these songs, dance, theater, and projection mapping. It’s about their experiences moving from the South to the North during that time, what they went through, and how layered the experience is.



BOWIE: Since founding No)One. Art House, you’ve been performing and collaborating with a wide range of musical artists and art institutions. Is that bridge between musically driven work and performance-art driven dance what you were originally aiming for with No)One.?

BORDENAVE: Yeah, we knew that we wanted to educate and also challenge audiences in LA, because LA is a bit new to concert dance. We figured bringing it physically closer to the audience would impact them a bit more. Doing it inside of a proscenium stage doesn’t really connect, especially with contemporary dance. So, we found that when we do it in galleries, or unconventional spaces where we can physically get closer to the audience. They feel more connected to the work.

BOWIE: On the music side, you’ve been working with everyone from Solange, to Kelela, to Mayer Hawthorne, to Anderson Paak. How do you approach those kinds of commissions from a choreographic perspective?

BORDENAVE: First it goes off of their original vision. Right now I’m working with Kelela, and it’s nice to be working with her at this point because it’s really the first time she’s headlining shows, and it’s going to be her first album. It’s kind of a new arrangement for her, it’s very fresh and very new. So, it’s nice because I’m able to bring my concert dance art sensibility to this kind of commercial, mainstream element.

BOWIE: On the art side, you’re going to be presenting work at Hauser & Wirth in LA, the California African American Museum, and the SAINT HERON house. Does your approach change dramatically in accordance with the different types of venues that commission you?

BORDENAVE: Totally, it’s all about the space. It doesn’t really benefit anyone if we keep doing the same thing in different spaces. We want people to feel connected. We want them to feel like they are the work, that their role is as vital as that of the performers.

BOWIE: So, let’s go back to the beginning, you started dancing when you were about nine. What was your training like at that age?

BORDENAVE: I started at the Lula Washington Dance Theatre here in LA, and we did a lot of modern, African, jazz, and hip hop. Kind of everything, she wanted us to have a lot of tools under our belts so that we could work and do whatever we were asked to do. Then I went to the Debbie Allen Dance Academy once she opened up her school. When I graduated from high school, I moved to New York and went to the Ailey school, then I graduated from the LINES Ballet BFA program in San Francisco.

BOWIE: So you went to Ailey then came over to Alonzo King and finished your education?

BORDENAVE: Right. I was part of the inaugural class for their joint program with Dominican University. That was mainly contemporary ballet and I danced with the LINES company for a little bit after I graduated. Afterwards, I danced with Morphosis in New York, and then Luna Negra in Chicago. I moved back here because the state of affairs with dance companies in this country is failing. A lot of the most prominent contemporary dance companies have closed because people don’t care anymore about dance and they don’t want to give money to it. I basically started this new company with some friends as a way of rebuilding the model, because the old model clearly isn’t working. We thought that LA would be ideal, not only because it’s our home, but because it doesn’t really exist here. There’s definitely a void, but concert dance in LA is quickly becoming more popular.

BOWIE: It seems like your dance practice itself has been moving stylistically as well as geographically. From the examples you just gave, you’ve gone from ballet, to latin-based contemporary, to contemporary, to gaga-based movement…and I’m sure you’ve done a whole wealth of work in between. Would you say there’s a single motivating factor behind your overall trajectory?

BORDENAVE: The direction. It was always really important for me to work for someone who I knew could change a dancer. Every time I would go and see LINES, I had no idea how the dancers were doing it. I wanted to learn from whoever was directing. Gustavo Ramirez Sansano (who took over Luna Negra before it closed), he really trained me how to dance and how to work with different choreographers; to not only be true to what they’re doing, but also to be true to myself.

BOWIE: When we look at dance history, at least from a Western perspective, dance and fine art really developed in tandem, especially over the 20th century from the avant-garde movement, to modern, and finally the postmodern movement. Then we get to contemporary, and it seems like contemporary art has gone in a very conceptual direction and contemporary dance has been very commercially driven. Do you have any theories as to why that phenomenon may be occurring?

BORDENAVE: I think contemporary jazz dance has gone commercial for sure. But true contemporary dance, I wouldn’t say that it’s gone commercial quite yet. I think people just get confused about the differences between the genres. A lot of people think what they’re doing on So You Think You Can Dance? is contemporary dance, and it’s not. It’s contemporary jazz dance, which is very different. A big aim for me, and the reason why I always try to perform in these fine art institutions, is because that’s the only way that people will understand it’s at the same level as fine art, as visual art. In this country, unless you’re doing ballet or commercial dance, there’s no funding. The level of what you’re seeing on stage is usually very basic because the funding isn’t there. But when you go to Europe or when contemporary companies tour here, you see the scale is so large, and so much more than what we’re doing here. It’s sad that we have to bring outside companies from around the world to show us what the next level of dance is.

BOWIE: Do you think that academically, our institutions are doing justice by American dancers?

BORDENAVE: No! I’ve found that the institutions that have dance programs usually keep the same faculty for decades. Decades upon decades upon decades. People who have not worked, people who have not been in the field for years. So, of course, if you have this outdated information that you keep perpetuating to your students, they’re not going to know what’s going on. I would say there are about four conservatory programs in this country that can compete with companies outside the U.S.

BOWIE: Which would you say those four are?

BORDENAVE: I would say they are USC, Juilliard, San Francisco Conservatory, and SUNY Purchase… and LINES. So, five.

BOWIE: Do you have any predictions for what the future of dance will look like, both academically and commercially?

BORDENAVE: I think people are starting to wake up to contemporary dance for sure. It’s becoming more prevalent with people like Ryan Heffington. They’re bringing it into fashion and music videos and to film. There’s definitely a slow progression, it’ just... slow.

BOWIE: What do you think is the most valuable lesson you’ve learned as a performer?

BORDENAVE: That it’s important to see dance, to see all forms of art, to let it inform you, to be influenced, and also to copy. I feel like I’ve only been able to be so versatile because I’ve been able to really observe and listen and then copy and then let it influence my work. People are always scared like, “Oh no, I can’t be like them.” But Michael Jackson stole the moonwalk. All these influential people steal. Beyoncé steals... she does. It is a form of flattery. I don’t see why people get so upset when Beyoncé steals their work. Their work would never have been seen by that many people unless someone like her was to do it. Of course, there’s artistic integrity and all of that, but I still think that there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s okay.

BOWIE: Finally, I feel like we see a lot of young people who’ve fallen in love with dancing but then they don’t know how to continue the practice as adults. Do you have any advice for young adults who struggle with feeding that passion?

BORDENAVE: That’s a great question. As soon as I moved back here, people came up to me like, “Oh are you still dancing?” You know, of course. It’s what I am. It just goes back to arts education. I know USC is definitely teaching them the business side of it, because that’s a reality. Especially now with social media, you have to be able to market yourself. You have to be able to know what you look like, what to post, you have to know the avenues you can go down. You can be an arts manager, you can be a publicist, you can be a gallerist, you can do so many things within the art world even if you’re not the one performing or creating the work. I taught myself how to curate, how to reach out to magazines, how to do all of these things just by seeing what other people are doing and trying. I think it’s important to know that you can’t just dance anymore. You have to be able to promote yourself, promote your work, promote every aspect of what you’re doing. Even if you’re not that good.



No)one. Art House will be performing at 8pm November 9 at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, as well as 7-9pm December 19 at the California African American Museum. Follow Chris Bordenave on Instagram @chrisemile, follow No)one. Arthouse @no_one.arthouse, follow AUTRE @autremagazine. Look out for this interview, as well as interviews with Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Varda, Harmony Korine, Judith Bernstein and many more in the Winter 2017 issue of AUTRE. Available for pre-order now! This is a limited-edition issue, get your copy while supplies last!