PRECARIOUS MOVES

How does a body set itself in motion where the relation between the body and what surrounds it appears to be a fundamentally precarious, vulnerable relation, a relation that is all too easily thrown off balance and in which we sometimes encounter visible or invisible boundaries?

In Precarious Moves Michael Turinsky continues his investigation of resistant choreographic gestures through designing choreo-political aesthetics.

At the centre of the solo, which is as much biographical as conceptual, lies the questioning of both his very own personal as well as urgent collective needs and necessities with regard to mobility and mobilization, pertinent as they are especially within in the tension between movement and environment, gesture and milieu.

Including the experience of disability in his singularity, Turinsky once again ties in with the concept of crip time, in a revolt against the imperative of the integration of disabled or any body into the systemic regimes of the existing hegemonic cultures mobility and mobilization, without, however, ignoring both his own as well as collective real and thus also ambivalent needs between speed and/or slowness.

Oscillating between the organic and the organized, Precarious Moves unfolds as a sometimes light and sometimes dark exploration of that strange loop that connects the body with the sensual world through which it moves; as a searching movement in which the untamed gesture discovers its choreographic milieu, and at the same time opens our sensitivity beyond the same.

PERFORMANCE / CHOREOGRAPHY / TEXT / LYRICS: Michael Turinsky
MUSIC / LYRICS: Tian Rotteveel
STAGE / COSTUME: Jenny Schleif
LIGHT: Sveta Schwin
PHOTO / VIDEO: Michael Loizenbauer
DRAMATURGICAL ADVICE: Gabrielle Cram
PRODUCTION: Anna Gräsel, Michael Turinsky – Verein für philosophische Praxis
COPRODUCTION: Tanzquartier Wien, HAU Hebbel am Ufer
SUPPORTED BY: Stadt Wien, BMKOES
DURATION: about 70 minutes
SUBTITLES: The performance has English and Croatian subtitles.

The performance in Zagreb is produced by Divert and coproduced by the Zagreb Youth Theatre.

Michael Turinsky is a Vienna-based, physically disabled artist and theoretician, working at the intersection of contemporary dance and performance, disability, and political as well as aesthetic theory.

Academically trained as a philosopher at the University of Vienna, Michael began diving into the world of inclusive dance in 2006. Later questioning the notion of inclusion, Michael later coined his own term “crip choreography” to designate his unique artistic practice of engaging the specific, resistant materiality of the body in processes of subverting, de-organizing and re-organizing dominant forms and qualities of movement.

Recently, he has also become interested in what fellow disabled artists have termed the “aesthetics of access”, as well as in exploring the intricate relationship between dance and ecology.