What might it mean, especially in regard to kinesthetics, to be a man and at the same time heteronomous through an absence?
Playfully shifting between the unique logic and functionality of the disabled body on the one side and the forces of the law of choreography and society on the other, fluctuating between eros and helplessness, between the position of a child and a grown man, oscillating between seriousness and irony, between sensuality and intellectuality, heteronomous male investigates the fundamental, identity-determining axes of the field on which I as a disabled man and dancer move.
Departing from reflections on contemporary political economy (Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt), political philosophy and aesthetics (Giorgio Agamben, Sibylle Krämer, Paul de Man), performance theory (André Lepecki) and even the poetics of Rainer Maria Rilke, Michael Turinsky develops theses on the political ontology of inclusive dance as a practice of aesthetic intervention in the prevailing paradigm of immaterial labor as well as the associated submission and the displacement of the materiality of the bodies into invisibility:
“We are confronted with a social imperative that dictates a movement to the bodies, in which the bodies themselves in their materiality stay as ‘invisible’ as possible so that the processes of (mostly affective) transmission are free of any disruption.”
“As a political practice sui generis, inclusive dance practice frees impaired bodies from their submission to certain objectives, frees impaired bodies from their submission to the principle of noise-free, transparent transmission, elevates their specific mediality, their opaque materiality, to the status of a value in itself and presents disabled bodies in this specific opaque mediality by way of a faltering and breaking of the flow of movement. Inclusive dance is stumbling gesture.”
“Inclusive dance (is) therefore always a staging of the entire affective self and world relation of disabled and non-disabled people denoted in a specific ‘theme’. It is a staging of the historical co-existence of disabled and non-disabled bodies that is spun in a particular manner and denoted in a certain choreographic ‘subject’.”(Excerpts from the essay “Stumbling Gestures – About a Political Ontology of Inclusive Dance”, published in gift – zeitschrift für freies theater 02/2010, S. 51 – 55)
CREDITS
choreography / dance/ stage / text Michael Turinsky
music Ben Frost
costume Devi Saha
production management Angela Vadori // groundworkers.at
production Verein für Philosophische Praxis
supported by TANZ*HOTEL, M.A.P. Vienna, MA 7 Wien Kultur.