Michael Turinsky (AT)
Work Body

The relations of this production don’t get absorbed into the product, but stay on display instead: Michael Turinsky sets up his own stage, building a platform for his performance, then generously handing out canned beer before starting to chant each name of his production team into the mic. Inspired by Pasolini’s poem Gramsci’s Ashes, the Marxist filmmaker and author’s hymn to the physically disabled philosopher and communist politician, Turinsky’s Work Body is an exploration of today’s working class. Which concepts of masculinity and which dreams and desires govern the worker’s body, and do communist ideas of the past offer insights into its turn to the right? Without pessimism, the two-time Nestroy Prize winner – who is also disabled – develops gestures, words, images and an intensity that could be taken as a blueprint for a new way of understanding and communicating with the working class.