With DYS_FUNCTIONAL BODIES the Viennese choreographers and performers Michael Turinsky and Georg Blaschke invite for the first time to a focused confrontation of their personal approaches of their choreographic thinking and somatic practice.
Michael Turinsky: Based on my positionality as a disabled performer and on the consideration that compositional practice always occurs in the encounter of choreographer-body and performer-body, my choreographic practice departs from the specific materiality of my own body, its specific effect (agency), its relationship to space and time, to repetition and variation, to movement flow and its interruption. Thus, basic formal decisions always have to take into account the inherent formal tendencies of the material – and that means, first and foremost, the functional difference of the bodies involved. In other words, how can the impetus emanating from a body marked as "functionally different" be used in such a way that this "impetus" literally "in-forms" not only the basic choreographic structures, but also the kinaesthetic texture beyond the body's boundaries.
Georg Blaschke: Over the last few years, I have developed a form of sculptural thinking in my choreographic research, based on both, the practice of somatic methods – primarily the Feldenkrais method – and on phenomenological concepts of the visual arts. I am particularly interested in the following juxtapositions:
The fragmentation of movement versus the movement flow
The anatomically "normal" body image versus the image of the "distorted" or "extended" body
The duality of centre and periphery of the body versus the non-hierarchical sensitisation of body parts
The stability in the own skeleton versus the dynamic balance through touch of another body
These juxtapositions open up a field, which bodywork, partner work and choreographic research mutually influence and refine each other in recurring sequences.
Michael TurinskyGeorg Blaschke
