Escape Act -  Alexandra Bachzetsis performance during the opening of An Ideal for Living

Alexandra Bachzetsis develops a work that explores the frontiers of dance, physical performance, visual arts and theater, exploring the body as a stage, a critical artistic apparatus, a place of transformation and finally as a means of communication. Bachzetsis is passionate about popular culture that she considers evocative and seductive, and in the worst of cases manipulative. She´s going to implement gestures, movements and dance styles, often related to musical genres, to express emotions.

An Ideal for Living, the exhibition that the artist specially conceived for Centre culturel suisse - Paris, forms part of her bodies exploration. The exhibition has also will give place to her dance piece called Escape Act, making use of various garments and accessories in a process of constructing imagination and desire, the artist explores ways in which bodies and objects are reversible. Bachzetsis draws inspiration from vogue culture—particularly as showcased in the 1991 documentary film Paris Is Burning—an urban dance style that emerged in Latino and African American transgender and gay communities, characterized by fashion poses and other codified movements.

Her exhibition comprises an installation of three simultaneous video projections in which a pair of teenagers, a boy and a girl with an uncanny resemblance, act out real-life situations and sing songs. The installation includes low platforms like mini-stages inviting exhibition-goers to strike poses or sing out loud, along with various gym equipment on which to warm up and shape up one’s body. It turns out that some of these objects, designed to protect against a danger or optimize certain physical exercises, are also liable to be used dangerously, even violently. This inherent ambiguity suggests the potentially subversive ambiguities of body language.