Alexandra Bachzetsis b. 1974

Exhibitions
Works
Overview

Alexandra Bachzetsis is a choreographer and visual artist, based in Zurich (CH). Her practice unfolds at the intersection of dance, performance, the visual arts and theater, generating a conflation of the spaces in which the body, as an artistic and critical apparatus, can manifest. This fundamentally interdisciplinary approach is reflected in her educational background. She studied and graduated at the Zürcher Kunstgymnasium (CH), the Dimitrischule in Verscio (CH), the Performance Education Program at the STUK arts centre in Leuven (BE), and then continued to post-graduate level at Das Arts, the Advanced Research in Theatre and Dance Studies centre in Amsterdam (NL). During these years of training, Bachzetsis began to work as a dancer in the contemporary dance and performance context, collaborating with Sasha Waltz & Guests (Berlin) and Les Ballets C. de la B. (Gent), among others. Collaboration, transference and a plurality of voices and bodies have informed Bachzetsiswork ever since and is often thematized as a method of developing new work in her practice.

Biography

Much of Bachzetsiss work involves choreographies of the body, focusing on the ways in which popular culture provides source material for gesture, expression, identification, and desire as we continually create and re-create our bodies and the way we identify through them. Within this, she scrutinizes the mutual influence between the use of gesture and movement in “popular” or “commercial” genres on the one hand (online and social media, fashion, video-clips, television, etc.) and in the “arts” on the other hand (ballet, modern and contemporary dance, photography, performance, and so forth). For Bachzetsis, the relationship between these varying forms and genres produce an inquiry into the human body and its potential for transformation. Ultimately, the way we all perform and stage our bodies and ourselves – through stereotypes and archetypes, through choice and cliché, through labor and spectacle – is a question that continues to shape the work of Bachzetsis.