That back tells a story: from spine to dorsal muscles, a threshold where pre-social intensity collides with political structures. Swiss-Greek choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis composes universes of gestures—visible and invisible—on the premise that bodies can be regarded without reducing them to objects. She makes you look into the grids of classification that infiltrate bodily memory, exposure, and gestures that predate commodification are nevertheless reshaped by its logics. Authenticity and fiction are not her adversaries but accomplices, folded into one another. Presence itself becomes choreographic: a repertoire of tacitly acquired gestures that structures everyday being.
Bachzetsis occupies the liminal zones with choreography—entangling intimacy and spectacle, opacity and exposure, bleed into each other. Pop-cultural gestures—whether borrowed from fashion, social media, or music—are never ornamental to her choreography; they are integral archives of cultural codes, re-embodied and undone. Thus she often unfolds through what might be called strategic submission: a deliberate yielding to external frames—choreographic scores, musical rhythms, sartorial constraints—that paradoxically generate possibilities for resistance. In surrendering to imposed systems, new fissures of autonomy open up. By re-situating pop songs and fashion tropes, she exposes the power structures they reinforce, then inscribes a detached intentionality into their embodiment. In doing so, she shows how conscious emotion can revive an automation otherwise driven by power.
Fig. 1
Her solo Rush(es), presented at the Grand Palais in Paris, and featured in this issue, exemplifies this approach: a meditation on autofiction, autoeroticism, and autodocumentation. The work probes how desire is simultaneously constructed and dismantled by the dancing body. Through intense physicality, performer and audience are drawn into a heightened state of awareness—where sensual experience excavates the rational, and thought is folded into flesh.
The video work Rehearsal (Ongoing), shown most recently at Piktogram in Warsaw, extends this inquiry into the micro-choreographies of the everyday. The piece stages two hands—face absent, body withheld—meticulously picking, shifting, and rearranging objects on a table. Each attempt at order collides with resistance: some actions remain suspended, others achieve fragile completion. The work dismantles the fantasy of seamless control, exposing instead the persistence of disorder and the embodied labor of repetition as a feminist practice of endurance.
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Bachzetsis’s feminist legacy does not reside solely in the mesh of identity or sexuality but in her own methodology: in making visible the cultural and institutional forces that structure embodiment itself. In a world where identity and sexuality are exhausted by circulation and commodification, her work insists that transformation may still emerge through self-presentation enacted knowingly. Yet, every subject she stages remains alert to the conditions that make such enactment possible: access to platforms, visibility, and institutional recognition.
In this light, each of her performances opens up as a critical cartography of who is permitted to move, who is compelled to remain still, and under what circumstances. The question she poses is no longer “what can the body do?” but “who is allowed to move as they could, and on whose terms?”
- Image credits
Cover, Fig. 2: Alexandra Bachzetsis, Rush(es), 2025. produced with c/o bardi@care.of.bardi. © and courtesy of the artist. Photography by Estelle Hanania.
Fig. 1: Alexandra Bachzetsis, Rush(es), 2025, press image - A.B., photo Piotr Niepsuj.
