Work Body

by Michael Turinsky Solo-Performance about 85 min. Premiere: January 2025, Halle G, MQ Wien

Work Body is inspired by the poem ‘Le ceneri di Gramsci’ (The Ashes of Gramsci), which Pier Pasolini dedicated to Antonio Gramsci, the co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, who was also physically disabled. Turinsky uses Pasolini's sensual and intellectual homage to the Marxist thinker to find in Work Body an answer to the general shift to the right in the working-class milieu, which is permeated by fantasies of masculinity.

Gramsci always emphasised the ‘authentic core’, the ‘buon senso’ in the proletarian experience. What about the dormant longing to socialise autonomously and with one's own kind? What about the erotic, but also narcissistic undertones of comradeship and brotherhood? And how does communist desire relate to sexual desire?

Building, singing, speaking, dancing, transverse to the capitalistically organised division of labour, Turinsky not only subverts the separation of mental and manual labour, but also the boundaries between choreographic intervention, concert and political agitation. Work Body creates a space for resonances between the ‘disabled’ and ‘working’ body. Turinsky thus shifts the physicalities that are pushed to the margins of representation to the centre of our attention.

idea / choreography / text / performance   Michael Turinsky
music / lyrics / performance   Tian Rotteveel
stage / costume   Jenny Schleif
lightdesign   Max Rux
photo / video   Michael Loizenbauer
dramaturgical advice   Chris Standfest
artistic collaboration   Liv Schellander
production management   Anna Gräsel
duration about 85 minutes

a coproduction by   Michael Turinsky - Verein für philiosophische Praxis, Tanzquartier Wien, Theater RAMPE Stuttgart

supported by   the Municipal Department of Cultural Affairs, Vienna, and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sports