Alexandra Bachzetsis proposes a new “framing” in order to deconstruct traditional and contemporary cultural codes. Touching upon rebetiko (popular Greek music originating from migrants), she questions our relation to gender and bodies in representation. On a large checkerboard, three players attract, miss and intermingle to recompose an iconoclastic vision.
Art, like consciousness, suggests Jacques Derrida, depends on framing, on the “parergon.” From the border surrounding the painted canvas to the proscenium arch or the cinema frame, the “parergon” defines what can be seen. The frame, Derrida argues, upsets the notion that “aesthetic judgment must concern intrinsic beauty and not the around and about.” With three performers, Private Song re-frames some of the elements that were part of the solo performance Private: Wear a Mask When You Talk to Me. While the solo performance uses selfmutation as a technique to explore gender and cultural constructions through the ritualized repetition of embodied gesture, Private Song proposes framing as a perceptual strategy for questioning, underlining, or neutralizing the spectator’s relation to moving bodies on stage. Popular rebetiko songs from the 1940s and 1950s composed by Giannis Papaioannou, Vassilis Tsitsanis, and Giorgos Mitsakis are introduced within the piece – not as a narrative motive but as a means of juxtaposing the singular voices and codified gestures coming from oriental and modern dance as well as wrestling, Hollywood gender models, and the pictorial history of representations of love and battle.