Work Body

The philosopher, choreographer and curator Michael Turinsky is one of the most important disabled movement thinkers in the German-speaking world. His brand new work 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.

The starting point for Michael Turinsky's brand new work is Pier Pasolini's poem ‘Le cenere di Gramsci’ (The Ashes of Gramsci) about the Marxist pioneer Antonio Gramsci. 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 opens up a space of resonance between disabled, working-class and homoerotic physicality and the sensualities associated with it.

Michael Turinsky is a Vienna-based physically disabled artist and theorist working at the intersection of contemporary dance and performance, disability as well as political and aesthetic theory. Academically trained as a philosopher at the University of Vienna, Michael began immersing himself in the world of inclusive dance in 2006. He later questioned the term of inclusion and coined his own term ‘Crip Choreography’ to describe his unique artistic practice, which deals with the specific, resistant materiality of the body in processes of subversion, de-organisation and re-organisation of dominant movement forms and qualities. His solo work ‘Precarious Moves’ was awarded the prestigious Nestroy Prize for Best Off-Production in 2021. In 2023 he was honoured as ‘Outstanding Artist’ by the Austrian Ministry of Culture.