Conversation between Michael Turinsky and Kerstin Schroth about Work Body

Work Body draws inspiration from Pasolini’s poem “Le ceneri di Gramsci” (The Ashes of Gramsci). Could you share how Pasolini’s homage to Gramsci shaped the narrative of your performance, and in what ways the poem influenced your choreographic choices?

In many, many ways. First of all: the set, the setting, the props. To read Pasolini’s dense, multi-layered poem meant for me not only intellectually grasping its basic ideas – it also meant attending to the words (to the “signifiers”, as Lacan would put it) which resonated with me: the hammer, the rain, the ashes, the flowers, the dark, the light etc.. Jenny Schleif, my costume and stage designer and me, we worked on making visible and tangible what resonates in the set.

Then, what you find in the poem is a dense weaving together of politics and eroticism. My main concern here was: what does this imply for our understanding of solidarity? With my “dedication”, written on the white roll, as well as with my song and other elements I suggest a new perspective, namely a continuum that extends from auto-eroticism, narcissistic self-love to love for those who are like me to finally those who live far from me but in whom I’m still able to see “myself”. It seems of utmost political importance to me to shift our understanding of solidarity from one that solely grounds it in a sense of mutual dependence and precious difference to an understanding of solidarity that also grounds it in a certain narcissistic sense of similarity and deeply wished-for autonomy. The archive of male homosexuality to which I also count Pasolini is very informative here.
Finally, it is through Pasolini’s poem and also through the archive of male homosexuality that threads of death and mourning run. I wanted to move through mourning but also beyond it – to bring back to life our engagement to re-shape life (“rifare la vita”, as Pasolini puts it), to open the grave, so to speak, to find there something that maybe hints beyond death.

Your performance responds to a rightward shift in the working-class milieu, permeated by fantasies of masculinity. I am curious to hear more from you about this.

50 years of neoliberal policy as well as other cultural developments have in many ways undermined people’s sense of security and, as I like to emphasize, also their sense of self-determination. Political scientist Birgit Sauer has written extensively on how right-wing authoritarianism takes up this sense of insecurity, of injured autonomy and all the anger that comes with it – and how authoritarian parties, leaders and “intellectuals” respond to those feeling states by mobilizing masculinist attitudes centred around contempt of “the different” (in terms of gender, culture, ethnicity), the “different” who are assigned the role for being the cause of that threatened security and injured self-determination. As being a disabled person myself, I have a sensibility for how a precarious sense of self-determination can result in an extra-strong need for it – which basically means that you want to share space with people like you, so that their vibes, their wavelength, their preferences don’t interfere too much with your own. And the working-class movement also has its origin in an experience of similarity, mediated through the factory, the club, the newspaper and so on. So, given the contemporary fragmentation of the working class, the question for us on the political left is: How can we design post-national experiences of shared, common pride and self-determination. I think the body and affect are crucial here.

With Work Body, you created a poetic response to a work culture that continues to favour ableism, functionality and productivity–pushing what doesn’t conform into the margins. You have invented the term “Crip Choreography” to challenge conventional ideas of body and movement. Could you explain what this concept means to you? 
Additionally, the experience of time and duration in your piece felt particularly crucial to me. How do you relate to these aspects, and what is your experience of them from within the work?

Crip choreography, a slightly ironic term, for me essentially means engaging the inherent resistance of my own body in processes of de-organizing and re-organizing dominant forms of movement. That of course also relates to what is referred to as “crip time”. In the name of self-care, of not hurting ourselves in the long run we need to move through our lives in a different rhythm than the dominant one, the one established in our ableist culture and our capitalist mode of production. I view crip choreography as a practice of resistant temporality. And maybe this is what workers and crips have in common: In order to be free, we need to shoot at clocks.