Michael Turinsky presented the solo of the year with “Precarious Moves”. Text and performance of the intellectual and at the same time fantastically playful concept piece were virtuosic, funny and instructive. As with Jérôme Bel and Michael Laub, you come out of this Turinsky wiser than you went in. But the really important thing about Turinsky’s “Precarious Moves” is that it’s not a lecture. One not only likes to listen when the dancer/author merrily beats around the dance theater mush, one also watches with absolute fascination how his stage actions illustrate and counteract his theories and bring them down to the stage floor of physical facts. Beauty is a powerful argument: all theory may be gray, but the toy car Turinsky drives around the stage is bright pink, an unforgettable image.
The events and spoken words apart. The poetic text, which Turinsky himself speaks from the first row of the auditorium in Hall K1, is reprinted in the program booklet as “The Soiled Manifesto” and is very interesting. In it he laments the inadequacy of the human species, certifies that the “civilized”, “enlightened” are better off in humility, that we all need to be dismantled or composted, because there is no blessing in our insane vacillation between lack and excess and we are the earth destroy where we come from.
Like cute seals
It’s a very good, dramatic text, but what’s happening on stage after a generous twenty minutes is just plain boring – although Tian Rotteveel’s incidental music creates sensitive and original beats. Turinsky watches instead of participating. His three performers David Bloom, Sophia Neises and Liv Schellander are dressed in dark brown knit shorts and lie for an hour in a round pool lined with plastic, the black rim of which peeks out from under the white tarpaulin the thickness of a car tire. Jenny Schleif created the costumes and stage design, the performative aspect of which consists in green hoses hanging down next to the golden inverted umbrella, from which pumpkin seed oil begins to drip. The delicious smell spreads as the three bodies begin to shine and slide as more of the precious liquid spreads over them.
Monique Smith-McDowell takes small poetic liberties in her audio description of the events. In this way, a visually impaired or blind audience can also imagine what is happening on stage in “Soiled”. The idea of simply placing bodies in an environment in which they cannot practice the famous human upright walk is understandable. Turinsky shows bodies shoving on top of each other like some kind of cute seals, and yes, they are incapable of hurting or cheating one another in this state, further destroying the earth’s natural resources or trading in weapons. And now? The text is good, but with the trio slithering around on their stomachs, the illustrations are conceivably inadequate.
