Michael Turinsky is one of the most notable disabled current choreographers. In Work Body he 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 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 buon senso, the ‘authentic core’, 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.
