On 15th May, Austrian artist Michael Turinsky presented at the Antistatic International Festival of Contemporary Dance and Performance 2026 his performance Working Body. An artist and theorist with disabilities, Turinsky is one of the most prominent representatives of contemporary inclusive dance. His performance Working Body is inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem The Ashes of Gramsci, which the performer quotes on stage. The poem is dedicated to the influential Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, himself a person with a physical disability. The performance, which was presented in Sofia at the main hall of Toplocentrala, creates a dense space of resonance between people with disabilities and the bodies of workers, placing marginalised bodily specificities at the centre of attention. Nadezhda Moskovska met with Michael Turinsky after the show for an in-depth conversation about the piece.
Nadezhda Moskovska: I would like to start with a question that predates my encounter with Work Body and your impressive stage presence. As soon as I saw the title of the performance in the “Antistatic” programme, I thought it would be perceived differently in Eastern and Western Europe. It seems to me that in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, consciously or not, we have quite critical attitude towards communist aesthetics and the idealisation of the working-class body, purposefully pursued by institutional communism. This is connected to your work, albeit indirectly, through the poem by Pasolini that you interpret. To what extent do you think communist idealisation differs from the concept of the body harnessed in capitalist labour?
Michael Turinsky: Oh, that is quite a difficult question—very smart, but also complex. The first thing that comes to mind is that the composition of the workforce has changed over time. So the workforce, the working class, or the mass of working people today, at least in Europe, is composed differently than before, and perhaps differently than during the Soviet Union era.
Therefore, industrial labour, monotonous machine work, and so on, is now only a fraction of the overall composition of the workforce in (Central) Europe. So I think capitalism today utilises bodies in different and far more diverse ways than back then. But when you compare the classic Soviet Union body with the capitalist worker of that era, perhaps the difference is neither that small nor that large. I am stepping into delicate territory here, but I think one of the problems with the organisation of labour in the so-called socialist countries was an extreme focus on productivity. But back then, of course, productivity was actually a huge problem, or rather, the mismatch between organisational productivity and the shifting demands of the people was a major, major problem and challenge.
I always like to look for the rational core within problematic things, and I think the rational aspect in the aestheticisation of the working body is that there is value in labour. That there is value in contributing to society. Particularly today, in our so-called service economy, I think people who do very hard, genuinely physical work are overlooked. You know, today we aestheticise the hyper-creative, hyper-collaborative, hyper-flexible knowledge worker, the hyper-flexible, hyper-creative cultural worker. And we, in the art world, have forgotten to engage with the dignity of manual labour as well, not just intellectual labour.
N.M.: I expected your performance to make me feel vulnerable, which it did, but I didn’t expect it to make me feel so strongly like a worker, to identify as a worker. How central of a motif is this in the performance—to remind even people working in the arts of this identification as workers?
M.T.: Actually, the goal was to show that we, as dancers, work with our hands—we are manual workers to the extent that we work with our bodies. I think the core impulse of my artistic creation in recent years has been to weave a web of shared experiences that transcends our identities, in order to show connections. I want to further develop this common thread between us as dancers or as people with disabilities, and other people who work with their hands. I think that was one of the objectives.
N.M.: I knew you would construct the stage, but I didn’t expect you to list all the members of your team on stage, and for that to be one of the first things you said out loud. When did this become a part of the dramaturgy?
M.T.: To be honest, I don’t remember exactly when, but I think from the very beginning I wanted to organise this concert of thanksgiving. I read a lot Michael Sandel. Not that I completely agree with everything he says. In one of his books he speaks a lot about the dignity of labour, and on the other hand, he criticises meritocratic thinking. And I also wanted to show that what I do, I don’t do alone; that my success is not solely my own doing. So many people have to support me, so many people have to show up so that I can shine. In fact, this “thank you” was a fairly early idea in the process.
N.M.: I am particularly interested in this tension between the abstract, again, idealised, useful body, and the concrete body of the individual, which—I’ll just say it plainly here—is never useful enough because, regardless of its specific capabilities, the body stubbornly remains itself.
M.T.: Exactly, exactly, exactly.
N.M. Do you think Pasolini pondered this stubbornness of the body?
M.T.: I think his expression is “to throw one’s body into the fight.” Or at least that quote immediately comes to mind. So I think Pasolini was extremely clear that the body has its place in the political struggle. But as you know, with Pasolini, it is very complex. Pasolini is drawn to certain bodies. He is incredibly attracted to what he perceives as pure, original, uncompromising… the immediate, living body.
It seems to me that some people view him as more naive than he actually was. In my opinion, he was very much aware of the tension between the real and the ideal. But he addresses this tension in a poetic, very dense, and clever way. And I think at some point, everything falls apart for him. And here I offer my own interpretation—in the beginning, the ideal and the real of the body are connected for him, they coincide in the sense that he projects the communist idea onto the reality of these proletarians. In my view, the poem “Gramsci’s Ashes” actually marks the moment when this overlap collapses because of a dead idea.
On the other hand, we have the pure body, which itself has also lost some form of identification, and that is why Pasolini begins to speak of these people no longer as angels, but as trash. Because he couldn’t sustain that dimension of the ideal—the communist ideal—and the reality of the working-class body. He couldn’t hold that wholeness together, because by then he was already projecting consumerist filth onto the working body, rather than the communist idea. Therefore, the poem is less a meditation on the tension between the capitalist body and the real body, and more on the tension between the communist ideal and the reality of the worker’s body.
N.M.: Do you think this has anything to do with the way he handles poetic form? Since he deconstructs certain classical forms. And does this link to the way you treat the form of the performance?
M.T.: I don’t think I did it intentionally. I definitely wanted to work with the popular and deconstruct the popular. For example, a concert in a popular culture format. And Pasolini not only deconstructs classical form but also integrates popular language in some way. In that sense, I would say I always align myself with attempts to do something with a popular format. This, by the way, is a Gramscian moment—working through the popular. Because in popular culture, in the popular movement, popular beliefs, aspirations, and thoughts are articulated. According to Gramsci, art must engage critically with these popular elements. But as far as classical form and what Pasolini does with it are concerned, I didn’t dive that deep into that type of deconstruction. Yes, during my research, I read quite a bit about how he takes up the terza rima form but then removes the rhyme scheme and so on, but I personally didn’t delve deeper in that direction.
N.M.: You mentioned Gramsci; it was about time he came up. In Work Body, there is quite a bit of text projected or printed. We see your dedication on the floor, while to the side—in the case of the hall in Toplocentrala—there were banners with quotes from Gramsci on the audience chairs. How did you select them?
M.T.: I tried to find short passages that resonate in the mind. Actually, someone questioned it: “This isn’t Gramsci, it’s some contemporary theorist.” But these are actual quotes from Gramsci that sound incredibly contemporary and relevant all these years later. So I just felt that Gramsci somehow needed to be here, in this space. I was looking for fragments that didn’t require too much context to be understood. For instance, the thesis on the importance of independent education for the working class. The problem of education is precisely a class problem. There is also another quote—about the time of monsters and so on, so I simply tried to find texts that speak to the core of human thought.
N.M.: The presence of the quotes, as well as you saying that we need Gramsci to be here, made me think again about Gramsci’s own physical condition. In the performance, you say that today it is easier to say you are disabled or queer than it is to say you are a communist. Why do you think that is?
M.T.: Until two or three years ago, we had fairly solid reasons to hope that things would improve for disabled people and for homosexual people. I think that still, despite Trump and despite everything, we can still hope that the lives of gay, lesbian, and transgender people will improve. It is undoubtedly much better now than it has ever been. However, I think we do not have such solid reasons to hope for the overcoming of solely growth-oriented capitalist societies.
I think it is harder to remain optimistic about that—about a sincere desire to change the way we produce, consume, and distribute goods. On one hand, because historically our attempts have been more or less catastrophic, and on the other—which is also connected to the first point—people no longer believe in socialism or have any idea how such ideas could improve their lives.
N.M.: At one point you say you are torn between two types of pride or honour: that of working and expressing yourself as an artist, and that of simply sitting and contemplating… How do you relate to your authorial position? Given the collective effort, to what extent do you conceive authorship as an individualistic gesture?
M.T.: That quote is actually about contribution. And I connect it to the discourse on labour within the leftist political sphere. Because when we listen to the Left’s reflections on labour, we find essentially two opposing lines. One is that of “post-work.” Those who say: “Oh, great, every technological advancement is wonderful! Someday, no one will have to work!” That is the post-work line. On the other hand, Michael Sandel and other social democrats insist that what we need today is to restore and return to the dignity of labour. That is the dignity of labour line. On one side, the discourse on life after work, and on the other, the discourse on the dignity of labour. And so I tried to use myself as a voice to unite them.
To say out loud that both things exist within me and I can relate to both. And that perhaps we need to find a way to integrate them. We must combine the dignity of labour with the need to simply sit down, unwind, and rest. For me, it is important to reconcile these things in this debate. A philosopher like Rancière could actually also fit into the post-work line in some way, because he always emphasises this moment of interrupting work and so on. I think he strongly criticises this discourse on the dignity of labour… But yes, I definitively believe we need to combine them. And before you ask me how—it is all a matter of rhythm. Keeping them together is a matter of rhythm. And, of course, this rhythm is definitely not the rhythm of capitalist growth, which doesn’t allow you to just sit for a moment.
N.M.: We only have the right to do it to celebrate all the labour we have put in, and to buy ourselves a little free time through it…
M.T.: I think you touched on an important issue, which is definitely connected to the liberal-socialist perspective as well. Yes, I think that both I personally and people in general need to do things our own way. We feel a sincere desire to do what we want in an environment that actually supports our autonomy, rather than our heteronomy. What I suggest is to think of solidarity not so much as the opposite of individuality, but rather as a way of loving oneself in the other. I am interested in how we can actually think together. Solidarity and this narcissism—how not to view them as opposites, but rather as a possible extension of one’s own narcissism toward solidarity.
N.M.: In this piece you work a lot with your voice. You speak and sing in the performance. Does it require a special effort for us to hear the voice of the working class?
M.T.: For me, this is the core of the entire issue that Gramsci encapsulates in the figure of the “organic intellectual.” For me, the idea of the “organic intellectual” was truly extremely important in conceptualising the performance. On one hand, I am definitely not exactly an “organic intellectual,” even though I come from a working-class family. Neither of my parents went to university. However, I am not a metalworker or a farmer either. And here lies the paradox that I am, after all, a dancer.
It doesn’t matter whether I belong to the working class or to the class I belong to. The core idea in Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual is that in order to speak on behalf of the working class, you must be a part of it. I think dialogue is very important to him—remaining in dialogue, maintaining contact, and growing out of the working class. Having roots, being deeply rooted in the working-class experience, and growing from there to speak out and organise the class. The “organic intellectual” not only originates from the working class, they also organise it.
For me, the main problem with this piece, of course, is that I remain at the level of representation. On the other hand, however, that is exactly what interests me. The problem of representing the working class and the fact that I am a person with a disability. I am simultaneously “out of the game,” yet at the level of the body, I am completely inside. So, my thesis is that we need to restart this articulation of disability within the working class. No matter whether I am an Austrian, Indian, or communist intellectual, we all feel pain. We feel pain in our bodies, and we give up our bodies, we give up our time, we give up our identity. I wanted us to start from the premise that the problem of representing the working class is a problem of expression. How should it be solved? By rooting the voice in the body—not just in the mind, but in the body.
N.M.: There is a moment in the performance that particularly evokes left-wing melancholy—the grave that you destroy to find the red flowers inside. I really appreciated your sense of humour. I’m not sure to what extent it was intended to be funny, but I found it very entertaining.
M.T.: Yes!
N.M.: But how does this gesture relate to the utopian side of revolutions, to the utopian horizon and the desire that leads us there? And why did you decide to be at least a little bit funny in this part? How do you relate to left-wing melancholy?
M.T.: I am sincerely grateful for this question. This is my favourite part of the entire piece. I am very proud of it because, in my opinion, it is extremely precise in its multi-layeredness. I think the first layer is connected to The Gospel According to St. Matthew and the open grave. And I decided to take the liberty of opening the grave of communism and bringing it back to life, so to speak, or making visible the growth inside the grave, if it is indeed a grave.
Then, of course, there is the layer of the armoured right-wing body, of the fascist body, which perhaps also still hides something else inside itself. And then follows a very brutal gesture—to break this hard shell and pull out the flower.
After that comes God, but only in his selfless sexual intensity, this pure pleasure of bodies fucking and the intense desire to penetrate. I don’t know if you know the book No Future? If so, this is the kind of homosexual, pure intensity, very close to death, that we are talking about. And that is also Mussolini’s fate, because he was actually killed during one of his sexual encounters.
As for the humour, when I take the flower, I myself start to cry. The sadness is also there. But it’s as if the whole scene is actually a poetic response to something less melancholy that cannot even be expressed in words.
N.M.: I believe that even the humour is a result of this rather complex combination of these layers, and it achieves this effect because it is such a complex gesture that it cannot be made seriously. Something that cannot be overcome without humour. That is to say, it is too heavy anyway, and without humour, it is unbearable.
M.T.: Exactly, that’s exactly it. Thank you.
N.M.: It was a pleasure both to watch the performance and to talk to you.
M.T.: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure for me to perform in front of a Bulgarian audience again.
Nadezhda Moskovska is a journalist in the field of culture.
