Dream Season

An erotic anthropological view of our society

Alexandra Bachzetsis, who comes from Switzerland, has danced in productions by Christine De Smedt, Koen Augustijnen, Sasha Waltz and others. Her own work occasionally leans towards performance and video art and then again towards theatre and dance. Over the past few years she has been exploring the realms of mainstream popular culture such as hip-hop, fashion, striptease and film.

In Dream Season Bachzetsis examines the conventions of soap opera. The protagonists are two women and two men, a recipe for a potential romantic disaster. Like pawns on a chessboard, they represent a series of archetypal characters in endless combinations. As in a real soap opera, the ‘story’ is regularly interrupted by ‘reality’: commercial breaks which are here ‘enacted’ by the same actors. The shifts between ‘real’ and ‘acted’ in Dream Season tell us, the theatre-goers, TV viewers and shoppers, something about our identity in a society dominated by buying and selling. After all, isn’t Paris Hilton simply a persona invented to sell a perfume named after a certain Paris Hilton?

Dream Season is a soap opera and a study of soap opera, a story and a meta-story. As always, Bachzetsis plays on the thin line that separates parody and empathy, analysis and identification. Dream Season is amusingly critical, contemporary and feminine. It is an erotic anthropological view of our society.