Michael Turinsky:

Vulnerability as Political Power

Claudine Colozzi 

Austrian choreographer and theorist Michael Turinsky sees his body as an experimental space. An advocate of what he calls “crip choreography”—a politically engaged approach to dance rooted in disability studies—Turinsky will perform his solo Precarious Moves at the MC93 theater in Bobigny, just outside Paris, as part of plan D, programmed by CN D this November. In the work, he invites audiences to question conventional ideas of mobility, speed and efficiency.

Michael Turinsky alternates between gliding across the stage in a wheelchair, bringing his body into contact with the floor, and standing upright. It’s as though he is searching for the best way to navigate space, in his own time and at his own pace. Each of Turinsky’s gestures emerges as both precise and unpredictable – a particular way of moving that has been central to his practice for almost twenty years. 

This fall, Turinsky will perform Precarious Moves – a 2021 solo using slowness, effort, and precariousness as choreographic material – at the MC93 theater in Bobigny. A former philosophy student at the University of Vienna, the 48-year-old Austrian artist started dancing in 2006 when another friend – also in a wheelchair – invited him to join an improvisation group. By attending, Turinsky discovered “a way to reconnect with the physical pleasure,” he says, recalling the joy he’d felt playing in his grandparents’ garden as a child. 

Turinsky has powerful memories of this formative experience, describing the way he played with other children as a “savage” practice in which bodies tumbled over one another, got back up, and started again. “This very dynamic connection to other people interested me immediately,” he says. “Not having had a ‘classical’ training may be what’s enabled me to consider dance from a new perspective.”

Turinsky then discovered choreography and began working with artists from the Viennese dance scene. While he works with both disabled and non-disabled people, he uses the word “inclusion” with caution. For him, the concept still seems to presuppose a norm to which some bodies are expected to conform. In response, he developed his own concept of “crip choreography”, which, as a disabled person himself, he defines as “the affirmation of a specific physical resistance against normativity.”

According to Turinsky, “crip choreography” deconstructs normative ways of organizing movements and reorganizes them according to the physical abilities of each body. This open and permeable approach is closely connected to his understanding of the connection between philosophy and dance. He describes their relationship as “an interweaving of conceptual and movement practices,” bringing together thoughts, feelings and physical sensations. For Turinsky, philosophy is not something separate from movement or simply a way of talking about it; it can become part of the choreographic process itself.

This way of working is evident not only in Precarious Moves – where Turinsky talks, sings and moves at his own pace, considerably slower than the one imposed by capitalist society – but throughout his practice. In his 2014 work My Body, Your Pleasure, Turinsky explores the connections between corporeality, desire, consumerism and capitalism. Likewise, in the 2018 production Reverberations, he connects crip aesthetics with Afrofuturism, solidarity and dub music. In short, Turinsky’s practice has never been about isolating disability as a category; rather, it seeks to situate crip experience within broader questions of desire, work and ecology.

Created in 2025, Turinsky’s recent solo Work Body takes this reflection one step further by connecting the disabled body with the working body. Inspired by the work of Italian Marxists Pier Paolo Pasolini and Antonio Gramsci, the piece is at once a dance performance, concert, political discourse and a reflection on the division of labor. The porosity between philosophy and performance in Turinsky’s work is one of the most distinctive features of Turinsky’s work. And though he writes, publishes, and gives conferences and workshops, he mostly conveys his concepts and reflections through movement. 

While Turinsky regularly performs across the globe, he is virtually unknown in France. He has, however, recently connected with the dance department of Paris 8 University in Saint-Denis, where professor Isabelle Ginot, has invited him to participate in the seminar “Dance and means of action” (“Danses et pouvoirs d’agir”). Ginot co-hosts this seminar with her colleague Isabelle Launay, and is happy that a French audience will soon be able to discover Turinsky’s work in the context of Plan D festival, a broader program that doesn’t solely feature disabled artists. 

Turinsky’s work invites viewers to shift their gaze and consider attributes often perceived as deficiencies as sources of transformative power. This is where the most political dimension of Precarious Moves lies: in the possibility of turning, being late, hesitating and being vulnerable—not into obstacles to movement, but into conditions for creating another way of dancing and another way of being in the world.

In the mid-1990s, while she was still a student majoring in journalism in Lille, Claudine Colozzi interned at the dance magazine Les Saisons de la danse, where she learned to sharpen her critical perspective. As a journalist, she works for magazines, teaches, and writes on a variety of topics, notably disability. She continues to feed her insatiable curiosity for dance by writing for websites such as Danses avec la plume and Coups d’œil. She has written documentary books for young audiences: L’Encyclo de la danse (Gründ), Dans les coulisses de l’Opéra, La danse classique and Passion hip-hop (Nathan).

Precarious Moves
Michael Turinsky
November 14 and 15 at Stoa Teatterisali, Helsinki
within Moving in November festival
November 20 and 21 at MC93
within plan D - CN D x MC93

Upending norms: metamorphic, emancipatory and resisting dances
Professional meeting
November 20 at MC93
within plan D - CN D x MC93