Read a review of the performance by Dominic Eichler on the website of Frieze Magazine.

Continuously mining the gold vein of popular and/or mass culture’s lowliest, raunchiest forms in search of sexy, sassy symbols of female self-empowerment, the formidable creative threesome that is Company – multitasking artists Alexandra Bachzetsis, Tina Bleuler and Lies Van Borm – does not shy away from the pitfalls of parody and persiflage that pock-mark the slippery slopes of today’s entertainment industries. In the delightful, aptly named ACT – as in: «act out your fantasies» – they have agreed to lock their lurid gazes onto a major minefield of ‘gender trouble’: the ultra-feminine art of slowly taking off one’s clothes – the art of the strip tease.

Two young women strut their stuff onstage and perform a tightly choreographed striptease routine in which both serve as each other’s mirror image, before finally dissolving in a wicked, stroboscopic light show. The pedestrian grey hues of their matching outfits may not strike the viewer as particularly erotic – and neither will some of their bizarre robotic moves, which quickly become amusing rather than arousing. Arousal, however, does announce itself in due time – in the end, we are all waiting for a glimmer of hope: a liberating glimpse of bare flesh.

ACT, in short, isn’t so much a striptease act as it is a dissection of the many gestures that co-define the pleasurable art of disrobing and denuding. Company’s «semiotics of the ‘tease’ thereby presents itself to the audience both as a (undeniably, deliberately sexy) reflection upon the art of the tease, and as a direct enactment of its joys, stopping short – damn! – just of the final sartorial frontier.
Source: the artists’s website.

Act
Concept: Alexandra Bachzetsis, Tina Bleuler, Lies Vanborm
Performer(s): Alexandra Bachzetsis, Tina Bleuler, Lies Vanborm
Music: Steve Slingeneyer, Stefaan Van Leuven
Costumes: Tatiana Vilkitskaia
Production: We Love Productions
Commissioned by: If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam (premiere)
Co-produced by: If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam, de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam
Thanks to: Les Ballets C de la B, Gent; Vooruit, Gent; Rote Fabrik, Zürich; Gessnerallee, Zürich; Athanasios Bachzetsis; Alfred Bleuler; Julia Born & Graphic Design Department G. Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam; Ann Demeester; Stephen Dewaele, David Blum, Helga Duchamps, Martena Duss, Pascale Gatzen & Fashion Department Arnhem; Patrick Frank; Catja Loepfe; Laura Vanborm; Marc Vanborm; Yasmien Wenger
Financial support: Pro Helvetia, Arts Council of Switzerland, Kulturstiftung des Bundes/DE, Kanton Zürich, Pact Zollverein Essen