Another East Village loss: Incubator Arts Project

Incubator Arts Project to Close
by Patrick Healy, The New York Times, April 16, 2014

Other Forces presents WaxFactory's "#aspellforfainting"

Gillian Chadsey
in WaxFactory's #aspellforfainting

The always-dizzying APAP season continues, including one of the lesser-publicized festivals devoted to independent theater, Incubator Arts Project's Other Forces 2014. Last night, I caught WaxFactory performer Gillian Chadsey, sound artist Ivan Talijancic and video artist Shige Moriya in their collaborative piece, #aspellforfainting, at the Robert Moss Theater, a small performance space off Astor Place.

#aspellforfainting, a 40-minute improvisation, locates its soloist within cinematic sound from Moriya's electronic setup and within imagined, uncharted territory littered with wacky props--sky-high black high heels, a wiggly, musical robot poodle, the requisite fluorescent-pink fright wig--Talijancic delivering each item throughout the piece according to his fancy. Each time Talijancic, slim and mysterious in his shiny, silver hoodie, drops off another prop, Chadsey gives it a split-second, distracted glance and seems to be thinking, "Um, what do you want me to do with that?" But then she carries on. Because she must. Because that's what artists do.

And how she carries on. By now, readers of InfiniteBody might come to think that every APAP-season show is an intense, outlandish solo having something to do with a woman slipping right off the murky edge. Or that I've deliberately chosen to see the ones that do. Maybe I have.

Using Charcot’s Tuesday night lectures at the Salpêtrière and his instigation of hysterical performance as a leaping-off point, WaxFactory traces the lines of fainting, hallucination, delusion, and love letters that run through the source material.

If you go, you won't see exactly what I saw, of course, but you will experience some jumble of words and behaviors constructed from bits of culture, high and low, from A Street Car Named Desire to YouTube. And you will always have the work's north star, Chadsey, with her strength, versatile skill and magnetism. At a bite-size 40 minutes, what can you lose?

#aspellforfainting runs through January 19. For schedule and ticketing information, click here.

You'll be invited to use your mobile devices to to take photos (without flash) or video during the performance and tweet to #aspellforfainting--hence, the quirky title.

Robert Moss Theater

440 Lafayette Street (south of Astor Place), 3rd Floor, Manhattan

(map/directions)

In the fog with "Vulture-Wally"

Dance artist Jillian Sweeney and director/writer Jeffrey Cranor strike just the right balance between earnest mysteriousness and kickass satire in their new work, Vulture-Wally, a presentation of Incubator Arts Project's New Performance Series at St. Mark's Church. As described by Sweeney, the 65-minute, immersive Vulture-Wally

uses spoken word, song, and dialog to create a long-form poem about who owns our bodies and who authors our stories. Based on the 19th century Austrian Alps folk novel Geier-Wally, the dance dissects the melodramatic hero(ine) by examining individual body parts and pairing the movement with deconstructed classic film scores.

Set in IAP's small, black box theater--upstairs from the more familiar Danspace Project home in the church's sanctuary--the work unfolds in a dimly-lit space engulfed in artificial fog.* Faint lines of light often demarcate areas of new action, guiding the circulating audience members to position themselves out of the way of developing scenes. People sometimes perch on risers that extend across one wall but, now and again, watchers have to make way for dancers.

In fact, Vulture-Wally opens with Sweeney's dancers--Siobhan Burke, Lydia Chrisman and Tara Willis--dramatically gesturing as they tread back and forth, in strained and grave slow motion, across those risers in the mist and Vincent Vigilante's filtered light. Vaguely romantic music plays faintly in the background. Sweeney, moving even more sparingly, occupies a separate box of light in a corner of the theater, and we must deliberately lose sight of the severe trio to turn around and catch up on whatever she's doing. The "chapters" of the piece unfold a story of either conforming to authority or striking off on one's own. Hell is indeed other people who wield cosmetic brushes or singalong hymns.

Cranor's clever text and the excellent performance by Sweeney and company make a worthwhile event of this smart, accomplished work.

*One important note of caution: If you have respiratory allergies, a cold or asthma, the ever-present fog might prove challenging. It's not the same as watching fake fog billow across the stage of a big theater at the normal, safer remove. You're all up in it for a full hour. I'm still struggling this morning with congested nasal passages and a severely irritated throat. For information on adverse health effects of fog or smoke machines, see here.

Vulture-Wally continues this evening through Sunday with performances at 8pm. For tickets, click here.

Incubator Arts Project
St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street at Second Avenue, 2nd Floor, Manhattan
(directions)