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)

Daze of love at Dixon Place

With the hectic spring dance and performance season, I'm able to only dip into the X-YU Festival, a co-presentation of WaxFactory, Dixon Place and Dance New Amsterdam.  Curated by WaxFactory's Ivan Talijancic, the festival showcases new performance works by artists of the former Yugoslav republics. Shows are running, in a rather packed schedule, through June 3 at Dixon Place. Each show will set you back only about an hour.

Schedule and other details

Just a few words, then, on Ways of Love, a multimedia presentation created and performed by Slovenia's Maja Delak and Luka Prinčič. From a few things I've seen at Dixon Place in recent months, I'd say DP is already ground zero for edgy, festishistic eroticism in contemporary performance. At first, this pair spent a lot of time going there, and that was about as remarkable as the academic word salad in their poster-sized brochure, which I hope was meant to be a goof. It was also goofy to watch lots and lots of donning and doffing of clothes to no apparent point--except, perhaps, to suggest a kind of time-lapse passage in which many things have happened that we cannot see. There are hints, throughout, of human vulnerability; as it turns out, the vignettes of love are not all a total yawn. The completely brilliant selection, interpretation and manhandling of standards and pop songs earn respect, and Delak proves to be an absorbing performer with dramatic range, stamina and grit. Ways of Love is intense, saturated, obnoxious and, literally, hard to get rid of. It outstays its welcome. So, when it gets too clingy, just do what the opening night audience did and applaud it away.