alex romania (NYC) & future death agency (PDX)
SUNDAY, MAY 1, 2016 ~7PM
5040 SE MILWAUKIE AVE, PDX, OR 97202
http://cargocollective.com/alexromania/JERK
Jerk
Created and performed by Alex Romania
Description
This physically vulnerable choreography frames the male body between violence and pleasure – a microphone is bound to the body and swung from the pelvis evoking forms in the realm of BDSM, pornography, athletics, games, and flagellation. Through genital hypnosis and rigorous discomfort, this is a dance of (narcissistic) pleasure and (quiet) longing, (self) mutilation and (self) care. A dance to flatten and complexify the male body, to tenderize the flesh, to move beyond and to newly inhabit — a phallic solo to recompose the phallus.
Bio:
Alex Romania is a multidisciplinary performance-maker, organizer, and teacher based in NYC who has taught and shown work nationally and internationally. Besides creating performance work, Alex organizes events with dance and performance artists in NYC (such as the ‘Get Your A$$ in CLA$$’ class series at Abrons Arts Center), holds irregular discussions and events through his collective journalism platform INVISIBLE ARTISTS (a resource to approach sustainability in the arts), teaches teens how to devise original performance, video-documents live performance, and practices Thai Yoga. Alex has performed in works by Kathy Westwater, Catherine Galasso, Andy de Grout, Eddie Peake, Jacob Slominski, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton and has collaborated with a handful of performance art collectives, amongst other artists. http://cargocollective.com/alexromania
Artistic Statement:
Humans engage in radical, normalized, spiritual, and institutionalized actions every day to exorcise dangerous and healthy demons from (their) bodies. We sweat, laugh, protest, screw to liberation, abuse, annihilate cultures, and systematically oppress. We shit, we piss, we cry. At the core of exorcism (not necessarily religious exorcism), is to purge, expel, and move. Fear causes exorcism of lives. Exorcism polarizes good/evil, pure/vile, light/dark. The same forces of cultural colonization that empires war over. Exorcism destroys cultures, saves lives, and builds identity. While functioning as a force to separate the evil from the good, it condones invisible evil under the guise of godwar. This polarization sanctions demagogues and lifts them to demigod status. It justifies culturally practiced vilification, which leads to mass distortions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, and spurs hysterical, insane, illogical, and fear driven violence. My practice investigates the dangerous and functional role of value systems in relationship to social choreography (the choreography of systems - economies, isms, government’s, gender… etc.) mutating systems through performance, movement, improvisation, action, pursuing alternative possibilities for cohabitating space. Performing my work is to navigate through a psychedelic constellation of scores. Thrust between the internal experience and external reality(?), it is negotiating what, why, how, and when we perform while performing scores that catapult the performer into intentional confusion and discomfort. My work pursues an altered inhabitancy of the the good/bad spectrum to liberate the governed body. Investigating a body possessed by cultural debris, overloaded with the invisible everyday and it’s social, global, and personal ingestions, reckoning with itself in a purging state, consuming and breaking apart. The multiple body in exorcism.
photo’s are by Daniela Sanchez
future death agency http://futuredeath.agency/
isolation
tech:
use the 4-track, but (lack of) sight might make this a bit more difficult
mic stand or two mic standz
ulta violet led light (blinking)
processing text
the dance:
circle
arm
pelvis
voice box
tape loopz:
“people like you. you like people.”
“there’s something wrong with you, nobody likes you. you’ve got serious problems.”
“you feel friendly towards people. you like to feel intimate with others. you can get along with people by being yourself. you feel neat and tidy. if you see paper on the floor, you pick it up.”
“do you realize that you are a very hostile person? do you know that you are hostile with the nurses? do you know that you are hostile with the patients? why do you think you are so hostile? did you hate your mother? did you hate your father?”