Exstase, Chicago (IL)
Rachmaninoff plays for 1.5 minutes. “La dictée. L’Amour Désarmé est un tableau peint par Jean Antoine Watteau en 1715 [...] Allez, on recommence!”
L’Amour Désarmé is a 30 minute surrealist performance, exploring dreamscapes, fragmented memories and moments of cognitive dissonance. In a strange white uniform and a surgical mouth guard, the performer is at first confined to a small student desk. A tape recites the history of Watteau's painting. She tries to keep up with the dictation but it accelerates, the voice becomes increasingly aggressive. Soon she loses interest and defiantly goes seeking for a blade in a jar filled with wine. With the blade, she slices the magnetic strip of the cassette tape, interrupting the voice and creating a fissure in the text. The performer then places a new tape inside the player. As it starts, she removes a letter from the inside of a freshly dead fish.
The performer reads while momentarily being interrupted by the tape that plays a collage of audio excerpts: Rachmaninoff and quotes from Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, on love and desire. Narratives accumulate and intersect in a disorienting textual unraveling.
L’Amour Désarmé was presented as part of Coming Asunder curated by Julia Bikra White featuring Polina Protesko, at Exstase, formerly To have and to hold in Chicago, in June 2018.
