ABOUT

ALEX ROMANIA - Multidisciplinary Artist. Performer. Dance Artist. Actor. Director. Editor. Cinematographer. Sound Artist.

Photo by Mitchell Murdock

Photo by Mitchell Murdock

My performance work is genre blurring, and pivots between the contexts of dance, performance art, installation and video, involving costume and object. Often working through physical research, I view the choreographic as an unattainable pathway where the performer navigates boundaries, creating friction between the premeditated and the spontaneous. My practice investigates the dangerous and functional role of value systems in relationship to social choreography (the choreography of systems - economies, isms, social contracts, gender... etc.) mutating through performance, pursuing alternative possibilities for cohabitating space. Performing my work is to navigate through a psychedelic constellation of scores; thrust between the performers internal experience and external stimulus, steeped in the consequence of actions in a space shared with the witness - it is negotiating what, why, how, and when we perform while performing scores that catapult the performer into intentional discomfort.

Photo by Da

Photo by Walter Wlodarczyk

I share my time with both New York City and Massachusetts where I have been making work in collaboration with my father since 2017, and where I continue to work with one of my core collaborators Ava Vex. I have taught and shown work nationally and internationally, most recently  at Huerto Roma Verde (MX City), the Center for Performance Research (NYC), Human Resources (LA), Encuentro (Lima), UV Estudios (Buenos Aires), the Pillsbury House (Minneapolis), Movement Research at the Judson Church (NYC), and el Museo del Arte Contemporáneo (Lima). I have collaborated as a dancer performed in works by Kathy Westwater, Luciana Achugar, Catherine Galasso, Andy de Grout, Eddie Peake, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and as a video designer for Pepper Fajans and Antonio Ramos.

Photo by Miao Jiaxin


 At the crux of expansive task and deteriorating form, my multidisciplinary work investigates bodies of cultural debris amidst the invisible everyday and toxic ingestions, consuming, purging, and breaking apart - the multiple body in exorcism. My work delves into spaces of the unimaginable, staring into the unknown to consider one’s crude and splendid humanity. I pursue an altered inhabitancy of the the false binary of good/bad, embracing spaces of  embarrassment, and unruly action to liberate the governed body.

 

Photo by David Gonsier

Though non-narrative, my works have drawn from experiences in relationship to trauma. In prior works, I have explored the consequences of violent-patriarchal-masculinity fed to, emanating from, and intertwined with my white-cis-male-presenting-body through a durational, and choreographic work titled JERK. Engaging with the reverberations of trauma I aim to destabilize and deteriorate these influences by offering my body as a vessel to be symbolically possessed, consumed, and reborn. Taking a critical look at the role of trauma in artistic production, my current work is a meditation on nonsense and the reverberations of an insane consumer culture, abstractly drawing from personal experiences, and considering an artist's relationship to pain as a source of production.

Photo by Effy Grey

Photo by Wei Chao

Photo by Miao Jiaxin