It is impossible to accurately perform grief. Grief is illogical, inconsistent, illusive, immaterial. Grief resists our expectations, never neatly fitting into the frameworks and language we develop to contain it. Alex Romania’s FACE EATERS, performed May 17-25, 2024 at The Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City, Queens, is perhaps the closest approximation of an embodiment of true, unadulterated, unfiltered grief legal to show on stage.

FACE EATERS is part experimental performance, part multimedia installation, part heavy metal show. The ghosts of the departed permeate: Romania’s brother Zachary died by suicide at age 34; Taylor Sakarett, Romania’s friend, video artist, and collaborator died at age 30 in January 2020, possibly from Covid before it could be identified as such; and Sebastian Cocco, Romania’s cousin, died of an overdose at age 23. FACE EATERS seems to be grappling with how artmaking, especially in the age of instantaneous and prolific capture and replay, keep the dead with us beyond their passing through the work they leave behind. The obvious messages from beyond the grave come through video art made of and with material by Zachary Romania. The program illuminates that Coco and Sakarett are present through music and other elements, though their exact contributions are more elusive.

The work is truly and completely multimedia. Upon entering the Chocolate Factory’s sizable, industrial, un-airconditioned space, audience members are offered the opportunity to color while waiting for the house to open. The coloring sheets, we later find out in a jarringly conversational intermission speech by Romania, are by Zachary. We are invited to hang them in a makeshift room of see-through walls erected in the lobby area. Much later, at the very end of this long and loud night, Stacy Lynn Smith, co-choreographer and the other half of FACE EATER’S producing group “Psychic Wormhole,” dons a hazmat suit and jumps around inside this room while dirt pours down from unseen hands in the balcony above and Romania and his band smash out a song worthy of a midwestern punk house.

The stage design is both baroque and stripped down. Dozens of television box sets of all sizes litter the space. Warped, brightly colored rubber in the shape of guns drape flaccidly over them, invoking a misguided violence not of this world. A heap of large globe-like objects fills the upstage right corner, and stage left is scattered with a host of instruments and objects used as instruments, activated loudly and masterfully throughout by collaborators Nazareth Hasan and Shane Jones. Romania, Smith, Hasan, Jones, and Glenn Potter-Takata, credited in the program as the Video Tech, all morph between dancers, instrumentalists, singers, and stagehands throughout. No one is off the hook in this Gesamtkunstwerk.

The monitors throughout the stage are supplemented by larger projections on the factory’s back wall. The screens often play the same visuals, a meandering and dated looking animated sequence created by Romania. The projections are like cryptic karaoke, with Romania performing the words appearing on them mostly faithfully. The sound of his voice is distorted, lo-fi, and, of course, loud, channeling the energy of a monster truck rally announcer. There are a lot of words. The text spoken and projected ranges from cryptic, poetic rambling (“so like belief a fog a syllable a murmur it blinks”) to direct references to narrative or theme (“I’m tired of being a meteor of pain” and “If I can’t go out of my mind, where am I supposed to go?”) to something in the middle (“ennui ennui ennui hot dog”). The projections also feature Romania’s father, Arthur, dressed in a clown-like get up, musing on meditation and nature.

FACE EATERS is as aesthetically ambitious and specific as a Broadway show, but with the sensibilities leaning away from the clean and polished and towards 1970s B-Horror movie chaos and viscerality. Between Romania, Smith, and the band of collaborators, the ensemble rocks at least a couple dozen elaborate costumes. Romania’s include a mattress exoskeleton which he both wears and is inside of like a soft, unwieldy turtle shell and a budget Michelin Man look made of foam and duct tape. Smith’s include a head-to-toe rope ensemble which gives her the appearance of a human wet mop and a truly beautiful jacket with dense, colorful yarn draping from the shoulder blades like wings.

The choreography itself is relatively simple and durational—a blessing in a work with this much going on. Army crawling, writhing, twirling, and shaking feature heavily. At one point, Smith, dressed as a fucked-up cheerleader with sliced open footballs for shoes and a face mask, the self-care kind, stuck to her face, flops around like a haunted ragdoll, then thrusts her way across the large stage in the equivalent of “bridge pose.”

Romania, Smith, and their collaborators, for all the highly produced chaos they invoke, also know the value of stillness, quiet, and simple metaphor. At two points in the show, three performers stand stock still holding long spools of magnetic tape. They tip the canisters over and for a couple minutes we watch as the tape unwinds quickly and rhythmically, gathering in piles and streams on the floor. The process takes plenty of time, enough to consider the detritus of a life unraveled and the waste of artistic promise in a life cut short.

One of the work’s most shocking accomplishments is that, despite the intense volume, confounding poetic ramblings, disturbing vibes, and depressing inspiration, the audience loves it. Inspecting the crowd in moments that could evoke discomfort and tension, the audience is smiling, leaning in, totally rapt. Even the baby in the house, probably about a year old, is happily along for the ride (thanks to noise cancelling headphones, of course).

FACE EATERS is as much about music, animation and projection, and theatrics as it is dance. Yet, Romania and Smith tend to pop up in dance spaces, and the work does center non-narrative movement. In a field dominated by trends, groupthink, and opportunistic grant-chasing, Romania and Smith may be some of the most singular voices working in contemporary dance in New York City. Other disciplines (fine arts, media arts, theater, to a degree) have long embraced the gruesome. Dance, as much as its creators insist otherwise, tends toward the beautiful and the virtuosic. Even those outside of commercial viability working in experimental modes and venues usually align with recognizable dance traditions.

On the other hand, Romania and Smith, in FACE EATERS and their “Psychic Wormhole” collaborations, seem to be more in relationship with punk music like GWAR, monster movies like “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” and creepy figurative fine artists like Francis Bacon. Calling this 2+ hour sensory overload performed in an 82-degree factory a “breath of fresh air” may seem incongruous, but to experience a truly unique artistic viewpoint on the universal, unavoidable, nearly overdone theme of “grief” is a relief. FACE EATERS is reassurance that unconventional, uncommercial, and unduplicatable art is alive in New York City.

Hallie Chametsky for culturebot, July 5, 2024.