LOVE TEST: Cruising for a Bruising

On the opening night of anorak’s new space in Berlin-Tempelhof, we are proud to present LOVE TEST: Cruising for a Bruising, a collaboration by artist and filmmaker Rosa Aiello and actor and theatremaker Dylan Aiello. Building on a lifetime relationship between them, LOVE TEST: Cruising for a Bruising stages the slippery dynamics of testing love, attention-seeking, and pushing past thresholds of social tolerance as potentially meaningful forms of connection, actions to be treated without contempt: a comedy of errors rather than a tragedy of failures.

Short comic routines called ‘Lazzi,’ which acted as performance units in Renaissance Commedia dell’Arte theatre to construct, break into, and unravel plots, serve as a means to destabilise the roles we take on as friends, lovers, performers, bosses, and siblings, as well as the power dynamics at play in these roles. As a love test, this collaboratively developed piece puts a spotlight on the urge to act, to control, to make something happen. Stitching together film, live performance, and song, LOVE TEST: Cruising for a Bruising is a variety show, an ecstatic conversation, a road trip, a succession of interruptions, charged with expectation.

The event will also feature film footage by Laura Langer and filmed appearances by Arianna Calgaro, Leslie Ewen, Victor Jacono, Maya Misfud, Tori Sasso-Briggs, Scarlett Stitt, Katherine Ward, and others.

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Rosa Aiello is an artist, filmmaker and writer based in Berlin. Her works, at once intimate and alienating, draw from films, books, online databases, found objects, and personal content to deal with the ambiguities of social and actual structures.

Dylan Aiello, known to many as the PUMPKING, is a London based actor whose practice proposes the Theatrical as a speculation into the transcendent in the Everyday. Drawing from various traditions, such as Commedia dell’Arte, his work approaches themes of creativity through grief, pop stardom and embodied ritual.