(23) Dellaventura

(23) Dellaventura. As a Soho clothing boutique assistant, in the episode “In Deadly Fashion” of the TV show Dellaventura.

For a heroically flimsy and insubstantial video clip, here’s a performance of mine that took stamina: it’s a whole five seconds long. Centring on Danny Aiello as a detective, Dellaventura got cancelled after just one season—a resounding cancellation that I can proudly claim to have played a very small part in. This time, I didn’t get to say my usual few well-chosen words; I was cast as the strong, silent type, let’s say. But I did get to pout, while whisking a curtain open in a painfully chic fashion boutique in Soho, which was some consolation. The acting preparation beforehand required some detailed “Emotional Curtain-Whisking” work, of course.

(If you let the video-player just keep auto-repeating the five seconds, with full-screen enabled and the music volume raised, then it morphs from a cancelled TV show to a piece of video-art whose obsessive repetition may be helpful to zone out to, for someone who’s easing out of a bad trip—or it may make the bad trip worse, I’m not sure.)

I have fun memories of swishing and mincing around the boutique with its owner/empress, the venerable Hungarian designer Marianne Novobatzky, there on Mercer Street at Broome Street (now long gone, R.I.P.). IMDb listing here and Wikipedia page here. (05”)
(See video here.)

 

(This video is also on Vimeo and YouTube.)