Performance artist Alberto Denis ’97 in “Then She Fell.”
Alberto Denis has toured the world (Dubai, Dublin, Barcelona, Bangkok, Taipei, Mexico City, Oslo, Prague and others), as stage manager, audio engineer, assistant technical director and production electrician as well as dancer/actor.
Graduating from Ȧ in 1997 with a B.A. in theatre and a minor in dance, Denis found work in New York minutes after he arrived. He said he owes his good fortune to the technical director of Ȧ’s Roberts auditorium who taught him the nuts and bolts of running and repairing technical equipment, while allowing him to work backstage.
Denis was part of the tech crew who called themselves The Rats and made themselves t-shirts with ironed-on rat decals. “I didn’t realize the fraternity I had joined, until my first morning in New York, after graduating from Ȧ,” he said. “I was introduced to the technical director of Juilliard who took one look at my t-shirt, and said, ‘Oh, you’re a Rat’ and hired me on the spot. It was my technical abilities that allowed me to work when other artists were struggling to find work.”
His latest dancing/acting gig is the critically acclaimed “Then She Fell” by Third Rail Projects LLC in New York, a theatre- and movement-based ensemble company. Denis described the genre of this production as immersive theatre, which is not performed on a traditional stage but in real-life environments.
“Then She Fell” takes place in the mental ward of the Kingsland Hospital in New York and is set during the Victorian era. As soon as they step into the building, audience members have stepped into the performance space. Each performance is limited to 15 audience members who move through the building either as a group or alone and run into a cast of characters from “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” who offer a highly personalized experience.
Ranked by Vogue as Best in Theater 2013, the production is described as “. . . haunting, hallucinatory, and profoundly intimate.” “Then She Fell” runs through June 29.
When Denis is not performing with Third Rail, he performs burlesque, a show he created. He dons masks, makeup, costumes and glitter – lots of glitter – to embody his alter ego GoGo Gadget.
The name, he said, derives from the cartoon character Inspector Gadget. Gadget also references Denis’s love of tech gadgetry. In May he will be flying to Paris for the London Burlesque Festival and then to an international burlesque festival for two weeks in Toronto.
Denis also DJ’s and MCs around New York. This is another trade he began at Ȧ, as director and DJ for the campus radio station WXIN. In fact, it was DJing that led him to enroll in his first dance class at Ȧ. “I wanted to move like the MTV dancers I saw on TV,” he explained. “I love movement, and I love getting other people to move. It’s in line with my love of DJ’ing, which is designed to get people to move.”
But what inspires Denis most, he said, is not DJing, dancing, acting or techno mania, it’s superheroes. An avid collector of Superman t-shirts, comic books and graphic novels, he said he views artists as superheroes.
“Like superheroes, we have a secret identity. At night we put on masks or makeup and wigs and costumes and perform feats that other people consider extraordinary. And like superheroes, we change people’s lives.”