Bigti
Kince de Vera
CONTENT WARNING: Mental health, strangulation, strobe-like effects
Photo courtesy of Jeff Legere
BIGTI
ChoreographY
Kince de Vera
Concept and Execution
Kince de Vera and Sierra Leone Boone
Performer
Kince de Vera
MUSIC
The Sweetest Kill - Broken Social Scene
Editing
Kince de Vera
Kince de Vera (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist and community catalyst living and working in Seattle, Washington. A Filipino immigrant, Kince’s US training includes instruction at Mencia-Pikieris School of Dance and New World School of the Arts in Miami, Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, and multiple dance intensives under the Velocity Dance Center umbrella.
In his pursuit of truth in his various art forms, he uses his dance background to create work centered around the intersection of identities. These works have been featured as part of Dimsum Dialogues at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, the Self-Esteem Salon at 601Artspace in Manhattan, Seattle Pridefest, and multiple year of Pride ASIA Fest, amongst others.
Kince’s art is currently focused around mental health and helping others through his work.
PROGRAMME NOTES
As a gay artist of colour open about living with Bipolar Disorder I’ve had many avenues to explore the subject matter through my art. I've been fortunate to have been presented this in multiple ways, the most relevant being a triptych of performance art solos on suicide and survival, Manhid, Lagkit, Dama (Numbness, Stickiness, Feeling). This body of work paved the way for multiple avenues of healing and helping myself and others as it bore forth a workshop called Temp, which first launched in New York City with the Self-Esteem Salon at 601ArtsSpace, part of a series of installations for the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in 2019.
In the beginning of the pandemic, and in the midst of one of the lowest points of my life, I crafted a prologue to the triptych, a self-reflective visualisation of what it's like living with my condition. This piece, entitled Bigti (strangulation), was born out of a manic episode filmed at 3am (you can even hear a cuckoo clock at 1:13). In it I use the same choreographic tools I would for a stage work, in a sort of meta exercise of restraint.
MEANINGS BEHIND IMAGERY
I belong to a very small subsect of bipolar individuals who experience ultradian cycling, wherein I can cycle between mania, depression, and mixed states in a very short amount of time, sometimes even within the confines of a single day. However, given the good fortune of an early diagnosis, I often am able to mask this, at least on the surface.
The video edits above symbolise some of the non-visible things I experience below the surface. Some of these are:
static -the inability to take in information or process
“ghosting” and trailing - general fogginess and inability to process clear thought
throbbing - palpitations and physical
dual images - mixed states
flashes of colour - spikes of mania
silver paint - overwhelming depression
water - the constant having to wash traces of it off the surface
white liquid - white symbolising truth, this moment captures the inability to contain one’s true state
PHOTOS from “TEMP”
