In “Self-Tape for a Self-Love”, Dino Desica enters the space as if preparing for an audition. But there is no casting director and no role to win. Instead, the audience occupies the position normally held by the camera: watching, assessing and potentially deciding whether the person in front of them is worthy of attention.
Moving between scripted scenes, vocal exercises, posing, physical training, crying, laughter, a cappella songs and moments of improvisation, Dino repeatedly prepares himself to be seen. The mechanics of the self-tape gradually expose something more vulnerable: the labour involved in continually constructing a desirable, employable and lovable version of oneself.
The work connects the precarity of acting with a wider economy of validation. Casting, dating and social media begin to resemble one another: spaces in which the self is presented, judged and repeatedly placed in competition for somebody else’s attention.
Failure is not concealed but built into the performance. Awkwardness, repetition, uncertainty, and moments when Dino loses control of the image he is trying to produce become part of the work.
Behind the comedy sits a more uncomfortable question: what happens when the desire to perform becomes inseparable from the desire to be loved?
Performance: Dino Desica
Presented at: DIY Night, Chisenhale Dance Space, London
Photography: Pablo Larrosa
