Self-Abducting Hypocon 

2004

Self-Abducting Hypocon was a violent defiguration of the body. It was the first solo Wade created in NYC after graduating from SNDO, Amsterdam. The piece was a 25-minute actionist brutal exorcism of non-belonging, with the underlying score asking: “How is it possible to escape the confines of one’s self?” Lying alone on stage, face up, head toward the audience, dressed in preppy business casual, he allowed an accumulation of wretched shockwaves to transform, retrograde, and hijack his body into disorientation.

The physical practice Wade developed was a nauseous mixture of behavior, emotion, and abstract physicality that denigrated any coherent conception of the body—let alone the free-flowing traditions of downtown dance. Language could not account for the feeling of wanting to escape the confines of one’s body when faced with intense shame after social interactions that produced rejection and ridicule. Nonetheless, this was the first thing he uttered or disposed of on stage.

Jenn Joy wrote of the piece, “the choreography of the 'nervous body'—a body searching to find and surpass its own limits through intense movements such as crawling, stumbling, crashing, and convulsing—attempted to escape from itself. On his hands and knees, in a crawling sequence that traversed cockroach, wind-up doll, submissive slave, and zombie, and as the live music grew deafening, Wade approached a low-hanging microphone to vomit the text written by the artist Marcos Rosales”