Premiering in 2024 at the University of California, Irvine’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts, followed by a presentation at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, tonight’s performance of Asher Hartman and Jasmine Orpilla’s Blessed with Switch unfurls as part of the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s industrial space. The venue is expansive but Orpilla makes it condense instantaneously. Prior to her entrance, an empty chair foreshadows her presence while the audience is arranged in U-shaped bleachers.

Orpilla appears onstage with a quotidian walk to the chair. Three downstage lights slant upwards. As she crosses them, her figure becomes immense, creating a momentary, projected triptych on the back wall. As she approaches the chair, she slows introspectively then sits, her weight making it swing in a childlike manner. Wearing a cropped turtleneck tank top, miniskirt, and platform boots, she slows to stillness. Hands in lap and back straight, she seems to stare beyond the audience into an endless horizon. The drone-like wall of sound playing since her entrance grows in volume. Reaching a dramatic climax, the cacophony stops abruptly. There is a brief, anticipatory moment of quiet. She leans her head back in the chair, arching her shoulders and back to the point of discomfort, then sits up and begins.

Blessed with Switch is consumed by language. Or, it consumes with language. Spoken text exits Orpilla’s body, sometimes acutely, sometimes fluidly. Her affect shifts abruptly as she says different phrases. She speaks quickly, virtuosically. She stutters and spits, wrestling with each syllable. A linguistic motor is erupting inside of her, driving continuous speech. Text and signifiers appear as a dualistic avalanche, an unnatural fit in this body.

It begins with slow speech, as if the language is too elastic and viscous to exit Orpilla’s body: “Ssssssshhhhhhhheeeee told me. God is the midwife to the oceanic womb.” Orpilla stands from the chair, writhing and contorting her body as she speaks. She walks throughout the performance space, changing direction as shifts in her language occur. She elongates one syllable, unable to release it, then fluidly moves to the next. Her language traverses images and characters across historical, fictional, and geographical times. Gendered and geospatial elements cross-fade. The womb and the maternal haunt her words. “Like a birth like a cow / Like a sea cow / Like a…” Orpilla trails off, changes direction, alters pacing, or makes lists of similes: “Like a like a rude man / Like a like a dead man / Like a like a hunk / Like a leetle what? / Like a what’s the matter with that God?”11Blessed with Switch, Asher Hartman and Jasmine Orpilla, Time-Based Arts Festival, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon, September 5, 2025. Performance. And, later: “Like a dad hustle / Like a solid six / Like Lord Pimp / Like I wanna nibble nibble nibble that.”22“Blessed with Switch – Script,” Mimesis: Film as Performance Magazine 2 (Winter 2025), https://mimesismagazine.com/2025-asher-script. And finally: “Like a cap like a whale like a birth like a cow / Like a sea cow / Like a pipe / Like an open mouth.”33“Blessed with Switch – Script.” These comparisons ask us to spy connections across systemic forces and notice power formations in their slippery metamorphoses.

Hartman and Orpilla bring cross-disciplinary practices to their collaboration. Hartman is interested in the “charged space between performance art, experimental theater, and immersive installation”44Program for Asher Hartman and Jasmine Orpilla’s Blessed with Switch at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, September 5, 2025. while Orpilla works as a “multipliced Ilokana/x-American vocal performance artist and operatic composer of experimental theatrical sound installations.”55Program for Asher Hartman and Jasmine Orpilla. Program notes for Blessed with Switch emphasize the work’s “extreme darkness and low light,” calling it “a dark, unnerving hacking and synching of languages that mar, distort, and disturb the feminine unconscious in order to free a glorious new Leviathan within.” This mention of the Leviathan strikes me. Known as a biblical sea creature, the Leviathan makes appearances throughout mythologies as a chaotic symbol challenging deities. Sometimes gendered towards the feminine in popular culture, the Leviathan connotes levels of uninhabitability and sustained disruption. In the face of destruction, Hartman and Orpilla’s program notes later ask, “What resurfaces after eons of attack, what cuts, what suffers, what vibrates, what gives way, and what new Thing/s is/are ushered in its wake?”66Program for Asher Hartman and Jasmine Orpilla. Onstage, Orpilla shapeshifts between the casual identifications of gendered tinderboxes, comparisons between the maternal and the geographic, and the embodiment generated as she rips herself from this language. Her embodied performance shifts quickly as she utters words with changing tones. At one moment, she saunters casually. The next, she stumbles back, tightens her shoulders, and lifts her head, as if she is fighting the words exiting her frame.

The thirty minute performance arrives at its ending quickly as it nods to its title: “Switch / Now Switch / Turn it off / Now Switch / Just / Turn it off…” Orpilla repeats alternate versions of this, coming to her finale. Is this the final square off? A plea? The stage has been marked by a laborious effort. As quickly as she entered, she departs by walking offstage. I am chilled by her disappearance, and sensations of her presence remain. Throughout, Orpilla has simultaneously existed amongst the uninhabitable logics she has named while using tongue, psyche, and physicality decrease their force. She undermines through revelation. In her absence, we are left with a thick silence in the room: The struggle has concluded. Suddenly rid of this struggle, we are forced to face the sensations of potential that follow such rupture.