The Black Bride

NOTE: This is an excerpt from my critical review titled “Revelation of Secrets & the Aesthetics of “Syjuco Tres Marias””. Photos by Richard “Rochie” Canuto and Jean Marie Syjuco.

In her recent performance at the opening of her sister’s (Michelline Syjuco) jewelry collection at Mag:net Bonifacio High Street, Philippines, last August 8, 2008, Trix Syjuco stunned the audience with her riveting feat in “Black Bride”. Clad with black wedding dress while her collaborator, acting as a priest-bridegroom (Danny Sillada), is wearing a white cassock and white linen with dark shade covering his face.

The contrasting images are hauntingly surreal; the priest, instead of sanctifying the sacrament of matrimony, was going to marry the bride. In the same vein, the bride’s black wedding dress, a traditional symbolic color for a widowed wife in mourning, amplifies the gothic and bizarre imagery of the performance.

The tension heightens when the priest-bridegroom and the bride reenact a bodily sensual encounter in a dance-like movement. Then, the latter, as if awakened from demonic spell, chastises the bride by wrapping her body and face with plastic sheet. The bride, to complete the ritual, sprinkles her head with black and white powder and pours out the holy water on her body.

Passionate, primal and, at times, perturbing, Trix Syjuco’s performances break the wall of her mild-mannered archetypal "self" without subverting the form and content of her live art presentation. Her performances in general, inherently, follow the trail of existential angst, disillusionment, and embittered human relationships.

Her subtle use of imageries and devices is intelligently delivered in a dialectic manner, purging and liberating the harrowing quest of her inner persona as a woman and as an artist and, at the same time, creating a succulent seedbed to grow and nurture her aesthetics.

© Danny C. Sillada

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