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CELEBRITY SKIN: On October 4 at Symphony Hall, superstar mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli kicks off the ’02-’03 FleetBoston Celebrity Series season, inaugurating a high-culture marathon that brings nearly 50 international classical, jazz, dance, and performing artists to town through May. Non-subscriber tickets go on sale this Monday; among the hot items are violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter (October 16 at Symphony Hall), tenor Ben Heppner (January 11 at Jordan Hall), cellist Yo-Yo Ma with pianist Kathryn Stott (January 22 at Symphony), mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves (February 2 at Symphony), Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Vienna Philharmonic (February 28 at Symphony), a rare concert uniting the Marsalis clan that’ll include pianist patriarch Ellis and sons Wynton, Branford, and Delfeayo (March 3 at Symphony), pianist Dubravka Tomsic (April 6 at Symphony), and the annual engagements by the Mark Morris Dance Group (March 13 through 16 at the Shubert Theatre) and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (April 22 through 27 at the Wang Theatre). On the local tip, the FBCS’s "Boston Marquee" mini-fest of Boston-based performers includes the premiere of an FBCS-commissioned work by Anna Myer and Dancers (January 31 and February 1 at the Tsai Performance Center) and pianist Robert Levin in the world premiere of John Harbison’s Second Piano Sonata (April 13 at Jordan Hall). In the wild-card slot, NPR humorist David Sedaris bows at Symphony on October 11. For a full schedule, visit www.celebrityseries.org, or call (617) 482-2595 for more info.

DON’T BE CRUEL: Who knows how long Elvis Costello’s rock-and-roll Indian summer will last? When I Was Cruel (Island), his recent reunion with most of the Attractions, is gritty enough, but you never know when he’ll go back to hanging out with Burt Bacharach or Anne Sofie von Otter. So we’re resigned to seeing him as much as possible this time around; on the second leg of a tour behind the album, he returns to the Orpheum Theatre on October 21. Tickets go on sale this Saturday at 10 a.m., through Ticketmaster (617-931-2000), but as is so often the case these days, those of you with modems get a head start. Log onto boston.cc.com for links to an in-progress Internet-only pre-sale. You can get a similar advantage if you’re looking for seats to Gov’t Mule at the Orpheum on October 9 or jazzman Joshua Redman’s Elastic Band at the Orpheum on October 10, both of which go on sale over the phones on Friday at 10 a.m.

NEXT WEEKEND:

Rochelle Fabb

The Los Angeles–based performance artist Rochelle Fabb is crazy, sexy, and cool. In the course of her career, which has taken her from Hollywood (where she was part of the Knitting Factory’s "LA All-Stars of Performance Art") to Berlin and Marnay-sur-Seine, she’s performed a strip act in a wheelchair and simulated both abortion and the act of giving the pope a blow job (at a Mexico City convent, no less). In her latest piece, At First Blush, which she’ll perform at Mobius next weekend, the segment that’s apt to bring the house down is a re-creation of the penultimate scene from Flashdance, where she portrays a repressed businesswoman contemplating suicide.

The Mobius performance is a homecoming of sorts for Fabb, who grew up in New York but moved here to attend Boston University and stayed on to become Mobius’s publicist. "I was a punk-rocker when I came to Boston," she says, over the phone from LA, and she wound up haunting such local clubs as the Rat and the Channel. She was drawn to the performance-art end of punk — Wendy O. Williams, Nina Hagen — and began performing her own work at Mobius and the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center and with Somerville’s Invisible Cities group. She describes that early work as "very dark, somewhat disturbing, very surreal and mysterious. There was one called Masonairy that I did which was a woman who started out encased in plastic wrap and ended up in a bell jar toward the end, and she kept taking feathers our of her mouth. I was into using all these different sounds; I used pirated recordings of restraining orders — including one of mine, actually, I had to sneak a tape recorder into the hearing."

In 1996, Fabb joined the company of the world-renowned performance artist Rachel Rosenthal. It was her big break; by the time Rosenthal retired, in 1999, Fabb was making a name for herself with solo works like Barely Breeding: A Hysterical Pregnancy in One Act, which was inspired by the case of a Filipino man who claimed to be pregnant. "It was on Good Morning America, and it was the most amazing story — the doctors all thought it was what they call a hysterical pregnancy, but it turned out to be a ruse. He made the whole thing up because wanted to marry his lover and get out of the Philippines."

For a while, Fabb gave up performing and got her first "real" job with a women’s-health organization. It was not a happy experience. "I was surrounded by these mostly affluent white women in their 40s and 50s with PhDs wearing dashikis, and I realized there was this vast chasm between them and women like me in their 20s and 30s. I don’t consider myself a feminist: I don’t like the label ‘feminist,’ I don’t think labels are useful. But it was the most oppressive environment I’d ever worked in! These women were awful to each other. And the only time you talked about vaginas was when you were talking about manual aspiration abortion or STDs, and the whole experience took all the fun out of sex and the body. I love women, I do, but it was estrogen overload. I thought I was gonna die working there, and then I got an invitation to do a piece, and it [At First Blush] just came out of me like a violent allergic reaction to this hostile environment."

In At First Blush, Fabb plays three characters: a high-school majorette ("It’s about going back to adolescence where you wanted to get out and be alive but you were sent away to your room, about that piercing longing you had when you were in your pre-sexuality stage"); a "baby doll" in a cherry dress ("That one’s about just wanting to be free, to sound the clarion call to go back to a state of full-bodied self-expression, where you were not afraid to run around naked and open yourself up and explore your own body"); and a businesswoman in a red suit, enacting a scenario that "shows her suffocation and eventual self-destruction from repressed desire." That’s where Flashdance comes in.

"Why Flashdance? Because it was a pop-culture catalyst for stimulating my sexual awakening in girlhood. Also, I think the choreography in Flashdance is absurdly sexy — so over the top and highly recognizable for all those who suffered through the film. And most of it was done by a man in a wig. Plus, it looks great when done in a red Albert Nippon business suit."

Rochelle Fabb performs At First Blush September 13 through 15 at 8 p.m. at Mobius, 354 Congress Street. Tickets are $12; call (617) 542-7416.

BY CARLY CARIOLI

Issue Date: September 5 - 12, 2002
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