By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – Pasqualina Azzarello flipped the first tarot-like card and gasped.

The card’s face bore a hand-drawn chicken leg.

“Shazam!” she shouted, swiping the air with a hocus-pocus wave.

“This is your source of motivation,” she said. “Beneath the skin is bone and muscle. It is your inner motivation.”

For five minutes she went on, her voice continuing in a breathy and mystical monotone. The next card was a vacuum cleaner. After that was the color red.

Every few minutes, Azzarello added another, “Shazam,” dragging it out until it had three syllables.

The performance had a goal.

Somewhere between the mundane images and the over-the-top characterization, she asked, “What does this mean to you?”

Azzarello sought relevance. If only for a second, she inspired introspection. That, a laugh and a little conversation, was all she intended.

“I think it’s a way of reaching out to people,” the Brooklyn artist later said, sitting in the driver’s seat of a van with “Black Factory” painted on its side.

The factory, parked outside the Gray Cage at Bates College, is about to begin a trek across the Northeast, stopping in New York City, Newark and Pittsburgh.

Part museum and part stage, the Black Factory was invented by Bates artist and theater lecturer William Pope.L.

It began as a funny, sometimes biting, commentary on race in America, accompanied by the slogan, “We make opportunity, not blackness.”

Visitors are faced with donated artifacts – articles that suggest African-American culture, such as bits of clothing, photos and books – and acting routines.

Azzarello is one of three artists in the traveling troupe. She is the only one of them who wears a tiara.

She was chosen from a national search of artists – both men and women – who vied for the title of Miss Black Factory 2005.

Azzarello was finishing her master’s work at Rutgers University when she spotted a flier for the search. She was already making her living as a performance artist.

“I have never felt more qualified in my life,” said Azzarello, 30. She had wanted to work with Pope.L since meeting him years earlier, she said.

And she wanted to work for the factory, which brings its work into the public.

“I really value penetrating those spaces where people are living their lives,” said Azzarello in a serious moment.

However, with her tarot cards in front of her, she’s – shazam! – a different person.

At the close of the reading, she placed her hands on the edges of the card table and looked at her male subject, dripping wet from the rain.

“When you wake up in the morning, you will be a Native American woman,” she said solemnly.

“And you will be in New Mexico.”