Macho Dancer
Eisa Jocson
Dates
Prices
Location
Time & Date
Information
Tickets
Full price: 7 €
Reduced, Friend & Groups 5-9 people: 6 €
Groups 10+ people, People with disabilities - Companions & Unemployed: 5 €
Group ticket reservations at groupsales@sgt.gr
General
Duration: 60 minutes
The performance is in English.
A “macho” man performed in a woman’s body, that of Eisa Jocson. Is this “gender loop”, this androgynous dancing image enough to question our clichés about sexuality, economy and social mobility?
Macho Dancing is a Philippino phenomenon: a dance in the voyeurism industry danced exclusively by men in clubs for women or homosexuals. A dance that flaunts its ‘manliness’ using a somatic idiom for turning an audience on for money. Eisa Jocson assumes the role of the 'macho dancer' and performs its kinesiological vocabulary with surgical cool and impressive precision.
The act of playing with her androgynous image causes a slight shift in every role involved, reformulating the customary relationships between them in the process: the macho dancer comes across as powerful, but might the voyeuristic gaze make him vulnerable and weak? By putting herself in his place, Eisa Jocson creates a rift in our own gaze, an opening that lets questions through about the way gender roles are constructed, about how we perceive the clichés of 'sexiness’, about voyeurism and the body as object.
Eisa Jocson
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Photo © Giannina Ottiker
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Photo © Giannina Ottiker
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Photo © Giannina Ottiker
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Photo © Giannina Ottiker
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Photo © Geloy Concepcion
A woman kicking ass as a macho dancer: prepare yourselves!
Credits
Concept, Choreography and Performance
Eisa Jocson
Light Design
Jan Maertens
Music composition
Lina Lapelyte
Coach
Rasa Alksnyte
Dramaturgical advice
Arco Renz
Technical Manager
Yap Seok Hui
Songs
“Devil's Dance” by Metallica, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler, “Pagbigyang Muli” by Erik Santos, “Careless Whisper” by Wham!
Co-production
Workspacebrussels, Beursschouwburg
Residency and support
Workspacebrussels, Beursschouwburg, wpZimmer
Premiere
24 April 2013 at Beursschouwburg
PARALLEL EVENT
Friday 26 October
After performance talk with the choreographers of "FARCI.E", "Be Careful" and "Macho Dancer". The talk will take place after the end of "FARCI.E".
Moderated by Nadja Argyropoulou, independent curator
“Macho Dance” is the second part of a trilogy by Eisa Jocson about the body as an object in the workplace of the voyeurism industry—what she calls the "happiness production industry". In the first work, The Death of a pole dancer, she stripped the pole dancer's role of its constructed ‘sexy’ aura. In the third, Host, she lets the audience’s gaze into the private moments of the Japayuki, Philippino performers who travel to Japan to perform in clubs, entertaining ‘low and mid-level executives’ by playing a specific role with roots deep in Japanese sex culture.
Eisa embarked on the male role of the Macho Dancer when she saw how people had identified her with the role of the pole dancer thanks to her previous solo, even though the work had set out to strip the role of its myth.
Although she has been active in the performing arts for a number of years, she recently became more widely known when she appeared in the video clip for the song “How You Like My Cut” by the electronic music star Peaches, in which she actually dances extracts from “Macho Dancer”.
“Macho Dancer” won the Zurich Cantonal Bank’s Recognition Award in 2013.
In 2014, she staged her first one-woman show, entitled “Philippine Macho Academy” (2014), at the University of the Philippines’ Vargas Museum.
Eisa Jocson Bio
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