Real Men at Play: Massive Company's 'The Brave'

Becoming Afriqueer: Conjuring Alternative Masculinities Through Site-Specific Performance, 2024

Excerpt: Afriqueer begins in darkness. The sun set several hours ago and we shuffle forward, hunching our shoulders against the winter chill, hurrying to follow the bobbing glass lanterns held by those who took our tickets at the gate. An audience of around ten at South Africa's 2016 National Arts Festival, we venture inwards, the paths of the botanical gardens seeming rough and unfamiliar terrain. Suddenly, a wolfishly charming sinewy man clad in aviator shades and a faux fur coat slips out of the shadows. In poetic, flirtatious and threatening tones he entreats us to follow him into a 'place of placelessness', where we will bear witness to a parable of how the stars were made through the burning love of two boys for one another. As we journey on, we come across performers tucked in hidden places, encountering both private celebrations and profound sorrows. Here, in an alcove under a tree: a blankfaced civil servant trading masculine work clothes for a filmy gown, relieved smile illuminated by lantern-light as he softly strokes its fabric. There, skating the horizon: a stately figure in a striped rainbow leotard and tutu under an umbrella decorated with fairy lights, entering and exiting the periphery of our awareness (See Figure 4.9). Following our guide's voice and escorted by five male dancers clad in traditional Botswanan skins and blankets, the experience of Afriqueer is otherworldly and at times profoundly disorienting. But our trickster guide had warned us at the gate: such magic is not gentle.

2022

A distinction between creativity and commerce as opposing forces is central to discourses surrounding popular music, and this distinction facilitates a gendered hierarchy of valued and devalued forms of musical labour. The practice of singing has typically been coded as feminine and has held a lower status than the masculinized practices of playing an instrument or composing. Accordingly, male pop singers tend to be assessed as inauthenticand, by extension, insufficiently masculineby some critics and audiences. In this article, I investigate how entwined notions of creativity and authenticity might shape contemporary pop artists' representations of masculinity. Through a case study of Justin Timberlake's music video Say Something (2018), I demonstrate how the showcasing of particular forms of musical labour can function to authenticate constructions of masculinity in accordance with artistic and creative ideals with roots in the Romantic era. My approach to audiovisual analysis merges perspectives from critical musicology and cultural studies, in order to investigate the processes by which 'real' masculinities are articulated on multiple levels.

Taking as their premise the assertion that in light of the continued burgeoning of studies investigating female identities in the theatre, a failure to investigate or 'define' masculinities could result in it remaining the 'unexamined gender' comprehensible merely as, what Kimmel calls, a type of 'antifemininity' (126), the authors of this ambitious study address this through a comprehensive survey and categorisation of expressions of masculinity in Australian theatre since 1950.

18th IUAES World Congress, 2018

In this paper, I work with young aspiring actors trajectories, particularly interested in understand how do they negotiate expressions of masculinity in their bodies in the process of interpreting characters. During six months, between 2015 and 2016, I have made participant observation in two theater groups of a private university of the United States: I have followed classes, rehearsals and presentations, as well as conducted interviews. I pursue the following question: how do bodies, while acting, update and produce repertoires of gender and sexuality?

Theatre Research International, 2018

What does the #MeToo movement reveal about how acting is understood at the present time, both in practice and by the public at large? The claim of one convicted abuser, New Zealand acting coach Rene Naufahu, was that his sexual offending in the classroom was simply preparing his students for the ‘real world of acting’. Drawing from Elin Diamond's argument that dramatic realism does not simply reflect the real but in fact produces it, I examine how figures like Naufahu promulgate certain notions of acting in order to produce a reality that legitimates abusive behaviour. Furthermore, I suggest that this behaviour is often a performance of acting itself whereby the actor, director or coach, in a selectively self-reflexive manner, exploits their professional ‘role’ in order to exert power over their victim. I argue that one way of contesting real-world practices that rely on hegemonic assumptions of what acting is or should be is to redeploy the critical terminology of acting to ana...

Studies in Theatre and Performance

2017

Patriarchal systems and hegemonic masculinity have consequences for all genders. One result is men’s submersion of authentic inclinations in favor of performing a socially constructed and rewarded “mask of masculinity.” Getting behind the mask can create space between self and system where dogmatic standards can be (re)examined toward authentic authorship. Similar to hooks’ (Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 4: 1–12, 1991) conception of theory as liberatory practice, a framework for understanding masculine performativity is offered and concepts related to intersectionality and queer authorship proposed as strategies for creating space for counter-hegemonic praxis.

This thesis focuses on notions of ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ theatre in two Pacific Island contexts, Aotearoa and Rapa Nui. It explores how notions of ‘tradition’ are imagined, recreated, and performed through the ‘contemporary’ creative arts, with a particular focus on theatre. It offers insight about culturally-situated understandings of ‘tradition’, and seeks to acknowledge diverse meanings and perceptions of theatre that exist across diverse Pacific Island cultures, languages, and epistemologies. Ideas about what constitutes ‘tradition’ have been significantly impacted by colonial histories, and that these culturally and historically situated ideas have wide-ranging implications for creative possibilities in the ‘contemporary’ performing arts. ‘Traditional’ performances are often seen as acceptable and relevant to Indigenous communities in Aotearoa and Rapa Nui, contributing to processes of cultural reclaiming and revitalisation. Although cultural continuity is a signifi...

Performance Research, 2019

[Please download from official link here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13528165.2019.1718444] This article argues that the main effect of revelations of sexual harassment prompted by the #MeToo movement, the resulting changes in workplace policy, and heightened sensitivities around gender representation on stage has been to reconfigure the assemblage of mainstream theatre. The analysis is pursued across three distinct case studies from Australia: watching a production of Arthur Miller‘s canonical mid-century play 'A View from the Bridge'; rehearsing Sarah Kane‘s notoriously violent 'Blasted'; and reading the publicly available documents relating to a defamation case successfully brought by Australian actor Geoffrey Rush over tabloid allegations of sexual misconduct during a production of Shakespeare‘s 'King Lear'. The article demonstrates that new connections between different aspects of the theatrical process and its place in the wider society have come to prominence, and are influencing working practices, creative processes and public attitudes.