Collaborated with Rui Batista
Toronto Metropolitan University
2019
The traditional Georgian folkloric choreography was derived from their ancestral hunting rituals, thus it inherently celebrates the masculinity of men, until it becomes an accomplice to gender norms and sexism. In Georgia, the male dancers’ movements must be martial, virile, and rigid. When a recent generation of male dancers explored a more gender-neutral genre of folkloric dancing that expressed ‘feminine’ features, they faced criticism, oppression, and hostility. This struggle was captured by the movie And Then We Danced by director Levan Akin.
Taking cues from their experiment of choreography, this leather dancing uniform is conceived to celebrate the “queerness” of male dancers and further reject the binary gender constructions in dressology.