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Dressed in a pleather halter top and towering stilettos, eyes lined in black and lips painted red, Eisa Jocson clops into the BodyVox studio. She carries a bulky black bag over her shoulder. We're in a circle around her, some sitting, some standing, many fanning themselves with their programs. The house lights are on. There is no music. Jocson's heels thud against the floor.
Jocson, a dancer from the Philippines performing as part of PICA's Time-Based Art Festival, goes through the careful process of setting up a pole—unpacking each piece, screwing the metal rods together, wiping it down. She's frequently pulling her long dark hair to one side or the other. At one point, she timidly makes eye contact with a man in the audience and asks for his assistance in setting up the pole. Once it's vertical and properly aligned, she places a gentle hand on his shoulder and whispers into his ear: "Thank you."
These are the first 10 minutes—nearly the first half—of Death of a Pole Dancer, and they're entrancing. From the moment she enters the studio, Jocson has demystified the allure of the pole dancer: This is labor. Beautiful and seductive, yes, but also hard and often mundane.
The rest of the piece has little you'd recognize from trips to Sassy's or Union Jack's. Jocson tugs and heaves on the pole as if trying to uproot it. Later, she throws her chest against it, a violently repetitive action that sounds even more painful than it looks. The light casts four sets of shadows on the floor. When Jocson finally flings herself up onto the pole and twirls around with easy grace, it's surprising—the pole, which had been her foe, has suddenly become her partner.
Jocson has been pole dancing for about seven years. When I interviewed her, she spoke about this identity as a pole dancer feeling uncomfortably close to her. Because she fits the expectations of a nightclub performer—young, foreign, pretty—audiences can have a hard time distinguishing Jocson from the identity she's performing. But this is also one of the things that makes the stakes feel so high in Death of a Pole Dancer and makes the arc of the performance so gripping.
For the second half of the evening, Jocson adopts an entirely different movement vocabulary: that of macho dancing. Characterized by snakelike undulations and set to power ballads, it's a dance form unique to the Philippines, and performed exclusively by young men in nightclubs. So when we enter BodyVox's second, bigger studio and see Jocson stomp onto the stage in steel-toed cowboy boots—face wiped clean of makeup, hair pulled back into a ponytail, gaze confrontational rather than demure—it's startling.
Photo by Giannina Ottiker
Her command of her body is just as startling as the change in expression. She ripples her torso and spins on her knees with phenomenal control. Each microbend she makes with her fingers is careful and taut. Some of the movements are more overtly sexual, as when she grinds against the floor. Others are straight-up silly, like when she licks a flexed biceps to the tune of "Total Eclipse of the Heart."
But for all of Jocson's technical skill, it's hard not to ask what makes this more than mimicry, and certain elements (hey look, she's got a fake penis in her shorts!) feel overly calculated or on-the-nose—we get it. After the emotionally robust role she played in Death of a Pole Dancer, this macho dancer feels almost like a cipher. There's a blankness to her eyes, an unsettling sense of distance between performer and performed identity.
Yet there's a compelling strangeness to this, too, and Macho Dancer prompts countless questions about a performance's context. What happens, most obviously, when a woman appropriates the vocabulary of macho dancing? What happens when she dances without music? When she's at a contemporary-performance festival instead of at a nightclub? When she's using her body as a tool for art, rather than as an economic commodity?
Jocson's performance continues for only one more evening, and it's followed tonight by Pepper Pepper's Critical Mascara drag ball, which is sure to spur its own knotty questions about gender, appropriation and sexuality—just with a bit more blood and glitter.
SEE IT: Eisa Jocson is at BodyVox Dance Center, 1201 NW 17th Ave. 8:30 pm Saturday, Sept. 12-13. $16-$20. Tickets here.
WWeek 2015
