It was a packed house Friday night for Eisa Jocson’s two-part performance of Death of a Pole Dancer and Macho Dancer.
The first thing you notice about Eisa Jocson is that she’s an incredible performer—masterful and captivating with her control—even though the majority of her first piece, Death of a Pole Dancer, consisted of Jocson merely assembling her portable pole (while wearing approximately 5-inch stilettos) in the space of Bodyvox. Half of the audience sat on the floor of Bodyvox’s studio space, pretzel style, and half stood up. Eventually we get to the dancing, which initially and primarily consists of Jocson violently throwing her body against the pole, in complete silence—aside from the rhythmic tapping of her foot on the floor.
I found myself looking around the room, losing attention during this piece, however Jocson has a quiet confidence that pulls you back into the performance. Things do pick up a bit when Jocson begins dancing on the pole; she is upside down when the music kicks in—the song is “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself” by Dusty Springfield. Jocson is suspended upside down, on the pole, for a long, long time before she slips to the floor. She lies there belly down. This is the end of the performance. The audience files out of the space, clapping, and trying not to step on Jocson’s faux-dead body.
After a 20-minute intermission, we filed back in to Bodyvox and took our seats. We were greeted by a fog machine and Metallica. Macho Dancer is a full-fledged runway performance. “Devil’s Dance” was playing on the speaker when Jocson appeared on stage in black cowboy boots, camo hot pants, knee pads, and a rosary.
The term “Macho Dancer,” can probably use some parsing. Jocson is Filipino, and in the Philippines macho dancing is a really particular kind of club dancing; as Jocson explained in an interview with ArtAsiaPacific magazine, it’s “performed by young men for both male and female clients. It is an economically motivated language of seduction that employs notions of masculinity as body capital. The language is a display of the glorified and objectified male body as well as a performance of vulnerability and sensitivity. The music used in macho dancing is mostly power ballads, sung by artists such as Mariah Carey or Celine Dion, as well as rock and soft rock, like Metallica and Scorpions.”
Jocson’s performance is mostly a study in movement, also in gender. After her performance on Friday night, I was left thinking about what it means to move in a masculine way: so many of the movements in Macho Dancer are about making yourself look bigger, about broad stances, about lunging forward (and pelvic thrusts, naturally). It’s helpful to see Death of a Pole Dancer and Macho Dancer together, for comparison. As Jocson said in that same interview, “Pole dancing is vertically oriented and works with the illusion of lightness and grace, while macho dancing is horizontally oriented, and works on the illusion of weight and volume. It’s more compact.”
To further explain this, I present to you this manual that Jocson created, with illustrations by Jocson herself:
I’ll leave you with this video, a trailer for Jocson’s Macho Dancer: