Eisa Jocson is an artist in the field of performance. Her research on the practice of macho dancing, or dancing by male performers in a gay bar, had culminated in a performance piece titled "Macho Dancer." She elaborates on this project in the exhibition "Philippine Macho Academy", a fictive structure of institution that serves as a classroom where the principles of macho dancing in the Philippines are fleshed out and conveyed.
This exhibition is a documentation of Jocson's research and an articulation of the macho dance movement vocabulary. It comprises artefacts, texts, drawings, video, installation, and performance. It is a course on the physical principles of macho dancing based on a syllabus designed through a woman artist's macho dance practice. Central in this project is the affective labor of a man performed in the woman's body. The latter undergoes both physical change and social habit, ultimately complicating the notions of the feminine and the macho.
All this is fleshed out in the body and its movement. The artist makes ample reference to it in the form of drawing and performance, as well as the ethnographic details of her research and collaboration with practitioners. She also notates it in the modernist method of rendering the turns of the body graphic, and so reflecting on erotic desire and the devices of modernity. This is her aesthetic articulation of a striptease: a laying bare of the gendered body that finally becomes queer.
Philippine Macho Academy by Eisa Jocson
Feb. 17 - Mar. 8, 2014
Vargas Museum