Sportchek

Friday night, I was at The Harbourfront Theatre for Sporting Life, a remount on the 20th anniversary of choreographer's Julie Sasso's first major work. One attendee was particularly ecstatic, declaring that everyone should have the experience of seeing their favourite work again after such a long time.

I wasn't quite as transported away by this episodic composition examining the violence implicit in typical male interactions. But I was intrigued by several set pieces. The male dancers (and one woman) dressed in the standard suit and tie engaged in often competitive posturing through kinetic and jagged dance. Several times, they were literally racing each other around the stage.

It was the accidental juxtaposition or subtext that I found most interesting. As the Asian businessman held down a struggling Black colleague, sometimes under the gaze of a Caucasian coworker, I thought about recent examinations of the role of other POC in the Black Lives Matter movement or the harmful "model minority" myth. When the dancers donned dresses and acted "feminine", the female performer seemed, to me, to gracefully burst free of her constricted menswear. Meanwhile, the men could not "pass", no matter how much they tiptoed or gyrated. Was it because women are trained (or at least expected) to know how to "be like men" but men are ridiculed if they "act like women"?