Review: DELIGHTS AND DEBAUCHERIES ABOUND IN ASIATOPA XO STATE at Arts Centre Melbourne

If you've been in the habit of blinking lately, you might have missed the fact that Arts Centre Melbourne has transformed to house the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts, so you might want to cut that out and head to a box office hashire hashire! What transpired on my visit was one of the most tantalising entertaining bewildering evenings this reviewer has thus far ever experienced.

It will continue to be criminal, the way Asian culture has been homogenised and fetishized by Western ideologies including Australia, but being our closest neighbours, ASIATOPA presents startling and diverse discoveries, true gifts for our interpretation, entertainment and insight. For those audiences seeking only a taste, a tapas plate of what ASIATOPA has to offer, an introductory entrée then you need only XO STATE. Under the red lights of Level 3, Melbourne's most adventurous can be met with all kinds of interactive opportunities and some of the most scintillating performance works from our corner of the globe.

MACHO DANCER
There is a subtle, yet specific, physicality that comes from having one's genitals protrude from their pelvic floor in such a manner that inherently commands society's hegemony. Eisa Jocson has it mastered. From the first step onto the stage, the assault of masculine tropes begins of antiquated Western aesthetics, cowboy and bodybuilder which contrast starkly and sensually with the exoticism of the performer's Philippine heritage. The performance is a dance in so far as it sequences poses and movement to stay within the firm boundaries of what its accepted masculine, but is all the same an intoxicating and invigorating experience.

Jocson's piece made intense remarks on what makes a man vs what makes the masculine, highlighting what of masculinity requires endurance, and what of the female gaze requires investigation. The stereotypical markers of bare chest and erect penis were in Macho juxtaposed with belaboured, beleaguered, sweat-drenched emotion and a rolling, finger-twitching sense of the vaginal, to create shatter the degradation of androgyny.

XO DARK feat. ARISTOPHANES
To step into the garden of XO DARK where Aristophanes ruled the decks, accompanied by a kaleidoscope of performative talents live and digital, was like the Moulin Rouge Made in Taiwan. The evening brought as much enjoyment out of watching the performers, as watching people watching and responding. Much is to be gained from the emerging understandings of sexuality within Asian culture. The expression of sexuality and intimacy here is not as many of the audience would experience, but fresh and still somewhat steeped in a taboo that protects and sanctifies the body and sincerity of sex that we have lost. With sexual liberation coming of age in the digital era, the performers cross boundaries Westerns can barely stomach, let alone fathom, for all that we may feel superior in our freedoms.

The humility and resilience of Asian works was marvellous for it did not take itself so seriously as to refrain from humouring the audience as much as arousing and discomfiting them; to feel the sustained emotional notes of the works, and the inner transition from entertainment to intellectualisation to confusion to frustration to enlightenment and release meant this work will not be ignored or tokenised or dismissed, and neither will its origins.

Tickets available here.

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