BEAUTIFUL EUNUCHS to Make Premiere at The Anchor with Burning Bones Physical Theatre
The butoh-based work is created by artistic director Frankie Worster Mulinix and explores themes of gender identity.
Burning Bones Physical Theatre has announced the premiere of Beautiful Eunuchs, a butoh-based evening of dance and physical theatre created by Burning Bones artistic director Frankie Worster Mulinix (they/them). The show runs August 28-30 at The Anchor, 645 Grant Street SE Atlanta, GA 30312.
Looksmaxxing, tradwives, resurgent transphobia, rigid rollbacks toward performative heteronormativity and binary gender roles... Hard-fought freedoms and fluidities of identity and love are under siege by regressive forces of compliance and conformity. Beautiful Eunuchs crawls under the erected barbed wire fences, leaps over the rotting trenches, and leads those who dare into the shadowed wilderness beyond the binary of who and how we can be.
Comprised of two acts — “Feminist Fatigue” and “Masc” — Beautiful Eunuchs explores the divergent demands, pleasures, limitations, opportunities, and satisfactions ascribed in our culture to different genders, in dialogue with Jean Baudrillard's conception of the human body as the "finest consumer object." In a cultural moment when reactionary authoritarians elevate compliant caricatures of gender, Beautiful Eunuchs dares to embody and expose the insubordinate multidimensionality of our ungovernable selves.
“Butoh has been, from its beginning, a transgressive form of dance and physical theatre,” says Mulinix. “Often called 'the dance of darkness,' it was born in Japan during the aftermath of World War Two, when all the surfaces that had once seemed so simple and certain had fallen apart to reveal something far more bestial beneath. Butoh was, however, soundly rejected by the polite society of its founding time and place for embodying all we're told must remain hidden in the shadows. Nearly a century later, butoh has become a global art form, yet one that still challenges artists and audiences alike to trespass in the dark forests where 'civilized' people aren't supposed to go.”
Directed and choreographed by Mulinix in collaboration with the dancers, this production of Beautiful Eunuchs features lighting design by Lindsey Sharpless (she/her), with butoh performed by Thomas Bell (he/him), Sharon C. Carelock (she/her), Hiroko Kelly (she/her), Holly Stevenson (she/her), and Frankie Worster Mulinix (they/them).
Content Warning: This production contains recorded audio and live spoken descriptions related to gender dysphoria, body dysmorphia, reproduction, bullying, cruelty to animals, aging, death, and other difficult topics related to gender roles.
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