Lonesome Cowboy spectacle ← → ×

Premiere at Festival La Bâtie, Geneva, September 1st, 2009. Rerun 2012. Choreography for 6 dancers.

Research on masculinity
With his dancers, Philippe Saire questions the masculine identity and explores, in a playful way, how both individuals and groups function. By using play and clearly defined rules, Lonesome Cowboy approaches notions such as team spirit, solidarity, confrontation, rapprochement and avoidance, belonging to a group, risk taking… Seeking inspiration in the codes of sport, the piece is performed as a physical experiment on masculine relationships within the group. Here, the group tends towards gregariousness and to a sort of acceptable proximity, because they are lost in the crowd. A male duet concludes the piece with a treatment of separation and fusion during a long sequence of struggle, obliging a certain intimacy which is fought against here.

Man and his incessant desire to dominate. Man and his sense of being part of a team. Man and his need to take risks, to confront himself, to belong to a group… Philippe Saire uses powerful choreography to embody the numerous facets of masculine identity. Six dancers experiment with physical relationships within a group of men, seeking inspiration in the codes of sporting activity. A long struggle between two of them, personifies the need for fusion and separation of this male duet. The power of direct body language, expressed by dancers whose generosity drives them to near exhaustion.
P.-L. Chantre | Programme La Bâtie-Festival of Geneva

The reflection was inspired by Elisabeth Badinter’s book, XY, on masculine identity, which unravelled with great pertinence the reasons underlying the affirmation of masculinity and its excesses. 15 years after this work was written, the situation has hardly changed and the confusion that she describes, that of «a mutilated man, torn between contradictory images, continuously repressing an essential part of his nature».

Masculinity is still in search of its identity. For years, it defined itself solely in opposition: an absolute need to differentiate itself from the female, the maternal. Asserting itself against any possibility of assimilation into the feminine. «Protesting», as Badinter put it. At a later stage, it had to protest against this very form of protestation, reject its macho image. Today, it creates «hominism» and its related demands. Badinter must be smiling; she who simply sought a form of reconciliation.

The subject of this piece, even if it is basically inspired by the present state of masculinity, has no didactic pretensions and is not meant to illustrate it in any way. These data served as a starting point and as nourishment for the research, but the work itself is to do with the effects of this situation and their direct physical transcription.

«In this context, with the group of six dancers, we decided to approach one of the last bastions of the male-only group, where what we might call «virile» values are still upheld: the world of sport. We then invented several match scenes that are played out for real and so are improvised during the show. We inserted some written sequences, in order to allow a sense of shift and provide some highlights. The very direct and concrete action imposed by this use of real-time play dictated the choice of gestures, which are also meant to be very engaged and stripped of all decorative features. It is a physical style that actually calls for an almost physical response from the audience.
The treatment used in the duet (created in 2004 in Dublin for the DTI and source of inspiration of the piece) was in that sense also a good benchmark: a long attempt to master the other that is just as eloquent on the mastery we try to achieve over ourselves, and which ends up in an irresistible need for fusion. Of the game, we kept the sense of emulation, the fraternal spirit, the physical promiscuity, the gregariousness… but also the need to dominate and sometimes the feeling of regression…
The show passes from one style to another, constantly slipping in concrete references at moments where the meaning is much more open. The final duet synthesizes all that has been at stake until that moment. The foundation of the entire piece is a questioning of masculine identity.»

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