Eisa Jocson is a contemporary choreographer and dancer from the Philippines. Originally trained as a visual artist, she won her first pole-dancing competition in Manila in 2010, and started pole ‘tagging’ and other public interventions in Manhattan and various cities.
Since then, Jocson has developed a powerful body of work that takes a fresh perspective on the commodification of the laboring body. CounterPulse, in collaboration with SFMOMA, will be presenting the entire suite of works in one weekend, Death of Pole Dancer, Macho Dancer, and the North American premiere of Host.
From pole dancing to macho dancing, Eisa Jocson investigates the labour and representations of the dancing body in the service industry, and exposes gender formation, seduction politics, and Filipino social mobility.
In the double billed evening of works on Friday and Saturday, Death of the Pole Dancer interrogates the way we look at what we think we look at. The audience is brought to reflect on what they witness: a woman during the act of pole dancing. The performance renegotiates notions such as voyeurism and restrain, vulnerability and violence, sexuality and power.
Macho Dancer, explores the specific movement vocabulary and physicality of this form that is a unique phenomenon in the Philippines. Macho dancing is an economically-motivated language of seduction that employs masculinity as body capital. By framing a woman’s body in the act, Jocson challenges our perception of sexuality and questions gender as a tool for social mobility.
Join us Sunday for the North American premiere of Jocson’s Host,visiting the hostess clubs of Tokyo, where Filipino female and transgender hostesses engage in ‘affective labour’ by performing a version of femininity that caters to Japanese salary men. These hostesses employ mimetic strategies and hybrid identities to survive and succeed. It is in this role that we first discover Jocson: she is our host, receiving and entertaining the audience as guests. Host invites us to experience and reflect on feminine image formation by displaying forms of entertainment strategies associated with femininity and by exhibiting labor and body politics.
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