Last night I attended the opening night of YMCĀ, a dance piece produced by Atamira Dance Company and choreographed by Oli Mathiesen. This is not going to be my usual kind of review because the piece and Mathiesen’s message about its themes and meaning have caused me to do a great deal of thinking about the state of queer creativity.
Let me begin by saying I have the utmost respect for Mathiesen. I have watched his career develop over the past few years and have been impressed by his talent and his courage.
I was very excited to see YMCĀ because I was interested to see what he had created but also because the Village People, who are referenced in the show, were a large part of the music I listened to as a young gay man in the 1980s. Their songs were played at gay clubs and became anthemic for many of us of the law reform generation.
I’ll start with my general thoughts about YMCĀ. A crimson carpet lined the floor and to one side two large red panels formed a triangle resembling the leading edge of a box. This set was simple yet striking.
The entire show consisted of a number of different vignettes that morphed into one another using various lighting and musical transitions. The dancing was, as expected, great. This was a very talented and experienced set of performers.
The opening dance was simply delightful. Several dancers in the unmistakable guise of the Village People came on stage to music that evoked that full disco sound from the 1970s. The costumes were not replicas – they were approximations. The leatherman for example was in leather pants, vest and Muir-like cap. The Native American costume was replaced by one with a more Māori identity.
That first number was fun, exuberant, and sexy. It had the vibe and the energy of the 70s and it worked. I lived in that era, I came out in the mid 80s, and this number brought back some happy memories where celebration, flamboyance, and sexual unselfconsciousness were liberating and powerful.
After this came other pieces, some intriguing and clever, but one or two that didn’t have the same energy or dynamism. There was a great scene where a man ropes up a woman in a type of human rodeo. This was well done and inspired. Similarly, there were references to colonisation and the repression of sexuality which were performed well. The final set involved the dancers stripped to their underwear and with blood smeared over their bodies. The soundtrack was full of violins and evoked an 18th-century vibe. This was the best part of the show and incredibly moving.
Now I’d like to talk about context.
What puzzled me was the show was named after the Village People’s biggest hit song and of course the group itself was the inspiration for the show. But who were the Village People? They were gay male icons irrespective of whether the band members themselves were gay or straight. Yet male homosexuality seemed to be absent from this show.
We were presented with man-on-woman action, and women-on-women action. The only ‘gay’ moment was a man going down very briefly on another and then getting a rifle pushed in his face. The romantic elements of this show were not those of male homosexuals. This started me wondering about the place of gay males in the wider queer community, and I’ll return to that later.
But for now I’d like to talk about another matter. In the playbill choreographer Mathieson says the Village People are culturally irrelevant but I wonder if that is coming from a 21st-Century youthful perspective.
The Village People emerged in the 1970s and their heyday was probably the first half of the 1980s just when gay liberation was coming of age. What they offered was an antidote and antithesis to the limp-wristed, psychologically damaged and often murderous gay men depicted in film and television at the time. Gay men were often portrayed as effeminate, pathetic, and predatory. What the Village People presented was the exact opposite – gay men could be masculine, sexy, happy, and most importantly, confident. The central premise of gay liberation was visibility. Being seen was vital and by being unapologetically out there, the Village People had an impact on young gay men like me.
You don’t get more culturally relevant than that! Their music and their costumes may not suit the tastes of some millennials or Gen Z, but at a time of oppression and nascent gay rights movements they were part of our zeitgeist.
Mathieson talks about the costumes being hyper-masculine and I wonder what he means. They are costumes for a pop band. What is hyper-masculine about a guy wearing bike leathers, a cop uniform, or a hard-hat from a construction site?
If we turn our attention to current musicians or cultural icons can we apply the same definition?
Is the leather jacket and cap that Busta Rhymes wears in the video for the song Twerkit, hyper-masculine? Let’s flip the idea. Could we say that Nicki Minaj’s costumes in the video for Twerk are hyper-feminine? What about Britney Spears dressing as a sexually active schoolgirl in Baby One More Time? And then of course there is Ru Paul and her many drag costumes – is she being hyper-feminine?
Why is it that depictions of gay male sexuality become the object of question and derision and why is it that long standing gay male cultural icons are said to be irrelevant when other groups display very similar attributes?
Cultural relevance or irrelevance is entirely subjective. Charlie Chaplain was once culturally relevant. Is he so today?
In the creative communities have we become afraid of male homosexuality? Of masculinity? There is nothing wrong with either of those things. I think perhaps what has happened in the last twenty years is that maleness and masculinity has been conflated with and associated to toxic masculinity.
But they are entirely different things. The former is perfectly normal and acceptable, whilst the latter should rightly be called out and dealt with.
There is another thing to discuss here. The song YMCA was an anthem to gay men who were already going to and hooking up at YMCAs across America. And what do those letters stand for? Young Men’s Christian Association, a religious organisation that wasn’t welcoming of queer men.
Yet for many of us, the song cut through the fake wholesome bullshit that was supposedly Christian morality and turned it around so the these places became associated with gay liberation.
Think of the lyrics: “They have everything for young men to enjoy, you can hang out with all the boys.”
Whether or not you agree with that, the song is bloody good and still beloved today – that alone makes it culturally relevant. Similarly with In the Navy, another anthem that basically said to young gay men, you belong wherever you are. It may be just a pop song, but it is powerful.
I do not wish to rag on Oli Mathieson or Atamira. They have put their heart and soul into this production and I applaud them for it. I have enormous respect for them all.
But I need to say this:
The Village People, named after Greenwich Village, the centre of the gay community in New York, may be culturally irrelevant to people who have never lived in a time when their sexuality was a crime or lived through a horrific pandemic that wiped out hundreds of thousands of gay men. But if you are going to use our queer history and culture as a jumping-off point for a piece of creative work, please check and understand that history before you revise it. The Village People represented sex positivity and strong masculine attributes to a generation of gay men who desperately needed it.
Photo credit – Sophie Miya Smith
YMCĀ
Q Theatre – 13 & 14th October 2023
