An ensemble dance-theater work
A 2017 Bessie Award nominee for Most Outstanding Production, as well as Best Sound Design, The End of Men; An Ode to Ocean was commissioned and produced by, The Joyce Theater, off site on the main stage auditorium at Abrons Art Center in New York. The newest iteration in this series, The End of Men, Again conjures religiosity and cult-like rituals that aim to investigate masculine vulnerability and the dynamics of domination and surrender.
Under the Trump regime, choreographer Vanessa Anspaugh finds a renewed relevance in her continued research and critique of male masculinities with the remounting of her dance-theater work, The End of Men, Again. Interweaving demanding physicality with spoken dialogue, sonic religiosity, and sublime virtuosity, Anspaugh investigates masculine vulnerability and the historical and unyielding dynamics of cultural domination.
From her subject position as a lesbian choreographer and mother to a young son, Anspaugh, along with an all male cast, explores how power lives in, and between, all of the participating bodies.
We all know that men often sit at the helm of most war and religious hegemony and oppression. And then, so often in contemporary dance, we encounter male choreographers who direct all-female and mixed gender casts, but how often do we see female choreographers directing all male casts? To Anspaugh, this arrangement implicitly unearths questions of authority and power within creative process and production.
In The End of Men: Again Anspaugh explores a new realm of representation to discover what kind of dynamics emerge within this all-male cast. Here, she turns her attention away from the fringes and focus on the Center, on dominance, and privilege. In short, she is taking on men, maleness, and masculinity.
Writes Anspaugh, “The End of Men, Again functions as an exploration, a critique, a celebration, and as an exorcism of myriad masculine archetypes. The work efforts to exist as an ongoing inquiry into the legacy of maleness my son will be contending with as he grows up.”
Partners in creation for this work include:
Sound artist and script writer Ryan MacDonalad
Lighting designer Kathy Couch
Performers include:
Massamiliano Balduzzi, Lacina Colibaly, Gilbert Reyes, Tristan Koepke, & Simon Thomas-Train, Jesse Zarrit , Connor Voss.
End of Men is available to tour
Vanessa Anspaugh is currently remounting an updated version of The End of Men: Again for touring with a smaller cast. She welcomes post-performance discussions as well as offering student & community (movement, voice, & theater) workshops. Talk back is also available to be facilitated by Rob Oken, Pro-feminist Men’s Movement writer and activist Rob Oken.
For more information contact
Jane Forde, Project Manager
jane.r.forde [at] gmail [dot] com
207 608 1853
Press
The New Yorker
Goings On About Town, The End of Men
The Huffington Post
Interview with Vanessa about The End of Men
Movement Research Journal
Holding Space for Multiplicity, Vanessa Anspaugh & The End of Men
Culture Bot
Review of The End of Men, by Maura Donohue
Culture Bot
Interview with Vanessa Anspaugh
Critical Review
Ms. Anspaugh is not rooting for the end of men, she wants to make a better man.
— The New York Times
So, I watched this work as a mother to a son and was moved to tears and delighted into laughing out loud at the unfolding antics….It’s a compositionally stunning feat of organized chaos that hints at testosterone flushed systems and resulting behaviors…
We will need the fierce kindness of this ode (Anspaugh’s, The End of Men) to bring the healers alongside the warriors and compassion instead of conquest into our dominant ideology.
— Culture Bot
The Joyce Theater’s “Joyce Unleashed” series sponsors two talented and youngish choreographers in separate spaces… Vanessa Anspaugh in The End of Men; An Ode to Ocean
— The New Yorker
An all-male cast hardly seems to scream “feminism” to the casual viewer, but the patriarchal structures of dance have long rested on all- or mostly-female troupes of willowy girls in tutus, their movements decided by a male choreographer with his own vision that, unlike an individual dancer’s performance, can live forever. In “The End of Men,” audiences will only see men onstage, but the more powerful force — the guiding consciousness — will be that of Anspaugh.
— The Huffington Post