The End Of Men

Portland-based choreographer Vanessa Anspaugh brings her 2017 Bessie Award nominee for Most Outstanding Production & Best Sound Design home for one night only!

Anspaugh finds a renewed relevance in this political climate through her continued research and critique of male masculinities with the remounting of The End of Men; An Ode to Ocean. 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.

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.

“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

“Ms. Anspaugh is not rooting for the end of men, she wants to make a better man.” –  The New York Times

Partners in creation for this work include:

Sound artist and script writer Ryan MacDonalad

Lighting designer Kathy Couch

Performers include: Tsiambwom Akuchu, Massamiliano Balduzzi, Lacina Colibaly, Gilbert Reyes, Tristan Koepke, & Simon Thomas-Train, Brandon Washington Jesse Zarrit , Connor Voss.

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Vanessa Anspaugh is a Portland-based choreographer and performance based artist born and raised in Los Angeles, CA amongst a wackadoo family of film and performing artists. After a childhood spent between the ballet studio and acid trips on Venice beach, Anspaugh found her way out of California creating various homes in Ohio, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, Massachusetts and eventually New York. Once in New York, her work has been both commissioned and presented by Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, New York Live Arts, The River to River Festival, BAX, The Sculpture Center, The Hessel Museum of Art, AUNTS, Movement Research, Catch Series,The Kitchen (through Emily Roysdon) Performance Mix at HERE Arts Center, Studio 303 in Montreal, as well as The Cowels Center in Minneapolis, for The Zenon Dance Company. She has had funded creative residencies through DTW Studio Series, Mount Tremper Arts, Kattsbaan International Dance Center, The Mac Dowell Colony, LMCC, BAX, BOFFO Fire Island Performance Residency, and The Bard College Fisher Center. In 2017 her work The End of Men, was a Bessie Award nominee in both the Outstanding Production and Best Sound Design (by Ryan MacDonald) categories. As a performer Anspaugh has worked for Aretha Aoki, Juliette Mapp, Robbinschilds, Faye Driscoll, Taylor Mac, Emily Johnson, Jen Rosenblit among others. She is currently at work on the latest development of her research with a new theatrical dance work entitled, Aggression Confession. Anspaugh is a visiting professor in the Theater Dance Department at Colby College in Maine for the 2018/19 academic year.