What would it mean to dance towards a dead end?
They Spent Their Youths Dreaming of Ever New Annihilations was a hybrid work of dance performance and visual artefact. In this radical work by Hamish McIntosh, an experimental choreography was performed; an unwitnessed dance between flesh and steel, with Hamish undergoing a vasectomy. Presented to the public through a pseudo-monument to his lost future, Hamish's performance/exhibition formed the creative component of his doctoral studies on the antisocial thesis and death in dance. The antisocial thesis argues that it is meaningful when queer people embrace the ‘negation’ they represent within heteronormative society. This negation is connected to ideas around what scholars have called 'reprocentricity'—the drive to reproduce and form a family unit around the Child. As such, Hamish created They Spent Their Youths Dreaming of Ever New Annihilations as a practical exploration of the antisocial thesis: a symbolic 'suicide' achieved through sterility that negated the Child rather than the subject, and a realisation of queerness’ threat to the future. Further framed as a death of normative conventions of dance, audience members were encouraged to question their beliefs about what dance is or could be, and to ask whether their understanding of dance could withstand Hamish's surgical incursion.
Supported By: Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship, University of Melbourne Faculty of Fine Arts and Music Faculty Graduate Researcher Fund, and Temperance Hall | Season: October 2022, Temperance Hall, Melbourne | Performer/Artist: Hamish McIntosh | Doctoral Committee: Sandra Parker, Philipa Rothfield, and Hannah McCann
C. Hamish McIntosh, 2022
C. Hamish McIntosh, 2022
C. Hamish McIntosh, 2022
C. Hamish McIntosh, 2022
