Vanishing

The masculine principle is in crisis, including in dance. The motto attributed to George Balanchine, "Ballet is Woman," was always a gender-normative oversimplification. In times of increasingly permeable gender boundaries, it is fundamentally wrong. If masculinity wants to rediscover itself, then it must first be defined: What does a man want to be, what can he be?

The exhibition Gemachte Männer (Made Men) at the Cottbus Dieselkraftwerk deals with “body, gesture, and habitus of masculine visual worlds” in painting and related arts. Objects from the museum’s own collection, spanning from the Weimar Republic to the present day, are on display. The title itself makes it clear that masculinity is a construct. The construction of the construct proves particularly interesting. For example, ...