Emotional Tofu (2023, 2024, 2025)
Emotional Tofu is a new project in process, envisioned as a multimedia performance that explores speculative masculinities and the sad boy trope.
In July 2023, I, along with my collaborator, Emilia Bruno, began by learning Post Malone’s improvised dance breaks from his most recent live performances, videos of which have proliferated on Social Media. Bruno (a transmasc non-binary soft butch), and I (a cis-gender gay man) slowed these choreographies down, developing them as a vehicle to challenge and queer hegemonic narratives and performances of masculinity. Through rigorous movement analysis and our own embodied research of Post Malone’s physical affectations such as the mince and thrust, we perform Malone’s movement as both tragic, comedic, and in some ways, liberatory. As we dance in slowness, we ask ourselves and our audience to focus, wonder, and meditate on the particularities of Post Malone’s expressions, and how our bodies enactment of them proposes a broad spectrum of masculine expression within the sad boy trope. Since its inception, Emotional Tofu has had several iterations with a rotating cast of collaborators, including Bruno, James Barrett, Curtis Thomas, Miguel Ángel Pacheco, and Cody Cook-Parrott.
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Emotional Tofu: Lewiston (performance, 2025)
Emotional Tofu: Greenbelt (video, 2024)
Emotional Tofu: Frogmore (video, 2024)
Emotional Tofu: Iverson (video, 2024)
Emotional Tofu: Northampton (performance, 2024)
Emotional Tofu: Rockland (performance, 2024)
Emotional Tofu: Freeport (performance, 2023)
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The development of Emotional Tofu has been made possible by generous support from SPACE Gallery's 2024 Kindling Fund and creative residencies provided by The University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD) and Subcircle (Biddeford, ME).
