Reviews: "Mucho Machismo y Pocos Machos" from Rogelio López & Dancers
- bhumibpatel
- Oct 20
- 8 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Reviews by Bhumi B Patel and Marlena Gittleman //
softening masculinities into queer possibilities by Bhumi B Patel
Macho men on stage is, in some ways, an American pastime. From historical representations of masculinity in dance through Ted Shawn and Gene Kelly, to the cowboy westerns of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, to scenes from the 2024 Superbowl of red-faced football players screaming in extreme euphoria at their win, representations of masculinity or, as Ocean Vuong writes, “what we have allowed it to be in America, is often realized through violence.” In the first decades of the twentieth century Ted Shawn used dance as a means to “assert male prowess” to avoid emasculation or “ridicule.” He wanted to “represent dance as an honorable career for men” by projecting manliness through athleticism and pushing a stronger connection between dancers and athletes. In “Dancing Masculinity,” Deborah Jowitt cites a 1913 article in the San Diego Union where Shawn stated “Dance is a manly sport, more strenuous than golf or tennis, more exciting than boxing or wrestling, and more beneficent than gymnastics.” Similarly, Gene Kelly promoted dance as an athletic masculine form, most notably through his 1958 co-directed television program “Dancing: A Man’s Game.” In addition to bringing professional football players and boxers onto the program to learn dance routines with him, Kelly went so far as to state that men were “capable of stronger, more intricate dancing” than women. These colonial, white constructions of masculinity were not always prevalent globally, but they have taken hold in so many places. Yuck, amirite?
I recall all of the violences and dominations that foregrounds our understandings of masculinity as I watched Mucho Machismo y Pocos Machos, created by Rogelio López, and performed by him, Josue Oregel, Kevin Gaytan, Luis Isiordia, Matt Han. This illustrious cast brought to life a magical journey to interrogate masculinities in Mexican Folklorio dance through one queer dancer’s story. The program notes that “the work is structured like a traditional romantic dramedy telenovela - boy meets boy, boy falls in love with boy, boy loses self, boy loses boy (but finds himself)” and inside of that structure I found myself cackling out loud, getting a little choked up, and even clapping along to the rhythmic Mexican Folklorio interwoven with López’s signature contemporary flow. In this telenovela format, we are brought into both the “public spaces” of rehearsals and (albeit secret) dates, but we are also privy to the intimate and the personal. To Sophie Milman’s “I Feel Pretty,” we get to see this queer dancer slough off the impositions of masculinity; To Mariachi Vargas’ “Por Ti Volare” we witness the return of this dancer’s sense of self and self-love. It is triumphant, it is personal, and it is beautiful. By the end, I hardly remembered I was still in a theater.
Watching López’s work often feels like a dream, and in 2022, I wrote about the dreaminess of Rogelio López & Dancers’ Entre Despierto y Dormido (Between Awake and Asleep). This work captured that colorful, sparkley, dream-like quality, but it was different. Or I concede that perhaps I am different, deeply attuned to the many ways the rights and lives of queer and trans people are under attack. This work both allowed us to escape this world by remaining firmly grounded in the very real threats to safety that queer people experience, even within our communities that we expect we can trust. But it wasn’t just the story that pushes us to interrogate masculinity, it is also in the movement and costumes - in one moment, dancers in jeans, holding beer bottles push each other around a little bit while laughing and teasing each other; in another moment, dancers in assless chaps dance sensually with dancers in heels and thongs; and yet in another moment, dancers twirl in rainbow Folklorio skirts finding joy in pressing the boundaries imposed upon them. All together, the piece didn’t just ask us to find ways of loving ourselves, it asked us to find ways to love each other in our messy journeys, in our queernesses, in our many possibilities.
So many men hold on to traditionally-masculine, patriarchal social roles because that’s the only version of manhood that they’re familiar with, and it feels easier to double down on the stereotype than to stare into a void of searching for self identity. But I believe that we are seeing cracks in masculinity’s construct, and believe that “perhaps one day, masculinity might become so myriad, so malleable, it no longer needs a fixed border to recognize itself. It might not need to be itself at all” (Vuong). For now, in the end it is the love of self that López arrives at on stage. It is a soft place to land, and perhaps the most free we can be.
Breaking Out of the Grip of Mexican Masculinity: Rogelio López and Dancers’ Mucho machismo y pocos machos by Marlena Gittleman
Rogelio López and Dancers’ Mucho machismo y pocos machos appears to be a love story between two men, but it is, ultimately, a love story between a queer Mexican artist and a dance form, folklórico. The show, a fabulous and energetic spectacle comprised of numbers across different dance forms, picks up on genre tropes from telenovelas and drag to tell the dancer’s journey towards his reconciliation with the form and with himself.
When I say “drag,” I don’t mean the kind we might typically think of: queens and kings performing their numbers. In Mucho machismo, we see elevated and exaggerated performances of the drag of everyday and artistic life: the taking on and off of gendered identities, along with their attendant costumes, gestures, and body languages. We see this as the protagonist, played by López in autobiographical fashion, stumbles and glides through different key scenes in his artistic and personal journey. The four young dancers who comprise the versatile ensemble (Kevin Gaytan, Matthew Han, Luis Isiordia, Josue Oregel) play all the other roles that take up and even queer telenovela types, from the seemingly hyper-macho love interest with wide-legged swagger, to gossipy friends with zippy leaps, to oversexed waiters at a café who lean and lick and flirt, to horses who kick and gallop. The fact that the other dancers alternate in the hyper-macho love interest role across scenes also suggests the prevalence of having to engage in continual performance along a gender spectrum. Throughout, we see the characters struggle with what an authentic expression of their own genders might feel like, and if that’s possible within the worlds and cultures in which they circulate.
Take two key ensemble pieces. We might want to call these opposites, but they share an extremely exaggerated approach to gendered performance. One is a sexy scene: Rogelio watches as the boys appear in thongs, two in heels with little femme red bandannas, two with assless chaps and vaquero hats and boots, and they dance the pleasure of their pleasure. They twerk, do splits, kneel, straddle, dip. They lick their lips and look the audience in the eye. The other scene is a macho scene: blue jeans, tucked-in western shirts, heavy belt buckles. They stomp and shuffle and kick, a zapateado. They toast and drink and clap each other on the shoulders, always careful to stay just on the right side of the line between homosocial and homoerotic. (Although I do not have roots in folklórico, I do know what it feels like to arrange your body into different postures to keep you safe, keep you undetected, keep you passing straight. And also what it feels like to not kiss your super hot lover full on the mouth because there’s some guy nearby with a certain kind of look in his eyes under a neanderthal brow.)
The macho beer scene devolves into slow motion, as manly chugs from glass bottles turn into exaggerated tongue movements lapping up phallic bottle necks. The dancers manage to convey that phenomenon where even within the most masculine groups of straight men, after a while, everyone starts to look pretty gay—as the “pocos machos” of the title and López’s reference to “semi-closeted” in the opening voiceover suggest. It’s like they start to become a parody of the very thing they stand for. The parody is inherent: machismo, for all of its very real violence, is also kind of ridiculous, pathetic in how desperately it tries to assert itself. And yet the stranglehold it has on so many of us persists, much as we try to get away from it. There were a number of scenes in which moments of expansive gender expression, its butterfly-winged arms and bright hues and soaring music, were interrupted by machismo, its stampede patter and broken glass sounds and stilted jerkiness. How do we get out of machismo’s tight grip?
One way: consensual gripping and grappling with one another. Rogelio and the boys run themselves ragged doing all the gender stuff: it’s exhausting, it makes us sweat, but we can also sweat from desirous, desiring movement. I was wowed by totally homoerotic head-hold dips, cartwheels over one another, head rolls around the other’s shoulder, full-body lifts with a hand over the other’s crotch. (I was reminded, too, of tango, that other dance grappling that originated between men at Buenos Aires ports.) Another way to get out of machismo’s tight grip: grappling with oneself to gain the resourcedness to perform differently. At a turning-point, Rogelio arrives to the macho beer-guzzling looking stunningly beautiful in a low-cut cream-colored tank top tucked into wide-leg gauzy pants of the same color with multicolored Oaxaca-style embroidery on the waist and cuffs, and matching sleeveless overshirt. (All of the costumes were made by López, who shared that the embroidery and symbols are inspired by the Zapotec and Mixtec people.) He tries to sweetly connect, but the machos laugh, bully, dismiss, shove. He is dejected, but another community swoops in: Mexican ballerinas in black tutus and skull masks and red flowers in their hair step him into the circle of a skirt, lacing it around his waist. We are transported to a scene where one Rogelio on video, in the same costume, is encouraging the other to dance on stage: “Ándale Rogelio, de frente.” He heeds the call, faces forward, and dances.
Skirts swooping and spiraling, proud torso, grounded feet. And as I watched, I questioned: Why have I seen infinitely more videos of Loie Fuller with her “Serpentine Dance” fabrics than videos of folklórico dancers with theirs? The other dancers came out in rainbow-quilted skirts and joined in: butterflies out of too-tight cocoons. The final number took flight from the violence of gendered binaries, colonial legacies, and national borders which are founded upon patriarchal masculinities—and all the ways they limit the freedom to dance, move, migrate, love, be.
Marlena Gittleman (she/they) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry at UC Berkeley. She completed a PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, where she taught writing and literature and researched gestures in US and Latin American queer and feminist literature and performance art. Marlena’s writing has been published in Feminist Studies, In Dance, and Life as a Modern Dancer, and their translations have been published in Critical Times, The Common, and Asymptote. Marlena is a dancer and improviser who has performed in NACHMO SF and with 4Fish x RedEye Productions and Tether Dance Project.
Additional Reviews from pdw's imprint fellows forthcoming
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