7:00 - 7:45 PM

wide leg black slacks circa 2001

I’ve had these black pants for 20 years

thinking that one day I would wear them in a performance.

You’re welcome…

On the one hand, the trousers and shirtless aesthetic harkens to the stages of Ted Shawn: slender, muscled men engaging in sporty acrobatic dance moves. On the other, am I going to a wedding or am I part of the wait staff?

Black slacks mean so much, but more than anything, they elicit feelings of class distinction, comportment of bodily composition and behavior, and gender performance expectations – all things I loathe. Wearing my black slacks while shirtless, masking to distort my facial expressions, code switching in the dancing opportunities of the score, assists my intentional resistance of the binaries that they - the slacks - encourage.