Walk Like a Man!

Men on three! One, two, three, men! This production is called Walk Like a Man. I teach intro to dance techniques. A lot of people come into my class with zero dance experience. A lot of young men who've never danced before in their lives and they come in and they're like, well, this will be hilarious, right? And they end up really loving it. I was just always so inspired by all of my students, but the guys that would come to my class and get really excited and want to do more. So it just sort of sent me down this rabbit hole of creating a dance, theatre, kind of multimedia, collaborative piece that explores behaviors that men may not have been encouraged to do for a variety of reasons. My character is Mr. Spectator. His whole job is observing what men do and then commenting on them, typically bad mouthing, saying everything that they're doing wrong in their masculinity. That's how we perfectly highlight how masculinity, its standards have changed. Everything in this show has been a collaboration of every person who's a part of it. So every single dance, you know, somebody has a part that either they almost came up with all on their own, or had a very big part in making. Everyone can dance, everyone can be a dancer, and I really love working with dancers who have very little experience because they come in as a blank slate, right? They're open to any new ideas. They're open to trying new things. I really can't recommend enough just getting out and moving. Even if you don't think you're good at dance, we spend so much time just sitting down and looking at computer screens. Whereas something like this, you really get the opportunity to move and loosen up and really, you know, come out of your shell, so to speak.