There will be men

Premiere 2021 MDT Stockholm

“There Will Be Men…” is about all the broken noses, bleeding knuckles and man -friends who can’t decide if they are gonna fuck, kill or marry. No, just kidding, men don’t want marriage or kids. This is bromance queerly re-imagined as high camp, low comedy and extreme violence.

“There will be men…” closes the triptych- which started with satiric gender essentialism around Woman-ness in I'm a very understanding woman, traveled through the never arriving utopia of queer futures in SPRINGTIME. Apetrea and Cornelius end in the shadowlands of masculinity- as portrayed by the silent film characters of the Fiend and the Dandy. They take on Entertainment not only as a method but as a topic to be skewered. Masculinity is presented in film, music and pop culture as domineering, violent and destructive. They return to vaudeville and early 20th century film aesthetics and characters combining it with the thick theory by Virginie Despentes- imagine Laurel and Hardy meets Fight Club, or the Marx brothers meet Quentin Tarentino. We have seen presentations of bromance on stages performed by and on the bodies of hetero-cis-males, “There Will be Men…” Transposes these performed relationships to the bodies of a cis queer woman and a non-binary queer masculine person- as an act of imitation, satire and privilege borrowing.

With and by: Amanda Apetrea & Cornelius. Set and light design, costumes: Daniel Åkerström-Steen. Producer: Sara Bergsmark. Administrative structure: The Artist Cooperative Interim kultur. Photo: Märta Thisner. With support from the Swedish Arts Council and the Swedish arts grant committee.