There was a time when the ideal man was depicted as someone physically strong, being unemotional and considered the provider of his family. These stereotypes have done neither men nor women any favours. After her critically acclaimed season at the 2015 Melbourne Fringe Festival with We May Have To Choose, performance artist Emma Mary Hall returns to the festival with Ode To Man, in which she smashes through these stereotypes with poetic rage.
Ode to Man's structure is set around 15 chapters, with Hall exploring what being a 'real' man is, means and should be to both men and women. "The show was sparked by a traumatic break up, which resulted in me spending two years interviewing almost 100 men (including every man I dated during that time) and asking them what it was to be a real man," she explains. "The show is me telling you what I heard. It's also about me trying to figure out how to live with their answers."
Hall premiered this work at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) earlier this year to a sell-out season for what she refers to as a very personal and strange show. "It was wonderful to be working at the limits of my understanding of the work and what these ideas might say to others. There's a lot of discussion these days about gender and disconnection and confusion, but I don't see much work that is linking this confusion to the social and economic decisions we might make," she tells me.
Premiering her new show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Emma Mary Hall's Ode To Man is a poetic look at the death of heroic masculinity and how it has changed over the years. Hall smashes through these concepts in her assertion that being a man should no longer be about aggression, dominance and physically strength, but about honesty, openness and awareness.
Hall's performance essay is sharply written and flows smoothly as she blends stories of past relationships with philosophical, historical and biological perspectives on men and women and gender roles and ideas. There is purpose to every word that Hall utters and each one builds on what she has previously shared with her captivated audience, listening intently to what she imparts. Hall absolutely shines when she gets into an impassioned speech and the anger, frustration and disappointment she is expressing is palpable.
