A reflection on TOUGHGUY at Berliner Festspiele within the frame of Performing Exiles / 100° Diaspora on 28th June 2025
©Alice Heyward
A lone, male figure (Ginjo Sakai) dressed in dark trackwear circles the bare stage with large, territorial strides. His energy commands and consumes the space, carving a singular presence through strong, spiralling, grounded motion. His gestures pursue direction without deviation, exuding power and invincibility through their achievement. He moves with intention, resisting submission to external forces or contingency.
TOUGHGUY opens as a resolute, solo dance work and doubles into a duet, with Yuki Takahashi joining Sakai, in the same sportswear and similarly dominating, supremacist drive. The work stages the destructive power of ambition and the arrogance that comes with an unquestioned sense of identity. Through intricate phrasing, their fierce dance-fight unfolds into a portrait of collapse, vulnerability and defeat. As their pursuit to annihilate the other escalates, it exposes the dancer—and the human—to their own toxic, self-consuming capabilities.
The material of this work is force, drag—physically, and also metaphorically, through Amanda Donato’s gendered casting of two male dancers to explore her own experience as a woman navigating competition in an individualist, male-dominated world, and friction. Domination pulsates with the desire to prove and rise through the conquest of the other. Each twist, pivot, and extension insists against gravity and limitation, tracing the aggression of a body shaped by power—its seduction and its exhaustion.
The work moves through chapters, telling a story. The work moves through chapters, telling a story. The dramatic, operatic score by Kaan Bulak aligns with the movement production of illustrative imagery. His unreleased track, "Fructus Eius" with LUC ILLA and Luise Enzian also premiered with TOUGHGUY. Music cues emotional tides, mapping the psyche as terrain—jolts of fury followed by solemnity, moments of exaltation that crumble into silence. The stage becomes a place of internal weather, where relation presents conflict. Connection manifests in attack and offence.
The dissonance between body and intention becomes the work’s central expression; its event. And with that, we see the dance turn inward, toward self-confrontation and self-destruction. The ground splits beneath us when the fight is no longer, or never was, purely external. We break ourselves when we defeat the other, revealed to be intrinsic to us.
The figure, at first singular, becomes two, then transforms into a shared terrain of struggle. Their confrontation is not only about male rage and how it resides within us all, but also about survival within its myth. How can we escape cycles of trauma and oppression while remaining complicit in the very systems that sustain them?
When will we learn that while others are not free, neither are we? The pursuit of personal, opportunistic gains at the expense of others erodes us all, leaving us all losers, defeated in a world where we relentlessly compete against each other.