Episode 18: The Macho Cock

Romance of Many Dimensions employs cockfighting as a metaphor to explore the politics of theatre, performance, and games in contemporary society. By displacing these questions onto the arena of cockfighting, ideas about gameness (being trained to fight beyond pain), masculinity, control, accumulation and violence can be addressed indirectly. The series questions how situations in everyday life—such as how we act, speak and relate to one another—can be staged and performed. By resorting to the violence of cockfighting and its associated gambling (and profits for the animals’ owners) the work interrogates the rules that govern such a staging, prompting a consideration of the rituals of performance and spectatorship more broadly.