THEY SPENT THEIR YOUTHS DREAMING OF EVER NEW ANNIHILATIONS

Content Warning - Themes of suicide, fertility, partial nudity

MIGHT WE KNOW DEATH THROUGH DANCE, AND DANCE THROUGH DEATH?

A new exhibition has come to Temperance Hall by Hamish McIntosh, a queer dance artist and researcher living and working in Naarm (Melbourne).
They Spent Their Youths Dreaming of Ever New Annihilations is a synthesis of dance performance and visual artefact. An experimental choreography has taken place: an unwitnessed dance between flesh and steel — a vasectomy deemed a ‘genetic suicide’ — ending the artist’s ability to reproduce and contribute to society’s future.

Temperance Hall invites you to view the documentation arising from this performance, with the exhibition forming the creative component of McIntosh’s forthcoming PhD, To an End: Death as a Queer Theory of Dance, which explores the anti - social thesis and suicide in dance performance. Like many queer people before him, the artist has become a dead end: a threat to the passage of time, custom, and power.

From fertility to sterility through a bodily intervention, this new work by Hamish McIntosh, in the tradition of artists like Ron Athey, John Duncan, and Fred Herko, positions the vasectomy as an act of dance and in doing so questions the forms preoccupation with liveness.

The anti-social thesis argues that it is meaningful when queer people embrace the ‘negation’ they represent within heteronormative society. This negation is connected to ideas around what scholars have called ‘reprocentricity’ — the drive to reproduce and form a family unit around the Child. As such, They Spent Their Youths Dreaming of Ever New Annihilations is a practical exploration of the anti-social thesis: a symbolic ‘suicide’ that negates the Child rather than the subject, and a realisation of queerness’ threat to the future.