Gay Dance Troupe Takes on Trump Fascism By Performing Nude Laser Anus Shows
There’s a new dance troupe in town, and it’s smashing global heterosexual male patriarchy in the form of a laser butt show.
The Young Boy Dancing Group is a European gay dance troupe founded on pushing what we know about gender and sexuality to the limits by shooting laser beams into their anuses while they perform for a live paying audience.
“They challenge notions of gender and sexuality and constantly question institutionalized settings. It makes you either cry or get offended,” says Mette Woller.
Mette would know; she featured the group in an Exhibition called “the curves of the world” at Chart Art Fair in Copenhagen over one summer in 2016.
“I studied dance in Rotterdam and Amsterdam and then visual arts in Vienna and Stuttgart.” Says Manuel Scheiwiller, one of the group’s cofounders in an interview with Vice in 2017.
” The funny thing about the group is that they are from everywhere: Croatia, Estonia, Holland, Germany. But actually, Young Boy Dancing Group is not really a fixed group, we try to keep it very [fluid]. There’s a core of like five people organizing gigs and doing things. And then there’s, in total, like 15 people that we’ll work with. The key thing is that we’re friends, but since all of us have quite similar aesthetic approaches and interests, the work connects. The whole show works like a pool for people to drop in, and then you might work with someone on their own project. There’s always overlap.”
The group does not hog all the performance fun either. Manuel says that they’ll regularly ask audience members to engage in acts while the group performs as well.
“in Paris, we held a make out workshop. We asked the whole audience to hold hands and make out with each other. Some of them did it. Actually, it worked when we did it in Zurich. It was much better. Everybody was so into each other.”
The Young Boy Dance group is unabashedly left in ideology, if one couldn’t guess. Another cofounder, transgender performer Nico Roses, is an open advocate for leftist revolutionaries in Chile, and shares articles entitled “poor people have to kill all the rich people or else humanity will not survive.”
For group member Ofelia Jarl Ortega, YBDG has an important message for the world. Ofelia is one of the group’s original members, and is from south america. Today she lives in Sweden according to her Facebook, but still travels with the group on tours.
For her, we live in an age of censorship. And YBDG challenges that. She’s been with the troupe for over 5 years now, and she doesn’t seem to see it going away any time soon.
But there have been hiccups.
In September, a pyrotechnics show went terribly wrong and multiple members of the audience caught fire, causing serious injuries. One girl, Hailee Taylor, got 2nd degree burns on her leg.
“The person right in front caught on fire, I was lucky not to have the same happen to me.” Said shaun Bass, who attended the show.
The incident has formed a huge wedge in the group’s fanbase, one that many are unsure will survive the incident. Talks of lawsuits and getting the “penalizing forces of the state” involved littered the facebook page after the incident.
Since the September fire, things have been quiet. There’s no shows scheduled, and no comment from the group since their Facebook post making a statement.
“We are deeply sorry for and regret the incident that occured during our performance at Klosterruine Berlin. We truly underestimated the situation. This has led us to reevaluate our safety measures and our next steps of our group. If you were affected by the incident please contact us or help us if you have more information regarding the people who were impacted.”
The post garnered hundreds of comments from fans mostly attacking the group for percieved negligence , and then nothing after.
The last comment though, made 4 weeks before this article, kind of summed up everything for Young Boys Dance Group.
Wander Otter comments, “can people just not give attention to horrible performance art and then nothing bad will happen.”