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Unlock Dancing Plaza, SummerWorks Performance Festival, Winchester Street Theatre, 80 Winchester Street, Toronto

August 9, 2026

Joseph: “I am a superficial person. I like to be looked at”

Playing at the SummerWorks Festival for only one performance each, Good Boy, Bad Girl and Spin and Click explore how we recognize — and sometimes fail to recognize — bodily training and technique as performance. Each programme contains two solos interrogating what we expect a performing body to look like and how we regard physical labour.

Presented as part of Collision Project, an international exchange led by Hong Kong’s Unlock Dancing Plaza, the four works share an interest in replacing dance from its most conventional forms with skipping rope, stretching, pole dancing and clicking through computer windows. Uneven in their realization, these shows nevertheless bring compelling perspectives on the demands of training and the ethics around perfection.

Good Boy, Bad Girl

choreographed by Joseph Lee / Paula Wong

Is your body performative enough? That question links these two solos by Joseph Lee and Paula Wong. Both are less interested in dance itself than in how and why the body is trained.

We, the audience, sit freely on the floor as the dancers speak to us in the first person. They tell us their names, invite us to participate, and describe how training the body can become a kind of organizing principle for identity.

In Good Boy, Bad Girl, features Lee’s own Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger and Paula Wong’s Come closer, go deeper! In the first solo, Lee identifies with a hyper-virile, almost Michelangelesque ideal of the male body. What emerges is something like a queer inversion of the male gaze theorized by film critic Laura Mulvey. Where Mulvey described classical cinema as a visual apparatus that turns the female body into an object of masculine looking, Lee redirects that objectifying gaze onto himself. His is a deliberate self-objectification, fuelled by a hunger to be desirable.

First comes a training session. Lee skips rope for more than four minutes as cones of light pulse to club music, speaking about his need to be looked at, desired and shaped by aesthetic ideals. Then, a nightclub. Bathed in red light, he moves with provocative slowness, striking poses between seduction and bodybuilding display. A pink skipping rope becomes a sadomasochistic instrument of connection, threaded through the audience, wound around spectators’ feet, dragged across his face and carried in his mouth. Control and exposure become increasingly entangled, before the performance gives way to a gentler form of contact.

Finally, intimacy. Lee chooses one audience member and, to the sound of a soft, melancholic song, dances a pas de deux with them. It is an apropos (clichéd) conclusion for a show that reveals that all that work toward perfection ultimately conceals a desperate thirst for connection.

Come closer, go deeper!  is built around another form of bodily discipline: Paula Wong teaches us her mastery of finding pleasure in pain. In practical terms, the performance is presented as a participatory stretching class. We reach toward our feet, soften our faces on the exhale, and perform exercises with partners. I must admit, I would have appreciated a warning to arrive in gym clothes — particularly as someone accustomed to travelling in suit trousers.

The most interesting element in this otherwise conceptually thin work is Wong's recurring use of the sexual moan. Stretching with near-contortionistic intensity, she acknowledges pain, then answers it with short, open-mouthed sounds unmistakably associated with pleasure. But Wong is not trying to seduce us. The pleasure is self-directed: what seems to excite her is the body’s capacity to be pushed beyond its limits.

For all their interesting perspectives, the two solos ultimately lack the physical coherence that would make them fully dance pieces or the conceptual daring that would make them performance art. In In both cases, intriguing ideas never quite evolve into fully articulated arguments.

Spin and Click

choreographed by Cheung Wai Yin / Cheng Nga Yan

Technique is fundamental to dance: pointe work, line, balance, the placement of the chin or arms in a turn. Arguably, these matter more than facial expression, because the body itself is the primary instrument. But do we admire technical mastery equally regardless of the form in which it appears? Would the same virtuosity be dismissed as spectacle in pole dance? As boring when a computer becomes the performer? The question, then, is how much our judgment of technique depends on the cultural prestige of the genre that contains it.

In Stay with the Spin, pole dancer Cheung Wai Yin makes a case for the athleticism pole dancing demands. The motif of training returns, but here through extreme slowness: Yin moves deliberately through a succession of poses and transitions while, behind him, a projected table catalogues what we are seeing — the name of each position, its code in the international pole appendix, the parts of the body in contact with the pole, the placement of individual limbs. The movement is almost dissected before our eyes.

The clinical precision of the criteria projected invites us to focus on Yin’s physical mastery. His body extends slowly and with sustained control, the apparent naturalness of the effort betraying how thoroughly trained it is. His ronds de jambe en l’air display remarkable command; at one point, hanging upside down, he calmly begins to speak, seemingly untroubled by the exertion.

The performance strips pole dancing of the hypersexualized aura through which it is so often viewed and redirects attention towards the exacting control behind each gesture. It offers an unusual perspective on the form. Midway through the performance, Yin projects an interview with Allie, a Los Angeles-based pole dancer and sex worker with twenty years of experience.

Asked about the discrepancy between how pole dancing appears and what it requires, she points to how often the cleanliness of movement gets easily overlooked. Her distinction is sharper still: “Sexy is okay, sexualization is not.”

Click, the final section of this double bill, is probably the most controversial. In my view, it is also the most daring and successful, although the many audience members who left the theatre partway through would probably disagree. As the title suggests, performer Chan Wai Lok creates a techno-performance in which dancer, laptop and projection screen become partners.

Lengthy as it may be, the piece is mesmerizing in its technical precision and inventive use of the technology. Seated at a small table to the side, with a lamp, laptop, and tropical plant beside him, Lok enters into a quirky pas de deux with the computer. He moves the cursor across Paint to draw a human figure, resizes windows, selects and deselects, writes and deletes text, copies and pastes, and opens images or plays videos. These mundane gestures are woven into a tightly controlled visual dramaturgy, sometimes synchronized exactly with the jazz and classical music, elsewhere confident enough to sustain long stretches of silence.

Midway through, the computer even gets a solo. Lok leaves the stage, while the screen produces an absurd succession of folders named after different parts of his body — lung, ankle, pelvis, ear. It is ridiculous but impeccably composed. Yet after so much precision, the performance ultimately returns to the body. Lok breaks into a frenzied dance, his movements suddenly loose and uncontrolled, his face opening into a carefree smile. After spending the piece disciplining the computer into choreography, he ends by allowing his own body to escape it.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photos: Collision Project: Good Boy, Bad Girl, © 2026 Zoe Chan; Collision Project: Good Boy, Bad Girl. © 2026 Yu-ting Fang.

For tickets visit: summerworks.ca