With her latest solo piece Eisa Jocson creates a kind of “One-Woman-Entertainment-Service-Machine”. The starting point for “Host” was a research on female and transgender hostesses from the Philippines who create a kind of femininity in Japanese entertainment clubs, linked to the Japanese Geisha tradition. Like in a club the audience is seated next to a stage designed like a catwalk. “Host” examines economic and gender- specific strategies in the entertainment industry and questions the role of Philippine women in the context of international structures of power. Based on her experiences as a pole dancer, the Philippine choreographer and visual artist, developed the piece “Death of a Pole Dancer” about female stereotypes and “Macho Dancer”, with which she successfully tours in Europe.

“The Philippine body is marginalised in the globalised world”, says Jocson. “An immigrant body, which tries to assimilate into different cultural contexts and is preferably deployed in the emotional service sector – as caregiver, home help or indeed entertainer. Ten percent of the Philippine population works outside their own country.” The Philippine body as working capital or, as should perhaps be defined more precisely, as “sex-working capital” – all of Jocson’s pieces to date have been concerned with this subject, the Asian erotic industry as a hive of sexual and cultural clichés, and as a symbol of global economic disparity.
(Excerpt of “The Sum of all Projections of Desire”, Magazin im August 2015, text: Nicole Strecker)

Eisa Jocson, educated as a visual artist and trained as a ballet dancer, won her first pole-dancing competition in Manila in 2010 and began her dance career with public interventions like ‘pole tagging’. At subsequent artistic residencies in Belgium she choreographed her solo “Death of the Pole Dancer” (2011), which questioned the stereotypes and context of the female pole dancer and toured through Berlin, Brussels, Zurich, Vienna and Ljubljana. For her second solo, “Macho Dancer” (2013), she adopted a male form of Philippine nightclub entertainment. The piece was invited to international festivals such as ImPulsTanz in Vienna, Noorderzon in Groningen, Tanz im August and Theater Spektakel in Zurich.