Roleplaying: The 5 Greatest Romantic Movies According to AFI.
roleplaying: the 5 greatest romantic movies according to afi.
Duncan Gallery / Stetson University.
Performance Piece.
At start I edited together the 5 greatest romantic movies in accord to the American Film Institute (Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, West Side Story, An Affair to Remember, Roman Holiday) keeping only the lead male actors. I then constructed a gay love story in all its stages (when they first meet, fall in love, move in together, fight, break up, and then go back together for the happy ending).
For the second instance of the piece I invited actors to improvise the story live, via the audio of my edited video. They wore headphones and did different possibilities of the 10 minutes love story.
ROLEPLAYING discusses social performance, gender as play/acting and the construction of masculine roles in gay and straight love.
ROLEPLAYING works in different levels. It is a meta-critique of the repression of models offered by the society of spectacle, where notions of acceptable behavior are restricted and downright repressive. The piece investigates the parameters of masculinity as incarnated in modern icons like Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant and Gregory Peck, but only to appropriate normative discourse to express otherness.
The subversive aspect of the project is to keep the visible parameters of exclusion in place and only modify their meaning and message. To co-opt them as a means to express gay love is a way that affirmatively engages in the contemporary civil rights movement of requesting equal rights for homosexuals.