BOYS DON'T CRY
Project type
Dance
Boys Don’t Cry is a pluridisciplinary performance exploring masculinity, vulnerability, and human connection. Starting from two performers, the piece examines the codes, rituals, and pressures that shape how boys become men—and how these expectations persist into adulthood. It approaches masculinity and patriarchy as intertwined and evolving structures, without fixed boundaries or clear answers, and open to question and exploration.
Movement is the primary language, intertwined with narrative fragments, monologue, video, and sound, creating a multi-sensory, intimate experience. The work explores how models of masculinity are constructed and circulated—through mythology, popular culture, and systems that reproduce certain ideals. Alongside this, it also searches for other ways of being: softer, more open, more complex forms of masculinity that resist rigid definitions and offer alternative role models.
At its core, the piece looks at men living within these expectations, and the tension between what is inherited and what is possible. It does not attempt to define what masculinity is, but rather to explore what it might be, or what it could become. There is also space for humour, emotion, paradox, and all the contradictions that make us human.
The work creates space for audiences to reflect on how we define and categorise identity, and what might exist beyond those frameworks. By loosening these structures, it opens a space to listen differently and to recognise what is shared. Not to arrive at answers, but to remain in the process of discovering what it means to be human, beyond form, beyond gender.
Boys Don’t Cry is both a mirror and a space of encounter, where we question and reimagine how we exist and relate to one another.
Concept / Choreography: Rhiannon Morgan
Performers: Duncan Hugkinson, Alexandre Lipaux
Dramaturgy: Antoine Colla & Jamie Wood
Musical creation / Sound Design: Emre Sevindik
Video Art: Jonathan Christoph
Costumes / Scenography: Sophie Vandekybus
Co produced by: CAPE Ettelbruck, ARCA Bertrange, Opderschmelz Dudelange, Maison Pour La Danse-3CL
