Performing Centaurs and the Debasement of Masculinity

Abstract

This article examines, in its first part, the symbolic aspects of the relation between horses and men, and the mythical figure of the centaur, most often assimilated to virility and male sexual drive, but also to women and their sexuality. In its second and central part, it focuses on Bartabas and Ko Murobushi’s performance, The Centaur and the Animal (2012) while raising ethical issues relating to performing animals. The essay analyzes how this play deconstructs the opposition between masculinity and femininity, as well as between animal and human, among other oppositional pairs such as reason vs. instinct, activity vs. passivity, verticality vs. horizontality or “inclination,” immunity vs. vulnerability, life vs. death, animate vs. inanimate, among others. It posits that Bartabas’s performance opens the possibility of a posthuman and postanimal perspective on the relation between human and nonhuman animals.