Cover Image: Quindell Orton sits between two projected hyper‑masculine figures, echoing Making of a Man’s critique of masculinity. Photo by Gabriela Need.

Making of a Man – by Quindell Orton
Summer Nights, The Blue Room Theatre
Fringe World, 4 February 2026

I love a good performance-lecture. That tantalising blend of education with entertainment warms my nerdy heart. 

So when I saw that dance artist Quindell Orton was presenting a solo lecture performance about masculinity as part of The Blue Room Theatre’s 2026 Summer Nights season, I was keen. Plus I’m an Orton fan from back in the early 2000s, when the WA-born artist began making site-specific work with fellow WAAPA graduate Serena Chalker. Now Orton is based between Germany and Australia, and it’s been some years since we’ve had the opportunity to see her work in Perth.

In Making of a Man Orton presents her research into how we “do” patriarchy, peeling back the layers of masculinity metaphorically but also physically. It’s thorough – we hear multiple viewpoints on the topic from academics and commentators, in the voiceovers and video footage that punctuate the work – while remaining pacy. The division of the work into seven “chapters” gives the work shape and momentum.

What is glorious, however, is the way Orton takes the lecture – a platform that often feels like it belongs to the patriarchal world in terms of its linearity and dependence on an authoritative voice – and bends and blends its structure, infusing and subverting it with movement that is variously playful, sensual, destabilising.

A deep dive (pun intended) into the concept of voice and power in Chapter 1 sees Orton use a miked headset to lower the pitch of her voice, as her arms slice down her body and outwards in an unmistakably and amusingly phallic gesture. 

In contrast, an exploration into the breathiness that is considered “feminine” sees Orton’s arms waft balletically, inflating and deflating, morphing into a melodramatic swoon that becomes a comical arabesque series. 

There’s a hilarious analysis of the cis-man hug that’s determined to be read as platonic, with pelvises apart and accompanying back slaps. In Orton’s rendition, though, those slaps are undermined as they become increasingly soft and sensual.

It’s Chapter 4: The Hero that provides my personal comic highlight. There’s Bonnie Tyler’s Holding Out for a Hero, there’s silicon pecs and abs, there’s posing and posturing that beautifully blurs the gender divide, there’s a cameo from an infamous purveyor of toxic masculinity and there’s superman in the mix. But as Orton flies we hear a voiceover telling us about the health hazards of masculinity, and we watch her crash and burn.

Orton continues to dance between humour and harsh critique. A powerful moment in Chapter 5: Real Men sees the video footage frozen on a still of bare-bottomed men at some kind of masculinity camp in Germany, as Orton begins to pull at the silicone torso as though it is suffocating her. Though she doesn’t labour the point, the connection between toxic masculinity and the rise of facism around the globe, and particularly in the US, is abundantly clear. 

So where does this leave us? In Chapter 7: The Future, the voices of experts talk about moving “morphing between dichotomies”; about new, less “narrow and violent” gender categories. In response, Orton swoops and rolls; unfolding, lunging, undulating as though her body is enacting the social and societal transformations to which the speakers allude.

Finally Orton offers us a vision of hope. What will bring about the revolution?

You’ll need to head to the Blue Room to find out… and it will be well worth it. Making of a Man is a lesson for our times.

Making of a Man continues until 7 February at The Blue Room Theatre as part of its Summer Nights program.

For more information, or to purchase tickets, visit: https://blueroom.org.au/events/making-of-a-man/