Wild, Wild West | Brandon Sward

Wild, wild west is a solo dance work set to the original motion picture soundtrack Ennio Morricone composed for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly which draws upon the vocabularies vernacular and concert dance to explore the figure of the cowboy as an enduring symbol in the US national imaginary. While frequently romanticized—even fetishized—the cowboy is tied to social and political processes of marginalization and exclusion along racial, gender, and sexual lines. By introducing a level of self-awareness, at times parody, into the cowboy, Wild, Wild West strives to make visible the relationship between masculinity and bodily comportment, as well as between these performances and a folklorized “frontier” that glosses over the violent histories of westward expansion and “manifest destiny.”