Tintinnabulum
by Gustavo Gomes

“I wonder if penetration is simply the colonisation of someone else's body.”

Tintinnabulum is a performance exploring the relationships between masculinity, authority, vulnerability, intimacy, and territorial occupation. Through the encounter between two male bodies, the work unfolds as a conflicted intimate relationship in which attraction, hostility, domination, and vulnerability become increasingly entangled. The dynamics of topping and bottoming transcend sexual positioning, becoming political gestures through which power, domination, and submission are negotiated. Gradually, the personal encounter reveals another underlying relationship: that between two countries in conflict, embodied by the struggle between an immigrant who has chosen to move to a new territory, struggling to find his place within it, and a resident who perceives his arrival as a threat and wants him gone, while continuing to benefit from his labour. The intimate becomes territorial, and the sexual encounter becomes a negotiation of borders, belonging, occupation, and control.
Taking its title from the ancient Roman phallic wind chimes, which were hung at entrances and in domestic spaces as symbols of protection, fertility, and virility, the work reconsiders the phallus as an emblem of masculine power. Divided into two parts, Castrato and Priapos, the performance moves between opposing constructions of masculinity: Castrato refers to the historical practice of castrating male singers to preserve their high-pitched voices, evoking the suppression and transformation of
masculine identity, while Priapos refers to the ancient Greek and Roman fertility deity associated with exaggerated virility, sexual potency, and the protection of property and territory.
Moving between protection and exposure, strength and fragility, intimacy and territorial control, Tintinnabulum examines how the boundaries of the body become entangled with the borders of nations. Through movement, text, and sound, the performance questions what happens when masculinity no longer relies on hardness and domination, but becomes capable of resonance, openness, and tenderness. What is the sound of a soft male? Can penetration happen softly? By drawing parallels between the occupation of another body and the occupation and destruction of foreign territories, Tintinnabulum investigates how the rejection of softness, receptivity, and vulnerability becomes a mechanism for sustaining patriarchal power, and how the fear of surrendering masculine dominance manifests itself in both intimate relationships and political conflicts over land, borders, and belonging.

Cast
Priapos — Gustavo Gomes
Castrato — Tommaso Bertasi