You’re handed silent disco headphones as you enter the theater. Five male-presenting dancers chug protein powder, debate at podcast stations, and belt out karaoke. You laugh and sing along as punk music and dancers’ voices pulse in your ears. But what starts as humor slowly mutates into what feels like a fever dream and late-night doomscroll all at once.
The Viagra Ballet is a dance-theater show that makes social media algorithms a physical reality. Blending ballet, contemporary, and mosh vocabularies, it uses the “manosphere” as a case study to interrogate how the digital age incentivizes spectacle, division, and ultimately violence.
Caretakers of Land/Land Acknowledgement: Piscataway and Anacostan peoples
Estimated Artist Fee:
1 show + engagement: $10,000 minimum + housing and travel
2 shows + engagement: $13,000 minimum + housing and travel
3 shows + engagement: $16,000 minimum + housing and travel
The Viagra Ballet is intentionally designed with a low-overhead touring model that reduces production expenses while uplifting equitable artist compensation. By utilizing minimal lighting and delivering all audio via silent disco headphones, technical costs are lowered and the work can be presented in both traditional theaters and unconventional spaces like gyms, parks, and bridge underpasses. Madeline Maxine Roman has a longstanding commitment to paying collaborators an hourly rate above minimum wage, which has been highlighted in Dance Magazine and Washington City Paper.
