This story appears in our Spring Art + Performance 2025 Issue, published on March 5, 2025.
Photos by Erin O’Reilly
An attractive, emotional, wild ride of a show is coming your way this April! DADS will be hitting the 12th Avenue Arts stage with a breathtaking dance performance that navigates fatherhood, masculinity, death, and purpose. There are also hot butts.
Drama Tops, accurately self-described as “Seattle’s hottest postmodern nightlife duo,” are Elby Brosch (he/him) and Shane Donohue (he/they). DADS is a study of extremes. At times, the pair are pulling off impressive, acrobatic choreography, climbing atop one another, and doing flips; in other moments, they are collapsed in exhausted intimacy. They experiment with duration against a soundscape that ranges from experimental sci-fi sounds to club hits, and though they sometimes break apart for strikingly diametric solos, they always slam back together in unified, arduous repetition. The result is campy, challenging, and heartfelt, and each artist has their own relationship to it.
For Brosch, the seed of the piece came from his father’s death. “My dad passed when I was 15, and I do feel like that grief is part of why I even kept pursuing dance. I’ve been wanting to make a piece dealing with grief, but I haven’t felt ready until now.”
The theme is “so complicated, and it’s so big,” Donohue explains. “For a while, we were talking about Elby’s loss of a dad. His loss of his father in relationship to him idolizing his father and being able to stop time and encapsulate someone.”
“I was really lucky to have a very emotionally connected dad,” Brosch reflects. “My dad was a very sensitive, emotional person. He modeled strength within emotion. He was someone who I felt very safe going to cry to, and that version of masculinity is really beautiful to me and important to me and something that I want to model as well. It felt clear that being a dad was so important to him, and so meaningful to him, and that he really cared for us.”
In death, we gain the ability to polish or idolize the memory of a person, which can feel like a gift compared to the tumultuous and sometimes messy relationships we maintain with the living day-to-day. This chaos, combined with the unpredictability of grief itself, mixes into further themes of purpose and queerness that are explored in DADS. “I’m interested in our relationship to fatherhood and purpose and what it means to us as queer people to have purpose if we are not [literal] dads,” Donohue explains. “Are we going to drink ourselves to death? Are we going to be single? Or are we going to, like, sex ourselves until we’re bleeding out of our buttholes? What is the queer sense of purpose that brings levity to our lives?”
Brosch expands on that in contrast to the prescribed purpose of heteronormative culture. “If you’re straight, there’s such a prescriptive life path. You get your career, you have your spouse, you have your children, and everything’s for your children. We’re free from that as queer people, but then there’s that ambiguity of, like, what choices do I want to make? What choices are made for me by my circumstances? How do we find our agency and desire and purpose?”
It all comes together in a self-referential but very relatable piece. DADS is sometimes loud, fast, and humorous, and other times quiet, still, and serious. This fits perfectly with tensions of masculinity. “Softness versus aggression,” as Donohue puts it, “and realizing that they’re not always opposites. Aggressiveness is not always not sensitive and not soft, and softness doesn’t have to be docile.” When put in motion, it requires “navigating the complexities of those things and being present in the dance. Being present with each other in those things as they come up.” Brosch points out how well dance functions as a medium for that contrast. “Dance can be complicated and hold multiple truths at the same time. And I think we’re really finding that in this piece—each moment can have multiple conflicting truths.”
It’s a vulnerable experience for the creators, one that invites the audience into that vulnerability. This comes with its own form of rigor, especially when navigating subject matter that holds its own complex relationship to emotions. Donohue contemplates how this comes up in their process: “I think I process my emotions way differently than Elby. In terms of how we’re both kind of pushing back and forth between each other’s habits, Elby is much more open to the emotional truth of the moment, and I want to choreograph into or around it. I think both of those things are aiding this complex piece that has a lot of defense mechanisms built in around these hard topics.” Brosch touches on the editing process of such personal content, noting that “It can be hard to get feedback on things that feel very tender and detach from it enough to think of it compositionally. That’s currently something that is very challenging.”
I asked how they care for themselves throughout such a demanding creative process. Donohue offers healthy, nonhierarchical collaboration as a means of care. “We spend time talking about it and give space when it’s needed. I really value making art with Elby because we can push ourselves into some sort of an edge. Avoiding harm is something that can’t happen, but experiencing small amounts of harm—and then processing it, understanding what it is, and understanding how to move forward—helps me learn about the world, helps me learn about Elby, and helps me be a better human being.” Brosch agrees that the two are pretty willing to push themselves to “physical exhaustion limits,” but in such a way that it doesn’t feel damaging to their bodies.
“Caring for yourself takes resources and practice. We received a National Dance Project Grant for this piece, and being able to pay ourselves has allowed us to prioritize time to do this. We’ve been working on this piece for two and a half years. We’re refining it, and we can get it to a place that it’s super sustainable for us and still pushes us in interesting ways. So I think planning is care.”
“Tell that to the kiddos: Knowing your schedule is care,” Brosch adds. For him, the grant has been huge. “I’ve gone down to part-time at my day job because we’re able to pay ourselves for rehearsals. We’ve given ourselves performance stipends [before], but to actually have sustained support over months has been life-changing. We’ve been able to buy a lot of materials to make set pieces, and that is super different. Dance almost never has [stage] sets, and I think a lot of it is just [not having the] money.” (Without giving spoilers, the set and props of DADS alone are worth seeing, but how Donohue and Brosch utilize them is mind-blowing… and they blow a lot of other things, too.)
Outside of the piece, they’ve found purpose and power in community and in the social role of dad-ness. Not in a way that discredits the strength of mom-ness, but in a way that reflects the positive modeling of dads, as well as their own dadness. Their friends have been Dad, they’ve been Dad to each other, their dramaturge has been Dad, and they’ve worked towards being community Dads as well. Brosch has been asking himself, “How do we offer information to a choreographer who’s just coming up right behind us? We’re nationally emerging artists now. We’re going to tour, so as we’re growing and learning through that process, we want to be able to offer [that knowledge] to other dancers who are curious about that path. As a way of being fathers in community.”
“We are not powerless,” adds Donohue. “We can all shift the world. We can all be dads.”
See DADS at Washington Ensemble Theatre April 24–26 and May 1–3. Tickets at washingtonensemble.org. Visit dramatops.com for DADS tour updates.
