Excellent salon discussion led by gallery director Monica Bowman at the Butcher’s Daughter yesterday, where what makes a man a man – what signifies as masculinity; how one becomes (or remains) a man in both art and life; MC Hammer and those balloon pants – and Grace Jones! – was the topic. If art is, or can be, an external organ of perception, both visual and emotional, shaping what it sees and presents – represents, in that sense – then a depiction of a man with a beard, a man in a dress, carries that doubled influence.

And afterward, Cynthia Grieg and I talked about women in pants, another kind of representation. To become something, do we dress the part first? To try on identity and see how closely the mask becomes us?

Theatre has always known this, of course, intuitively and externally. So on to Don Giovanni.