Weliton Menário Costa (center) holds a laptop while surrounded by dancers for his music video “Kangaroo Time.” From left to right: Faux Née Phish (Caitlin Winter), Holly Hazlewood and Marina de Andrade.
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Weliton Menário Costa (center) holds a laptop while surrounded by dancers for his music video “Kangaroo Time.” From left to right: Faux Née Phish (Caitlin Winter), Holly Hazlewood and Marina de Andrade.
Nic Vevers/ANU
Weliton Menário Costa grew up in the Brazilian countryside. “I come from the countryside of the countryside of the countryside,” he said. He didn’t have much, but from a young age he loved singing.
“I just remember watching the singers on TV and loving them,” Menário Costa recalls. “I think if I could have chosen a profession – if the world was equal and you could choose anything – I would have chosen ‘musician’.”
He took a detour into science, but eventually returned to music professionally. And he recently received a major honor. Menário Costa won this year’s “Dance Your Ph.D” award. competition, an annual competition organized by Science magazine where doctoral and doctoral students. graduates present their research through dance.
Menário Costa’s winning submission highlights his work on kangaroo behavior and personality, but it also celebrates his identity – and what he had to overcome to adopt him.
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“I would just sing… every day”
When Menário Costa was a boy in Brazil, he tried to sing and dance with his younger sister outside. That’s when the comments would begin.
“People were always like, ‘Oh, it’s a girl thing, are you an asshole or something,'” he says. “At the time, I didn’t even know what it was. I just knew it was negative. It’s a very sexist space and homophobic and all that.”
When Menário Costa received a compliment, it was usually for his intelligence. So he buried himself in school and excelled. He entered a competitive high school. But even so, he was chronically worried about what others thought of him and feared that he wasn’t good enough.
“So instead of going to parties and dancing or acting and doing the things that I really love,” Menário Costa says, “I would just lock myself in the room and say, ‘Hey, I I have homework.” But when I took a shower, I just sang… every day.”
In time, Menário Costa arrived in Australia – first to study English, then he received a scholarship to pursue his doctorate. in Behavioral Ecology at the Australian National University in Canberra. His research focused on eastern gray kangaroos in Wilsons Promontory National Park in southeastern Australia.
“And my main question was: do kangaroos have personalities… different personalities?” explains Menário Costa. “And then, what’s driving the behavior you’re seeing? Is it personality or social environment?”
It was during his Ph.D. – when Menário Costa was on this other continent, on the other side of the world – that he managed to connect with who he really was. He came out as a faggot. He began to sing and dance again in the world. And after completing his Ph.D. Amid the challenges of COVID and the bushfires, Menário Costa decided to leave science behind and pursue creative work.
“Now I’m going to be a singer, now I’m going to be a dancer, and now I’m going to be all these things that I loved as a kid,” he says. Menário Costa began performing in pubs and small venues, mainly singing cover songs. “Then last year I started writing and performing my own original songs as well.”
Diversity in kangaroos — and in dance
In Menario Costa, Science “Dance your doctorate” from the magazine. the competition seemed to me “an ideal way to showcase my work as a singer-songwriter”.
His creation – the song and dance “Kangaroo Time” – was born from an act of exuberant collaboration. The clip opens with Menário Costa heading towards what appears to be his pitch. There are a few shots of kangaroos, but it’s mostly a happy sequence of dancers on an open Canberra landscape – drag queens, Capoeira performers, ballet dancers and people doing samba, salsa, hip hop, Brazilian funk and traditional Indian dance.
“The way they move is very different,” says Menário Costa, “but what they wear to perform is also very different. I decided to use the real diversity we have in a dance community.”
This is how Menário Costa represented one of his central findings: kangaroos have distinct personalities, based on how they wiggle when handled as babies and how far apart subadults and adult females are move away from an approaching human.
Additionally, kangaroo siblings often have similar personalities, which is why Menário Costa dances alongside his own sister, the first family member to visit him in Australia. “One of the main reasons he wanted to come was to be in this video,” he says. “It was so special to have him here.”
Menário Costa also discovered that when kangaroos move between groups, they adjust their behavior to conform to that of their companions. In the video, he makes his way to other groups and adopts the new dance styles as he goes.
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The main lyrics are simple, yet catchy: “I’m going to share with you…hope you don’t mind…some things I learned from my kangaroo time.” The phrase “kangaroo time” has a rainbow of meanings.
“It means the time when I did my research on kangaroos,” explains Menário Costa. “But (it) also means the first time I live as a homosexual. It’s the first time I live as an immigrant, five years without returning home. Time to reconnect with myself , to explore my sexuality, to bring this beautiful community(s) together.”
Menário Costa, who now goes by WELI, says filming this music video – where all of his worlds came together in a single afternoon – feels like his most important achievement to date. He compares his first place to his victory in the Eurovision Dance Competition.
The video ends with the text displayed on screen: “Differences lead to diversity. It exists within a given species; it is simply natural.”
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