The Male Dancer

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THE MALE DANCER

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Reviews of the first edition: ‘The fascination of this book lies in the way in which the author is able to locate the male dancer in the broader socio-historic context of the times . . . a vital contribution to the placing of dance and its literature within contemporary cultural debate.’ Dr Alexander Carter, Middlesex University ‘A complex summary of the numerous biases and windows through which we have viewed and continue to view male dancers . . . Burt’s work argues persuasively that theatrical dance is a vital and threatening site for defining masculinity in relation to the culture at large.’ David J. Popalisky, Dance Research Journal The Male Dancer, 2nd Edition updates and enlarges a classic Routledge title that has established itself as the definitive study of the role of men in ballet, modern, and postmodern dance. In this challenging and lively book, Burt examines the representation of masculinity in twentieth- and twenty-first-century dance. Taking issue with formalist and modernist accounts of dance, which dismiss gender and sexuality as irrelevant, he argues that prejudices against male dancers are rooted in our ideas about the male body and male behaviour. Drawing on recent developments in dance and performance theory, Burt provides a provocative theory of spectatorship in dance. He examines the work of choreographers such as Nijinsky, Graham, Bausch, and Bill T. Jones, relating performances of masculinity in their dances to the social, political, and artistic contexts in which these were produced. The Male Dancer has proven to be essential reading for anyone interested in dance and the cultural construction of gender. Ramsay Burt has thoroughly updated this important work to include dance works from the last ten years. Reflecting on the latest studies in theory, performance, and practice, he has renewed its timeliness for the new century. Ramsay Burt is Professor of Dance History at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. His publications include The Male Dancer, followed by Alien Bodies and Judson Dance Theatre. In 1999 he was Visiting Professor at the Department of Performance Studies, New York University. With Professor Susan Foster, he is founder editor of Discourses in Dance.

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TH E M ALE DAN CE R 1

Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities

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Ramsay Burt

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First edition published 1995 by Routledge Second edition published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2007 Ramsay Burt All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Burt, Ramsay, 1953– The male dancer: bodies, spectacle, sexualities/Ramsay Burt. – 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Sex in dance. 2. Male dancers. 3. Dance – Sociological aspects. 4. Dance – Anthropological aspects. 5. Masculinity. I. Title. GV1595.B87 2006 792.8081 – dc22 2006024777

ISBN 0-203-96097-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–97575–1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–97576–X (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–96097–1 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–97575–9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–97576–6 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–96097–4 (ebk)

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For M.K.B. 1915–82

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CONTENTS

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List of figures Acknowledgements Preface to revised second edition

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THE TROUBLE WITH THE MALE DANCER . . .

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LOOKING AT THE MALE

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The spectator and the gaze 31 Choreographer-centred and spectator-centred dance analysis 35 Performative speech acts and dance performance 38 The male dancer and the gaze 41 Naturalising male violence 46 Black male dancing bodies and whiteness 52 Masculinity and presence 54 Conclusion 56

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Gender norms and binary ways of thinking 13 The subject and modern body 15 Degeneracy and masculinity 19 Homophobia and the male dancer 22 The male ballet dancer during the nineteenth century: green box trees 24 Homosexuality and the male dancer: the dance that does not speak its name 28

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NIJINSKY

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Ballets Russes and homosexuality 60 Male prowess in Nijinsky’s roles 63 Nijinsky as genius 66 Nijinsky’s unorthodox roles in Fokine’s ballets 68 The radicalism of early modernism 72

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CONTENTS

Nijinsky’s ballets and gender representation 76 Nijinska and gender representation 79 L’Homme et son désir and Les Biches 81

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AMERICAN MEN

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Men in the US 86 Shawn’s men 91 Male dancing after Shawn 97 Graham’s men 98 Limón, modernism, and ethnicity 105 The Moor’s Pavane and the dangers of male intimacy 108

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DANCING IN THE CITY

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Alvin Ailey and black masculinity 116 Merce Cunningham’s anti-hierarchical structures 122 Steve Paxton and contact improvisation 130 Conclusion 135

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MASCULINITY AND LIBERATION

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Bausch’s Sacre: men and shame 142 Bausch’s Bluebeard and the landscape of men’s souls 146 Changing men: Are You Right There Michael, Are You Right? 148 Jones and Zane dancing together 152 Redistributing male energy in Set and Reset 154

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IDENTITY POLITICS

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Clark and betrayal 160 Morris and the instability of sex and gender 164 Goode, ghosts, violence, and the politics of camp 167 DV8 and lonely men 172 Playing down sexuality in Swan Lake 178

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Displacing masculinity 184 Women choreographers, male dancers 185 Refiguring the relationship between performer and spectator 194 Three male–male duets 198 More trouble 207

Notes Bibliography Index

209 214 227 viii

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FIGURES

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1.1 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 7.1 8.1

L’Opéra du XIXeme siecle DV8: My Sex, Our Dance Cocteau: backstage after Le Spectre de la rose The death of Petrouchka Cocteau: Stravinsky playing Sacre Nijinsky as the Faune Ted Shawn: Death of Adonis Appalachian Spring Alvin Ailey and Carmen de Lavallade Steve Paxton Fergus Early Trisha Brown: Set and Reset DV8: Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men Lea Anderson: Smithereens

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No doubt everyone who researches a particular subject in order to write a book ends up with a long list of people who have contributed in a variety of ways. I am grateful to my editors at Routledge who suggest I consider revising The Male Dancer for a second edition. I owe much to Valerie Briginshaw who has been casting a sharp eye on my writing for more years than I care to remember; and to the friends and colleagues who have helped me in one way or another with one edition or the other including Christy Adair, Lynn Garafola, Rachel Fensham, and Sarah Rubidge. Thanks also to Lea Anderson, Frank Bock, Jonathan Burrows, Boris Charmatz, Nigel Charnock, Fergus Early, John Jasperse, and Lloyd Newson, who all very generously allowed me to interview them while each was in the middle of a busy working period; also to Richard Dyer, Michael Huxley, Sally Luxton, Maggie Morris, Nick Nuttgens, Philippa Thomas, Jane Pritchard at Rambert Dance Company, Joe Goode Performance Group, Thin Man Productions, and the Hall Carpenter Archives at the British Library of Political Economy and Science. Also to my students, many of whom will recognise discussions of ideas and pieces that I first tried out in lectures, seminars, and tutorials with them. York, May 2006

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PREFACE TO REVISED SECOND EDITION 1

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The manuscript of the first edition of The Male Dancer was completed in March 1994. Since then, as I discovered while working on this revised and expanded second edition, new research has been published in some of the areas that my book covered but not in others. For instance, although I’d seen the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater live in the UK, I could hardly find anything written about Ailey’s work or indeed about African American dance in general in the UK. This has now changed and there is a growing and important body of scholarship addressing both that deals with this from theoretical and historical perspectives. More has now also been written about Shawn and Graham, though there is little significant change to our understanding of Nijinsky, apart from the new translation of his diaries. When I was writing in the early 1990s, I felt I was moving into largely uncharted territory in writing about male dancers and homosexuality. This is no longer the case so that, perhaps, the fact that I have also discussed heterosexual masculinities is now a distinguishing aspect of the book. In preparing the new edition I have added discussions of works created since 1994. Dance studies has also moved on since then and I have added discussions of older works that have been the subject of new research. I have cut all the references to psychoanalysis that were in the first edition, not because I no longer think it offers useful insights but because dance scholars in general have been so resistant to it that I feel this is not the best place to advocate it. I’ve also cut what was the second chapter of the first edition that focused on dance and philosophy through an examination of theories of expression, phenomenology and hermeneutic philosophy, and post-structuralist theory. Most of what I said about dance theory there is now somewhat out of date. Central to The Male Dancer, however, is a theory of spectatorship based on ideas about the male gaze which were adapted from feminist film theory. While these ideas in general have attracted widespread criticism from dance scholars, my own use of them has not attracted much comment. Some of the hostility within dance studies towards these feminist ideas, in my opinion, is due to the fact that xi

PREFACE TO REVISED SECOND EDITION

they propose spectator-oriented approaches to cultural analysis that challenge a choreographer-oriented approach and the canonical account of great masterworks which it underpins. So, although no one in dance studies in recent years seems to have had a good word to say about the gendered gaze, I have revisited and revised my approach to it with the help of recent work in dance history that combines theories of spectatorship and narratology. While revising the book, I have adjusted the coverage of some chapters. Ailey, for example, is now no longer in a chapter with Shawn, Graham, and Limón. Instead he and newly added Pomare are in a chapter with Cunningham and Paxton. Had I been writing an entirely new book, I would have found a way of dealing with more choreographers of colour. As it is, I hope that contrasting black modern dance with white avantgarde dance practice in the 1960s goes some way towards troubling an influential way of telling the story of modern dance in which the work of people of colour occupies a marginal position. I’ve split what in the first edition was a long final chapter into three: one for the late 1970s and early 1980s; one about the work of gay choreographers during the period of the AIDS epidemic; and one for work in the 1990s and 2000s. In 1994, it seemed to me strategically important to write about male dance and its relation to gay culture because there seemed a damaging lack of public discussion of this. In 2006, it no longer seems appropriate to single out male gender and sexuality for special treatment. I hope, instead, that the theoretical approaches and discussions of dance works that I have developed in this revised edition will be of use to others who wish to include issues concerning gender and sexuality as part of a process of locating choreography and performance within its wider social and political contexts.

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INTRODUCTION

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I hardly knew of the existence of dance or ballet at all until I was 26 years old. By then I had a degree in painting and art history, and had read some feminist film theory. A friend persuaded me to go to a festival of experimental dance at Dartington College in the south west of England, and virtually my first dance class was a workshop in contact improvisation with Steve Paxton. In retrospect, the experience brought about a big change in my life. Had I been younger I might have tried to become a professional dancer; I have ended up writing about dance instead. I was born and brought up in a small town in the north of England far from anywhere that ballet was performed, and at a time when modern dance was virtually unknown in England except among a few people in London. As a boy and young man I was taken to art galleries and to concerts of classical music. I don’t recall any of my family’s acquaintances ever going to see a ballet, nor was I aware of the existence of ballet schools. Ballet was not an area of experience considered appropriate for young men like myself, or even one in which I might be interested. My experience is not untypical of men of my class and background. Professional dance during approximately the last 150 years has not been considered an appropriate activity for white men to engage in. Such is the strength of the prejudice against male dancers that a large proportion of the men who have pursued careers in modern dance and to a lesser extent ballet have often not discovered dancing until they were in their teens or early twenties. Far fewer men go into professional dance training than women, and it is consequently much easier for men to find employment in dance than for women. At the same time, men occupy a disproportionate number of the artistic and administrative positions at the top of the dance profession. As Christy Adair points out:

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Women do have a very strong presence in dance but a good deal of work needs to be put into equal opportunities policies and practices in dance for women to benefit. In order for women’s perspectives to be clearly established and influential, women need to have access 1

INTRODUCTION

to positions of power and decision-making as choreographers, administrators and directors. (1992: 238) It would seem desirable both to improve women’s position in the dance professions and to change negative attitudes towards the male dancer. There shouldn’t necessarily be a conflict between the two, but clearly a big increase in the number of men entering the dance professions could worsen women’s already precarious and sometimes extremely exploited position. This book is not primarily concerned with the structures and politics of the dance professions but with the meanings that come into play when men dance on stage. Theatre dance is dance performed on stage rather than dance activity occurring in social situations. In looking at gender representations, my approach is inspired by the achievements of the women’s movement in redefining images of women. Issues relating to images of men, however, are often different from those which affect images of women. There is a key difference between re-evaluating images of women and doing the same for images of men. Part of the feminist project has been to reclaim and redefine femininity, and to celebrate the achievements of women artists and thus contradict the legacy of centuries of definition and domination by men. To what extent can men’s achievements in dance be celebrated without, at the same time, reasserting male dominance and thus reinforcing the imbalance of power between men and women in our society? In an ideal world, men should be able to find ways of expressing their individual experiences through dance and contribute to nondiscriminatory perceptions of the differences between men and women. The reality is, of course, the reverse: images of men generally reinforce male dominance over women. But, as I argue in the first two chapters of this book, patriarchy is maintained through limiting the ways in which masculinity is represented in cultural forms, including theatre dance. To become aware of the conscious and unconscious ways through which dominant ideas are inscribed in theatre dance is a step towards understanding how to create alternative, non-oppressive representations. The history of theatre dance in the twentieth century has been one of continual reform and innovation, and one in which questions of gender and gender representation have never been far from the surface. ‘Modern’, ‘new’, ‘contemporary’, ‘postmodern’ or ‘post-modern’, ‘new wave’, ‘next wave’ are all terms that have been used by dance critics and scholars to describe particular developments in theatre dance, often to imply that this latest style renders all previous styles outmoded. The label ‘modern dance’ generally refers to the work of the pioneer dance reformers (nearly all of whom were women) who developed styles other than ballet, including Ruth St Denis (1879–1968), Isadora Duncan (1877–1927), Doris Humphrey (1895–1958), Martha Graham (1894–1991), Rudolph Laban (1879–1958), Ted 2

INT RODUCT ION

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Shawn (1891–1972), and Mary Wigman (1886–1973) during the first half of the twentieth century. It is sometimes used to describe the work produced in the US during the 1950s and 1960s; most of the younger choreographers, such as Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Alvin Ailey, had started their careers dancing in companies run by the earlier pioneers. These were predominantly men. The label ‘contemporary dance’ was widely adopted in Europe during the 1960s and 1970s to distinguish between the new interest in dance partly inspired by visits from companies and teachers from the US and the older European modern dance that had gone underground since 1945. Throughout this book, however, I am following US usage and use ‘modern’ to cover both the earlier pioneering modern dance and the later work that continues within that tradition. ‘Modern’ dance, in this sense, is the mainstream modernist dance tradition that made up (and still largely constitutes) the repertoires of the larger mainstream European and North American modern dance companies. The pioneers of modern dance were predominantly women. Similarly the development of ballet in Britain in the twentieth century was initiated by two women: Marie Rambert (1888–1982) and Ninette de Valois (1898–2001). To work out why there were so few men involved in these developments one has to look into the social and institutional factors that have until very recently restricted women’s access to the artistic professions. Up until the nineteenth century, most women artists in the male dominated field of painting were only able to gain access to training and to the specialist knowledge of their chosen profession by being ‘under the protection’ of a male artist, often their father. Bronislava Nijinska (1891–1972) is the only female choreographer of the first half of the twentieth century to make work with the resources of a major, already existing ballet company – initially the Ballets Russes. An important factor that enabled her to do this was the knowledge and experience of the sorts of artistic ideas and practices that lay behind the development of the Ballets Russes’ work which she had gained through her involvement in the work of her brother Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950). Clearly one reason why women initially developed a new area – modern dance – was because of their restricted access to creative positions in the existing one. Furthermore, the female pioneers of modern dance did not have any vested interests in upholding the specialist traditions of ballet, and were, therefore, freer than men to develop new and alternative forms and representations. In Rambert and de Valois’ case there was no prestigious tradition of ballet dancing in Britain (though there was ballet in music halls), and they were, thus, not competing with men in starting their schools and companies. There were some male choreographers active in American modern dance but their situation was the mirror image of that which had faced earlier women painters. Ted Shawn would surely never have got where he did as a dancer and choreographer without the help of Ruth St Denis. José 3

INTRODUCTION

Limón (1908–72) and Charles Weidman (1901–75), as Marcia Siegel suggests, were both dependent on Doris Humphrey for much longer than they needed to be (Siegel 1987). In Britain, Marie Rambert ‘discovered’ and nurtured the fledgling talents of several male choreographers (and, unlike de Valois, one or two women choreographers) of whom the most celebrated were Frederick Ashton (1904–88) and Antony Tudor (1908–87). According to her autobiography (1972), Rambert was not particularly keen to choreograph work herself and gave up doing so in the early days of her ballet company. De Valois, however, choreographed several substantial ballets, some of which were much admired at the time. She, however, believed that men rather than women should choreograph work, and the principal choreographers and artistic directors of the Royal Ballet which she founded have all been male (see Adair 1992: 111–12). The subsequent history of modern dance in the US has also been one of increasing male influence and subsequent dominance. The leading modern dance artists in the 1930s are generally considered to be Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Helen Tamiris, Hanya Holm, and Pauline Koner. By 1960 the leading modern choreographer was unquestionably Martha Graham, but, after her, most of the other important choreographers were men. In the 1970s and 1980s male ballet dancers even eclipsed ballerinas in terms of salary, media attention, and drawing power at the box office. Some illustrated books on the male dancer have celebrated what Judith Lynne Hanna has called the big bucks of modern ballet. Some female dance writers have even expressed dismay at this male resurgence, implying that these men have unfairly taken over ‘areas once securely reserved for women’ (Hanna 1988: 144). Dance is not an exclusively or innately feminine activity, and most people would surely accept that the history of twentieth-century dance would have been poorer without the contribution of male dancers and choreographers. It is surely a mistake to view the resurgence of the male ballet dancer and the entry of male choreographers into the previously feminine realm of modern dance as instances of men waiting until women have put in all the hard work and then taking over. Often what leads a man to start dance training is the discovery of their own unrealised potential; this is frequently brought about by seeing an inspirational performance by another male dancer. Shawn may well have been inspired by seeing the Russian ballet dancer Mikhail Mordkin (who toured the US with Pavlova in 1909 and with his own company in 1911–12 while Shawn took up dancing in 1911). José Limón and Erick Hawkins (1909–94) were both inspired to take up dancing after seeing a performance in New York by the German dancer Harald Kreutzberg (1902–68) in 1929. Furthermore, if one accepts that star male dancers generally attract large audiences, this must be largely because women enjoy watching male dancers. Statistics show that women generally outnumber men in audiences for dance and ballet performances. 4

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This book does not present a survey of male dance in the twentieth century, nor does it set out to define or celebrate the achievements of men as professional dancers. Instead it examines a selection of significant developments in the representation of masculinity in Western theatre dance during the twentieth century. A critical reading of these is proposed which grounds them in the social and political contexts within which they were created. A major assumption that underlies this selection is that it is only within work that is progressive, experimental, or avant-garde that staid, old-fashioned images and ideas about gender can be challenged and alternatives imagined. I have never seen a ballet performance that has not disappointed me. Perhaps I have been unlucky in what I have chosen or been able to see, but consequently this is not the book of a ballet lover.1 I have sought instead to characterise the conventions and criteria of mainstream and more conservative dance and ballet in quite general terms, and then to use this as a basis for evaluating the work of reformers and innovators. The bulk of this book, therefore, investigates: the reintroduction of the male dancer to Western theatres by the Ballets Russes; the virile image of the male dancer that developed in American modern dance during the first half of the century; and the ways in which avant-garde and postmodern choreographers have been able to adapt, react against, or reject the legacy of existing ways in which masculinity is conventionally represented in theatre dance. The theoretical framework for looking at representations of gender in theatre dance that is developed in the first two chapters attempts to take into account the social and historical conditions of production and reception of dance, including issues of class, gender, ‘race’, and sexuality. The rest of the book, however, at the risk of being accused of ethnocentrism, only looks at representations of masculinity in the context of Western theatre dance. It is, therefore, only concerned with black dance artists who have worked within or have extended the tradition of Western modernist dance. Regrettably this excludes work derived from the revival of traditional African and Caribbean dance, and revived Indian classical dance, as well as recent modern dance in South America and the Pacific Asian region. A somewhat overused adage has it that dance is a universal language. If this is so, globalisation notwithstanding, one shouldn’t underestimate the differences between its dialects. Representations of gender in the dance and theatre traditions of different parts of the world are each grounded in different, socially constructed ideas about the body. Chapter 1 of this book relates representations of masculinity in Western theatre dance to the development in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of scientific ideas about the modern body. To do this for each of these other traditions in the same depth would be a sizeable undertaking, and one that is beyond the scope of this book. What I have tried to do, where appropriate, is to critically interrogate the whiteness of modern dance, and 5

INTRODUCTION

not accept this as a universally transcendent norm. The other area that unfortunately, but unavoidably, receives no attention in this book is representations of masculinity in early modern dance in Germany. There were a number of men working as dancers and choreographers in modern dance styles in Germany in the period immediately following the First World War. However, there is very little evidence or documentation available in English about the choreography and performances of male dancers in European modern dance and it is for this reason that they are missing from the present study. The subtitle of the book – bodies, spectacle, sexualities – indicates key issues in the representation of masculinity in theatre dance. The body is the primary mode of communication in dance, and it is through our bodies that we are allocated our gender. Issues relating to the social construction of the gendered body are central to the way gender is represented in theatre dance. But theatre dance is also a spectacle. Different performances invite the spectator to look at dance in different ways. For example, performances of a classic nineteenth-century ballet present the audience with a clearly focused spectacle while a Cunningham event is more open, leaving it up to the spectator to choose what to watch and for how long. The way spectators derive pleasure from the spectacle of dance is also determined by their gender, social background, ethnicity, age, sexuality, and other components of identity. The question of sexuality is particularly important. I point out in the first two chapters that the traditions and conventions of mainstream theatre dance are formed by, and reinforce, a normative heterosexual, white, male point of view, marginalising and suppressing alternative sexualities. Future historians may look back on the period from around 1830 until around 1980 as a curiously anomalous one during which the male body became a taboo subject for cultural representation. Until comparatively recently, surviving nineteenth-century gender ideologies have denied the possibility that women might find the male body of any interest – erotic or otherwise – while punishing attempts to create a homoerotic view of the male body. At the same time, during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, gay men, predominantly in the field of ballet, and heterosexual women, in the field of modern dance, have been largely responsible for developing male dancing. But the conventions through which they have done this have dictated, first, that the audience look from a male point of view and are thus uninterested in the spectacle of the male dancing body, and, second, that masculinity is an unproblematic and unquestioned norm. This has resulted in the range of male dancing being largely limited to the expression of male dominance and control over female bodies, and the consequent development of a tough, hard, dance vocabulary. The American postmodern choreographer Mark Morris gave an interviewer an illustration of how limited he found the male dancer to be in comparison with the 6

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female performer. A woman in rehearsal, he says, can be asked to act like a 65-year-old man but ‘straight’ (heterosexual) men are too embarrassed to act like 13-year-old girls (Acocella 1993: 92). Morris (whose work is considered in Chapter 7) is one of a comparatively small number of recent choreographers who have set out to challenge and disrupt the ways in which gender is conventionally represented in theatre dance. Since the late 1970s, writers have been asking questions about how gender and sexuality have been represented in dance. In doing so, they have sometimes come into conflict with dance scholars committed to formalist aesthetics and modernist approaches to dance theory. A prevalent, modernist view proposes that dance is not a representational practice, and that modern choreographers are progressively purifying themselves of outmoded and extraneous representational and expressive practices. Thus questions about how gender is represented in theatre dance are irrelevant to what has generally been thought to be the true nature of dance as art. Such a view is based on misunderstandings both about the nature of modernism and about the way dance functions as a signifying practice. The first two chapters of this book locate masculinity and its representation in theatre dance within recent sociological debates, in the area of gender studies and film and cultural studies. Chapter 1 asks the question why the male dancer over the last 150 years has been a source of unease and suspicion, while Chapter 2 is concerned with conventions that determine the way the male body is looked at in cultural forms, examining, in particular, the idea of the gendered gaze and spectatorship. Together these chapters develop the criteria for the analysis of dance work in the rest of the book. Chapter 3 looks at the legacy of Nijinsky, Chapters 4 and 5 discuss modern dance in the US. The rise of second wave feminism, the Black Arts Movement, and Gay Liberation around 1970 brought about a sea change in ideas about the relation between identity and cultural representations. The last three chapters of the book discuss the work of choreographers in Europe and the US who have responded to these developments. Masculinity as a socially constructed identity is not a stable entity, but one made up of conflictual and contradictory aspects. Representations of masculinity in theatre dance over the last 150 years (more so in some ways than other cultural forms) have threatened to disrupt and destabilise masculine identities. This suggests specific questions and issues which underlie the analysis and interpretation in the last six chapters. What makes extreme, almost stereotypical representations of violent, macho masculinity appear to support dominant, conservative norms of masculinity in one ballet or modern dance piece but criticise and threaten these norms in another? Why is it that some choreographers have been able to reject and subvert the conventions and traditions through which masculinity is represented, while others’ attempts have been recuperated within dominant 7

INTRODUCTION

conservative gender ideologies? How is it that some choreographers have succeeded in making visible aspects of masculine experience that are otherwise denied or rendered invisible within mainstream work? Finally, this book is concerned with identifying key issues and strategies that offer the radical dance artist potential sites at which to trouble and subvert the conflictual and contradictory aspects of dominant notions of masculine identity in order to create possibilities for representing new, alternative, non-discriminatory perceptions of the differences between men and women in theatre dance.

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1 THE TROUBLE WITH THE MALE DANCER . . .

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‘The unpleasant thing about a danseuse is that she sometimes brings along a male dancer.’1 This is the title of one of the satirical lithographs which Charles Edouard de Beaumont (1812–88) published in 1860 of scenes at the Paris Opéra (Figure 1.1). It shows a male figure dancing, while behind him slightly to one side is a ballerina with little sylph wings who turns her head deferentially towards him. He wears tights and has an ugly face, solid thighs, and big hands. The artist, however, has not made him look grotesque, just less attractive than the ballerina. The implication is that the viewer would rather look at her, but the male dancer wants you to look at him, and anyway he is in the way. The joke is that the normal roles in the supported adagio are reversed so that he is on pointe while she is supporting him. But not only is he not in need of any support but the energy of the turn he is preparing to take and the amount of space it needs will cause a collision. The title appeals to a shared prejudice about these ‘unpleasant things’. At the start of the twenty-first century, it is tempting to read into the scene more recent prejudices against the male dancer. Nevertheless, the print captures a particular historical moment with its associated attitudes towards class, gender, and aesthetics, all of which have had a strong influence on the development of later attitudes. Up until the nineteenth century in Europe, prejudices against the male dancer did not exist. By the start of the twenty-first century these have developed and changed in response to a variety of social and historical factors. The print takes for granted that everyone knows what is wrong with the male dancer, but more or less leaves it unstated. That which is unstated, and by implication should not be stated in polite company, can be a powerful incitement to prejudice. So what then is the trouble with the male dancer? Today one might answer this question in a number of ways, depending upon point of view and the sort of dance with which one is familiar. One might feel distaste at macho displays of male energy on the dance stage – what are they trying to prove? and so on. Or one might feel that male dancers are generally a disappointment – they just don’t look very masculine. Or, again, one might feel that the ways in which one has seen 9

THE MAL E DANCER

Figure 1.1 ’The unpleasant thing about a danseuse is that she sometimes brings along a male dancer’. Plate from Charles Edouard de Beaumont’s 1860 Album Comique, L’Opéra du XIXeme siecle. Courtesy of Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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masculinity represented in dance do not seem very relevant to one’s own experience of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so on. Then there are those who do enjoy watching male dance, and wish there were more male dancers around to watch. In the area of modern and experimental dance during the twentieth century, a large number of male dancers did not actually discover dancing until their late teens or early twenties. This is undoubtedly largely the result of prejudices against the male dancer. For much of the twentieth century, the dance world tended to appear to be predominantly a feminine realm in terms of audiences, dancers, and teachers. The fact that, for example, in Britain and the US ballet and modern dance teachers have been predominantly women has been cited as one reason for male dancer’s ‘effeminacy’ (e.g. Manchester 1950). But for many people, a key source of contemporary prejudice is the association between male dancers and homosexuality. It is certainly true that there are a lot of gay men involved in the dance world. Although by no means all male dancers are gay, this is what prejudice suggests. One consequence of this, I suggest, is a particular form of hyper-masculine display which sometimes naturalises aggression and violence as dancers try to show that they are not effeminate, where ‘effeminate’ is a code word for homosexual. Until comparatively recently there has been a profound silence in the dance world on the subject of male dance and homosexuality. Commenting on the fact that the early American modern dancer Ted Shawn was gay, Judith Lynn Hanna in her book Dance, Sex and Gender points to the irony in the time and effort he and his company of male dancers ‘spent trying to prove that they were not what Shawn and many of the company were’ (1988: 141). What she fails to recognise is that for gay men in the US at that time, ‘coming out’ was not an option. With the trial of Oscar Wilde as a terrible example, and with fear of blackmail, it is not surprising that so many in the dance world have, in order to protect individuals, taken the line of denying any knowledge of homosexuality among dancers. By no means all male dancers are gay, and the belief that they are is not in itself an entirely satisfactory explanation of the prejudice. If one takes a historical perspective, I have not seen any firm evidence that the general public were aware of and concerned about gay involvement in ballet before the time of Diaghilev and Nijinsky at the beginning of the twentieth century. The prejudice against the male dancer, however, developed during the flowering of the Romantic ballet, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when de Beaumont drew this lithograph. Examination of attitudes towards the male dancer during this earlier period (considered below) suggests that what is at stake is the development of modern, middle class attitudes towards the male body and expressive aspects of male social behaviour. I am not arguing that, prior to Nijinsky, all male dancers were heterosexual, merely that their sexuality was not an explicit issue. Gender representations in cultural forms, including theatre 11

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dance, do not merely reflect changing social definitions of femininity and masculinity, but are actively involved in the processes through which gender is constructed and norms reinforced. What concerns us here is the way that the socially produced parameters of, and limits on, male behaviour are expressed in representations of masculinity in theatre dance. At stake is the appearance of the dancing male body as spectacle. What Rosalind Coward has commented on, in relation to contemporary film, in many ways sums up a modern attitude to the gendered body: Under the sheer weight of attention to women’s bodies we seem to have become blind to something. Nobody seems to have noticed that men’s bodies have quietly absented themselves. Somewhere along the line, men have managed to keep out of the glare, escaping from the relentless activity of sexual definitions. (Coward 1984: 227) Over the last two centuries, however, it is not that male dancers have quietly absented themselves, but that, in many instances, they have been nervously dismissed. When the male dancer gradually disappeared from the stages of western European theatres during the period of the Romantic ballet, his place, in some cases, was taken by the female dancer dressed ‘en travestie’ (Garafola 1985). There is a similar disappearance of the male nude as a subject for painting and sculpture (Walters 1979), and male forms of dress underwent what J.C. Flugel (1930) has brilliantly characterised as ‘the great male renunciation’ – the abandonment of the more flamboyant styles that the aristocracy had popularised in favour of the plain, black, bourgeois suit. What became conflictual and, consequently, repressed was anything that might draw attention to the spectacle of the male body. What one should, therefore, be looking for to explain the mid-nineteenthcentury prejudice against the male dancer, is the development, during this period, of modern attitudes to the body and gender, at a time when bodies in general were a source of anxiety. It is these attitudes that brought about a situation in which it seemed ‘natural’ not to look at the male body, and, therefore, problematic and conflictual for men to enjoy looking at men dancing. Masculinity, as a socially constructed identity, was rarely stable. Rather than enjoying a secure autonomy, men have continually needed to adjust and redefine the meanings attributed to sexual difference in order to maintain dominance in the face of changing social circumstances. Because the body is the primary means of expression in dance, and because gender is an attribute of the body, dance is a key area through which gendered identities are revealed. The kinds of gender representation that choreographers and dancers create and perform are partly determined by their individual histories and experiences. History and experience also effect the kinds of interpretation that audience members make of the dance work 12

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they see performed. How they see it is also, however, conditioned by the way in which the work is framed and presented to them – the way the work negotiates the traditions and conventions of theatre dance. Dominant gender ideologies are not, therefore, imposed without resistance through dance. The moment of live performance is a privileged one in which these ideologies are represented and contested. Indeed dancing bodies can become sites of resistance against them. The spectacle of men dancing on stage can, therefore, sometimes expose some of the tensions and contradictions within masculine subjectivities. The unease that sometimes accompanies the idea of the male dancer is, I suggest, produced by structures which defend and police dominant male norms. This chapter therefore aims to reveal some of the conflictual and contradictory aspects of the construction of modern masculine identities, while Chapter 2 discusses how these determine and are determined by the way masculinity is represented in theatre dance. The fact of the male dancer’s decline in the nineteenth century is the context for his subsequent revival. It was the prudishness of Victorian gender ideologies that initially condemned male dancers to the problematic status they have spent much of the last 100 years trying to overcome. ‘Modern’ ideas about masculine social behaviour and the male body, which developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have exerted a residual influence on more recent social attitudes towards the creativity and expressiveness of male artists as a whole up to the present. This chapter, therefore, looks first at the ways in which the development of ideas about the modern male body have influenced attitudes towards male behaviour that themselves can account for prejudices against men dancing on stage. It then looks at some of the earliest manifestations of these prejudices in the writings of ballet critics in the nineteenth century. What emerges from the latter is that these writers did not criticise, or were not primarily worried by, any signs of effeminacy in the male dancer; what concerned them chiefly were questions of male bourgeois identity. It was not until the early years of the twentieth century that a connection was made between male dance and homosexuality, and the chapter concludes with a discussion of this. GENDER NORMS AND BINARY WAYS OF THINKING

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I have suggested that the joke behind de Beaumont’s lithograph is the incongruousness of male and female dancers exchanging roles in a supported adagio. The lithograph exemplifies a binary way of thinking in which positive masculine characteristics and attributes are valued to the detriment of feminine ones. As feminists have pointed out, this way of thinking has reduced richly diversified qualities into narrowly defined 13

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polar opposites such as culture and nature, mind and body, intellect and feeling. In this lithograph, the male dancer’s ugliness contrasts with his partner’s beauty, his vigour and need for space with her intimacy and delicacy. Comparing their legs reveals a more complex polarity. Whereas his head and hands are slightly out of proportion with his body, his legs are not, and their silhouette is somewhat similar to hers. The difference is that de Beaumont has used shading to indicate the muscles in his legs while leaving hers flat and insubstantial. There is an undeniably realistic materiality to his body while hers is drawn in a way which suggests that her beauty offers her the magical possibility of transcending the body and thus evoking a Romantic ideal. Watching her permits an escape from an ugly reality into beauty and romance, but his energy and material presence pull the spectator back to the here and now. The lithograph, therefore, reinforces a binary where male dancing bodies promise action while female dancing bodies invite contemplation and fascination. Writing about visual art, John Berger observed that: ‘Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ (1972: 47). Berger, thus, argued that the gendered look informs the criteria and conventions which govern the way women and men are depicted in the tradition of European visual art within which de Beaumont worked. Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment began their book on the female gaze by revising Berger’s observation: ‘Men act, women appear. That’s patriarchy’ (1988: 1). I take this to mean that male dominance over women remains a constant, although the particular social groups exercising that dominance change over time. While binary modes of thinking assure that masculinity seems to be universal, there is, of course, a history of changing masculinities. In this example, the male dancer disappeared from western European theatres around the time that the nobility, with its landed estates, were handing on political power and patronage of the arts to the bourgeoisie with its capital investments. At a time of historical change, the visibility of the male dancing body became problematic. If nineteenth-century bourgeois men feared visible, male bodies, this is because, as Peggy Phelan has observed, visibility is a trap which ‘summons surveillance and the law; it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonial/ imperial appetite for possession’ (1993: 6). Victorian men, therefore, wished to be spectators who were not, themselves, objects of investigation for another’s gaze. Film theorist Steve Neale proposes that mainstream narrative cinema assumes the spectator’s look is an investigative one. Whereas women are constantly under investigation, men, he suggests, rarely are: ‘Women are a problem, a source of anxiety, of obsessive enquiry; men are not. Whereas women are investigated, men are tested. Masculinity, as an ideal, at least, is implicitly known. Femininity is, by contrast, a mystery’ (1983: 15–16). What Neale neatly sums up here has been the norm for gender representations in Western cultural forms. But what if one could dismantle 14

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the binary system on which this depends? What if the spectator were not white, male, heterosexual, and middle class? Neale evokes one of Freud’s most quoted remarks: what do women want? But there may be women who find men a mystery and puzzle over what they want; and it is not impossible that white men may be a source of fear and fascination for some African and Asian men. Rather than assuming ‘man’ is the universal norm against which all others are measured, this is to pose the question how white, middle class, heterosexual men might appear as one part of a range of different identities that are marked in terms of ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, age, and other social categories. Indeed we should not assume to know what this range may, in the future, include. To dance on stage for an audience is to make oneself visible in what may, sometimes, seem a naked exposure. It is, thus, to have to take into consideration how one might appear from points of view other than one’s own and thus to experience one’s being through others. Cultural anxiety about men dancing on stage, therefore, helps protect those men who don’t want to consider the effects that male dominance have on others. The idea that masculinity, as Neale puts it, is an ideal that is implicitly known, stops people realising that there is an open-ended range of evolving identities. Many of the dance pieces that I discuss later in this book have not only troubled normative definitions of masculinity, but, in doing so, have made space for imagining ways of embodying other possibilities. In order to appreciate the value of such alternative ways of performing masculinities, it is necessary to investigate the development of modern ideas about embodied subjectivity. THE SUBJECT AND MODERN BODY

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The relation between subjectivity and embodiment is central both to a sense of gendered identity and to the way dance functions as a signifying practice. To be a subject is to have a conception of oneself as an independent and responsible member of society. The body, as anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued, is a symbol of society. The idea of society, she wrote, is a powerful image. ‘It has form; it has external boundaries, margins, internal structure’ (1966: 114). Gender and sexuality are key elements within the internal structure while sexual dissidents and the otherwise gendered are either marginal or a threat to boundaries. These boundaries, Douglas has argued, can represent any boundaries that are threatened or precarious. If they, therefore, ‘contain power to reward conformity and repulse attack’ (ibid.), it is this which is at work producing anxieties about the male dancer. Modern ideas about the body, and about the biology of gender difference, developed as a result of the breakdown of older notions of the body in Greek thought and their assimilation within medieval and renaissance Christian thought. As the authority of the Church declined, the older 15

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Christian model of the sinful flesh became recast with new, scientific features by both the enlightened, rational bourgeoisie and their evangelical protestant counterparts. By the nineteenth century, the idea that the body, as an entity, is execrable not only persisted but became increasingly important in new and more anxious forms. The body itself was no longer admired, but became, as Michel Foucault has shown in his books on the asylum, the clinic, prisons, and sexuality, the object of classification and regulation through scientific, medical, and juridical processes (Foucault 1971, 1973, 1977, 1979). As Leo Bersani has pointed out, ‘Foucault wrote so brilliantly of the body as an object of the exercise of power, that we may fail to note how little he spoke of the body as an agent of power’ (1995: 102). Judith Butler has criticised Foucault for only recognising the way power inscribes the body. The problem with this, she points out, is that on a theoretical level it presupposes a pure, unmarked body prior to the moment of inscription (1990a: 130). What is needed, she argues, is to recognise that gender and sexuality are attributes of one’s body which seem to be fundamental to one’s sense of self but whose meanings are determined by norms that come from outside oneself. Dance is an area where, as embodied beings, we negotiate the social and cultural discourses through which gender and sexuality are maintained. She points out: the body has its invariably public dimension: constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, bearing their imprint, formed within the crucible of social life, the body is only later, and with some uncertainty, that to which I lay claim as my own. (2004: 21) There are a number of different practices through which one can lay claim to one’s body, but, because dance is a performing art, it is a particularly useful area in which to consider the ways in which gender is performed. Performing one’s gender, Butler argues, is like performing a play: ‘gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualised and reproduced as reality once again’ (1990b: 277). One cannot refuse to perform the gender that is ascribed to one, but as one lays claim to one’s body, one lays claim to the means through which one responds to and interprets this demand. The possibilities for interpretation are nevertheless circumscribed: Just as a script may be enacted in various ways, and just as the play requires both text and interpretation, so the gendered body acts its part in a culturally constricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives. (Ibid.) 16

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Ideas about the nature of gendered bodies are one area in which the kinds of interpretation that Butler identifies have taken place. Although these ideas claim to be universal, they nevertheless change and develop. Butler has put this in a way that seems particularly apt for the way masculinity is performed in dance. These ideas, she argues, are: ‘a sedimentation that over time has produced a set of corporeal styles which, in reified form, appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes which exist in a binary relation to one another’ (ibid.: 275). If the traditions and conventions, through which gender is represented in dance, are a set of corporeal styles that have sedimented over time, it is possible to correlate changing ideas about the nature of gendered bodies with ideas about theatre dance. With the increasing acceptance of a rational and scientific approach to the body, Aristotelian ideas about the metaphysical inferiority of women gradually became untenable. The eighteenth-century idea that men and women have the same potential to be free, reasoning subjects implicitly threatened male power. Christine Battersby (1989) has shown the conflicting nature of the arguments which were put forward, by philosophers in the nineteenth century, to maintain male dominance. Scientists and commentators sought to prove that women were physically and temperamentally unsuited to serious thinking (Jacobus et al. 1990). If the male body was the norm, against which female anatomical and temperamental traits were judged, men, by default and by implication, were considered to be less capable of transcending their natural lusts and desires, and thus morally inferior. If women had some grounds for claiming to be purer and more disembodied than men, it became more appropriate, therefore, for female dancers to evoke the ballet ideal than for male dancers. This definition of gendered difference is part of the larger separation of the middle class (male) public world of work and politics from the (female) private world of the home and family, which has been called the culture of separate spheres (Davidoff and Hall 1987; Wolff and Seed 1987). Artistic expression, itself, became gendered so that, as Paul Hoch has suggested: ‘Art, as an emotional (and therefore feminine) representation of the inner life became even further estranged from science, the representative mode of thought in the cruel, emotionless masculine world “outside” ’ (1979: 140). Much of the literature about gender ideologies in the nineteenth century contrasts stoic, taciturn masculinity with feminine sensitivity and emotionality. In Greek antiquity, stoic philosophy encouraged men to use reason to achieve moderation and avoid being carried away by their passions. Feelings are experienced through one’s body. Richard Rorty (1980) has shown that, whereas reason for Greek philosophers was located neither ‘inside’ nor ‘outside’ the human being, seventeenth-century scepticism located a newly discovered consciousness as an interiority. For Descartes, all bodily perceptions were fallible so that consciousness became dis17

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embodied. Whereas Greek philosophers, therefore, advocated an embodied moderation, Descartes proposed a rational ideal that could only be achieved through transcending the body. For nineteenth-century bourgeois men within the culture of separate spheres, what was important was not the achievement of moderation but the performance of masculinity in as unemotional a manner as possible. This particular mode of performance has persisted into recent times. Steve Neale has identified male heroes in Hollywood films whose behaviour is ‘marked not only be emotional reticence but also by silence, a reticence in language’ (1983: 12). In dance terms, this translates into a reticence with gesture and bodily expression, and I shall identify in later chapters similar masculine traits in some theatre dance work. This is a reactive mode of male performance. It is not one that actively represents positive aspects of experience but one which passively avoids association with femininity or effeminacy. This reactive masculinity is one which suggests anxiety about the limits and boundaries of masculine identities. The Romantic notion of the artist as inspired genius is the obvious exception to the rule that men should appear unemotional and inexpressive. Christine Battersby points out that the (male) Romantic artist was excepted from gendered divisions of social behaviour through being allowed to have ‘feminine’ qualities such as sensitivity, passivity, emotionality, and introspective self-consciousness. Battersby argues that artists could appropriate these ‘feminine’ characteristics by evoking the notion of genius, and thus without suffering the lower social status of being female. When the Romantic artist expresses the underlying forces of sublime nature, this is a male creative energy responding to the male energy of nature: according to Edmund Burke (1729–97), the grandeur of an avalanche in the Alps is sublime, as are also ‘kings and commanders discharging their terrible strength and destroying all obstacles in their path’ (Battersby 1989: 74). The new notion of male artistic self-expression was linked to the body and physicality. A sublime, muscular dynamism was identified in Michaelangelo’s art. On another level, creativity was linked to virility and male sexuality. Battersby calls this the ‘virility school of creativity’. The Romantic idea of male artistic self-expression clearly underlies much of the hype that has surrounded the recent popularity of the male dancer. It is paradoxical, however, that these notions should initially have been developed at the time when the male dancer was disappearing in western Europe as a result of strong social disapproval. The Romantic genius was allowed a wide range of self-expression that would have been considered unacceptable in men not considered to be gifted. The way in which the Romantic composer might pound his piano while performing his own work, or the emotionalism of the Romantic poet, or the way the brush strokes betray the painter’s emotions: the implicit or explicit physicality of all these seems to have been acceptable for male artists in the nineteenth 18

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century. As far as theatre dance is concerned, during the nineteenth century the dancing of ballet movements was not recognised as a reputable means of artistic self-expression, let alone a means through which male genius manifests itself. There were significant differences between the performance of the male dancer and forms of self-expression in music, literature, and the visual arts. The general low status of the performing arts, and of dance as a non-verbal form within them, contributed to the exclusion of the male dancer from the realm of genius.

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DEGENERACY AND MASCULINITY A variety of anxieties about the weakness and insecurity of the boundaries defining masculinity clustered around the nineteenth-century idea of degeneracy. In the 1870s the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) believed he had proved that criminals and prostitutes were throwbacks to humanity’s savage past. (He also proposed that genius was a productive form of degeneracy.) Fear of genetic regression was also anxiously identified in other areas. In Europe’s colonies, African ‘savages’ seemed in danger of regressing to brute animality while contemporary Asians were believed to be degenerate descendants of once great civilisations. If the health and vitality of Western culture supposedly justified colonial rule, Europeans needed to guard against becoming degenerate themselves. For the middle classes, the surviving aristocracy exhibited worrying signs of degeneracy through its moral decadence, while the urban poor were in danger, through ill health and vulnerability, to epidemics. The migration from the country to the city to form the new proletariat, necessary for large scale industrial expansion, produced an urban population in danger of losing its health and becoming soft within the unhygienic and immoral environment of the city. Catherine Gallagher has suggested that for the Victorian middle classes, the social body, far from representing a perfectible ideal, was imagined to be ‘a chronically and incurably ill organism that could only be kept alive by constant flushing, draining, and excising of various deleterious elements. These dangerous elements, moreover, were often not themselves unhealthy but rather were overly vigorous and fecund individuals’ (1987: 90). These overly vigorous and fecund individuals were, of course, members of the working classes. For the bourgeoisie, the body, with everything it implied, became a problem and a threat. J.S. Bratton, discussing the hornpipe within the context of nineteenth-century British working class entertainment, suggests that it was the sort of act through which a performer could exhibit admired qualities of dexterity, physical prowess, inventiveness, and pluck, within a dance which would be familiar as ‘working or holiday accomplishments of the audience, carried to a pitch they had not the leisure to attain’ (1990: 68). Bratton suggests that, underlying middle-class distaste for this sort of performance, was a real or imagined

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fear of the mass of working-class people going out in the street, getting together, and being induced to drunken disorder by the physical excitement of singing and dancing, and, ultimately, incited to riot by shows and plays which might have radical tendencies. (Ibid.: 74) Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the existence of a newly defined category, homosexuality, became a source of anxiety, particularly through its association with fin-de-siècle decadent art. And if all this wasn’t bad enough, middle class male prerogatives were also being increasingly challenged by women’s education, their developing economic role as consumers, and by calls for women’s suffrage. One response to anxiety about the limits and boundaries of masculine identities was to identify an external cause for this contemporary crisis rather than acknowledging any internal contradictions from which it might derive. As Michael S. Kimmel has shown, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a time of widespread debate about fears that this ‘super-civilisation’ was causing modern European men to lose touch with their ‘essential’, ‘natural’ masculinity (1987). One participant in this debate was Lord Baden-Powell. In his book Rovering To Success: A Guide For Young Manhood, he states: God made men to be men. On the other hand civilisation, with its town life, buses, hot-and-cold water laid on, everything done for you, tends to make men soft and feckless beings. That is what we want to get out of. (1930: 24) He goes on to praise English public schools for forming character and ‘licking’ upper and upper-middle class boys into shape, and compares this with the manhood initiation rites of Zulus, Swazis, and Matabeles: Unfortunately, for the ordinary boy in civilised countries there is nothing of this kind. We badly need some such training for our lads if we are to keep up manliness in our race, instead of lapsing into a nation of soft, sloppy, cigarette suckers. (Ibid.: 25) It was these ‘ordinary’ boys lower down the social scale who were attracted to the boy scout movement. Baden-Powell connected traditional male values with notions of nation and race, proposing that, by preparing for success ‘“you’ll be a MAN, my son” and you will thus be making one more man for the nation’ (ibid., his emphasis, and the reference is to Kipling’s poem If ). Lord Baden-Powell’s ideas about the need to stay in touch with ‘essential’ masculinity begs comparison with that of Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), US President (1901–09). Both shared what might be called a pro-male attitude towards masculinity, as did the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs 20

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(1875–1950) whose great fictional character Tarzan presents an exemplary image of masculinity conceived of as ‘natural’ and innate. Tarzan’s civilised behaviour is a thin veneer which is learned because of women. This is in line with the pro-male, misogynistic view that, while it is women’s function to uphold and maintain the values of civilisation, the consequent feminisation of culture leads to the weakening of manhood. Tarzan, thus, recuperated for men the feminine qualities of being closer to nature and the emotions without becoming feminine. In his first Tarzan novel Tarzan and the Apes (1912), it is only through contact with Jane Porter that the eponymous ape man decides to enter into civilised society. As Joseph Bristow points out: Tarzan obviously bears the traces of earlier varieties of man – the gentleman of Victorian fiction; the imperial soldier on the battle-front; the Scout making himself at home out of doors – but he is, for all to see [when he first kisses Jane], a belatedly Darwinian being whose sexual passion knows no reason. The political imperative to survive has here been transformed into a sexual imperative to be a man. (1991: 217) This political and sexual imperative is a homophobic one. The idea of a ‘natural’ and instinctive masculinity evoked by Tarzan, and asserted by figures such as Roosevelt and Baden-Powell, was a reassuring myth to hold onto during a period in which traditional gender norms were perceived to be under threat. This myth is, of course, largely a product of white, Anglo-Saxon social forces, but one which draws on an ideologically distorted view of non-Western masculinity. Tarzan can be seen as a hero who directs his violence against an externalisation of a contemporary crisis rather than facing up to the possibility that it may have internal causes. Tarzan is a useful reference point for Ted Shawn’s early male solos, since his first performance as a dancer was the year before the publication of the first Tarzan novel. I discuss Shawn’s choreography in Chapter 4, but it is useful here to note how Shawn, who initially trained to become a Methodist minister just before the First World War, developed ideas about dance and masculinity that were formed by Victorian gender ideologies. Writing in 1946 when he had retired from an active career as dancer and choreographer, he defined essential, binary differences between male and female ways of moving that are clearly informed by heterosexual, Christian, family values. He wrote: In watching movements of men in manual labour all over the world, continuously and carefully, I have come to the conclusion that most of them are big movements of the whole body and the arm movement is a continuation of the body movement, as for example the movement of a man using a scythe. (1946: 104) 21

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By contrast, women’s movements, according to Shawn, are small, delicate, and confined. He was, thus, arguing that men’s work is totally different from women’s work, and that it is neither right nor natural for women to do male work. ‘We felt that it was best when woman was working in the home, taking care of the needs of her husband and children, and so most religious and moral education has come from mother to children’ (ibid.: 105). This provided Shawn with a seemingly ‘natural’ basis for making prescriptions about male and female movements in dance and a retrospective justification for the kinds of male dances he had choreographed in the 1920s and 1930s. He thus used positive examples of men from ‘all over the world’ to confirm what ‘we’ already know about white masculinity. By polarising differences between men and women, Shawn blurred and erased other kinds of difference, particularly in relation to ‘race’ and ethnicity. His account of manual labour is one in which he presumptuously located himself in a field of others in which he was the supposed centre. The violence of this presumption is that those men whose work effort did not fit in with Shawn’s particular need are in danger of not being considered men, or perhaps even human, at all. Shawn, in many ways, set an unfortunate precedent for men entering what had, by the twentieth century, become, in effect, the feminised field of theatre dance. As I shall show in Chapter 4, Shawn created a hard, muscular, male dancing body, through his attempts to distance male dancing from the fearful spectacle of effeminacy and homosexuality. The point I am making here, however, is that this way of performing masculinity through dance also ran the danger of naturalising whiteness and male violence. HOMOPHOBIA AND THE MALE DANCER What I have proposed, so far, is that, increasingly since the nineteenth century, it has been considered appropriate for men not to appear soft and not to appear emotionally expressive. An individual who does not conform to these behavioural norms, and cannot claim to be a genius, has been in danger of being considered ‘not to be a proper man’, a euphemistic phrase that generally means homosexual. The cluster of fears associated with homosexuality is sometimes called homophobia. Homophobia is the social mechanism which prohibits, or makes fearful, the idea of intimate contact or communication with members of the same sex. It is generally argued that homophobia is a mechanism for regulating the behaviour of all men rather than just self-identified homosexuals. Much queer theory assumes that homophobia is an essential characteristic of patriarchal society. Joseph Bristow puts it thus: ‘homophobia comes into operation so that men can be as close as possible – to work powerfully together in the interests of men – without ever being too (sexually) close to one another. . . . homophobia actually brings men into a close homosocial 22

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relation’ (1988: 128). The mechanisms (including disapproval of male dance) which limit the subversive potential of some representations of masculinity can be seen to serve the purpose of keeping out of sight anything which might disrupt the relations within which men work powerfully together in the interests of men. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that, in men’s relationships with other men in contemporary Western society, emotional and sexual expression is necessarily suppressed in the interests of maintaining male power. In a broader historical and anthropological perspective, she argues, this sort of male bonding is atypical: a similar suppression does not occur in female bonding in modern Western society, nor did it exist, for example, for Greek men at the time of Socrates. In the latter examples, there is a continuum between social, political, and sexual expression. Sedgwick argues that male, homosocial relationships in our society are characterised by intense homophobia, fear, and hatred of homosexuality. This repressed homosexual component of male sexuality accounts for ‘correspondences and similarities between the most sanctioned forms of male homosocial bonding and the most reprobate expressions of male homosexuality’ (Sedgwick 1985: 89). Men are in a double bind in that they are drawn to other men, but this acceptable attraction is not clearly distinguishable from forbidden homosexual interest: ‘For a man to be a man’s man is separated only by an invisible, carefully blurred, always-already crossed line from being “interested in men”’ (ibid.: 89). What was at stake in Sedgwick’s account is the limit of normative heterosexual masculine identity. Heterosexuality depends on homosexuality in order to define its own limits. There would be nothing straight about heterosexual men if there weren’t homosexual men to define the limit beyond which heterosexuals cannot go. Homosexuals are, thus, essential to the continuation of heterosexuality; as Leo Bersani has put it, homosexuals are ‘the internally excluded difference that cements heterosexual identity’ (1995: 36). Homophobia doesn’t actually offer an explanation of why modern Western society is prejudiced and discriminates against homosexuals. Homosexual men were subject to sometimes violent discrimination prior to the nineteenth century, at times when performances by leading male ballet dancers were greeted with considerable approval. There is no simple linkage between homosexuality, homophobia, and uneasiness at professional male dancers. The usefulness of the concept of homophobia is, perhaps, strategic. By giving a name to the way social restrictions function that maintain certain norms of masculine behaviour, it is possible to make visible aspects of male experience that are otherwise hidden. It, then, also becomes possible to discuss the way male–male social relations have been represented in theatre dance in terms of homophobia. My argument is that it is these social restrictions that, since the mid-nineteenth century, have caused the display of male dancing to become a source of anxiety. 23

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Male appearance signifies power and success: as John Berger has put it, a man’s appearance tells you what he can do to you or for you. If, however, his appearance is also desirable, he is, from the point of view of a male spectator, drawing attention to the always-already crossed line between homosocial bonding and homosexual sexuality. His appearance, therefore, carries with it, for the male spectator, the threat of revealing the suppressed homosexual component within the links he has with other men and through which he maintains his power and status in patriarchal society. It is the inability of the male ballet dancer to represent the power and status of men in bourgeois society which was proposed by one nineteenth-century writer as being the trouble with the male dancer. THE MALE BALLET DANCER DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: GREEN BOX TREES In London, Paris, and most other European cities during the first half of the nineteenth century, as ballet came to be defined as an idealised feminine world, there was, on a material level, a decline in demand for male dancers. The fashion for the all-white, female corps de ballet must have contributed to the disappearance of men from the corps de ballet in most of Europe. There were still male dancers around who were valued for their technical ability as dancers. Peter Brinson has suggested: The more the employment, and so the technical standards of male dancers as regular members of ballet companies declined throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the more the practice grew of employing for particular occasions the few who could display any sort of technical brilliance. These men moved from company to company like a circus act. (1966: 72) One example of professional male dancers in Italy were the Fighting Dancers or Tramagnini who performed speciality danced combats as part of theatrical spectacles in Florence during the second half of the nineteenth century (Poesio 1990). This, however, seems to have been an isolated phenomenon. Elsewhere, after the 1850s, male dancers increasingly performed roles that demanded acting skills and mime, such as Dr Coppelius in Coppélia (Saint-Léon 1870) or Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker (Petipa/ Ivanov 1892), parts that could be performed by dancers past their prime. It was, therefore, in countries such as Britain and France where the ballet was under bourgeois rather than royal and aristocratic patronage that the career structure for male dancers collapsed, while it was at the courts in Copenhagen, Stockholm, and St Petersburg that the career structure of male ballet dancing survived. 24

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While the ballet La Sylphide (1832) is hailed as the first Romantic ballet with its star role for Marie Taglioni and its all-white corps de ballet, the neo-classical ballet d’action with its (male) danseur noble, that it superseded, did not disappear overnight. Instead, there was a transitional period in which older and newer style ballets appeared in the same season, together with older style ballet interludes in operas. There were also, as John Chapman points out, ballet critics such as Hipployte Prévost who went on writing appreciatively about neo-classical ballets into the 1850s. But, for Romantic critics such as Jules Janin (1807–74), performances by danseurs noble were an excuse for scurrilous criticism. Concluding a merciless attack in 1832 on the danseur noble Monsieur Albert (François Decombe 1787–1865), Janin observed: People say ‘He is so noble! He is so noble! What deportment! What looks! What deportment!’ It is truer to say ‘He is so stiff!’ I abhor the danse noble just as I detest the noble style of declamation and all the routines, reflections, and genuflections of the Conservatory. (Quoted in Chapman 1997: 213) This did not, however, mean that Janin and Théophile Gautier (1811–72), the other great critic of the Romantic ballet, necessarily disliked male dancers as such. But the fact that, for them, ballet was a pleasing but undemanding display of feminine grace made it increasingly difficult for them to find a way of admitting to any pleasure in watching male dancers. In an 1837 review of Fanny Elssler, for example, Gautier announced that ‘an actress is a statue or a picture which is exhibited to you and can be freely criticised’ (1947: 20) and then went on to give an extraordinarily detailed description of her physical appearance, especially her legs, as if she were indeed an object rather than a person. This concludes: ‘We shall be pardoned, we hope, for having discoursed at such length on legs, but we are speaking of a dancer’ (ibid.: 21). Writing about La Volière (1838), a ballet choreographed by Therese Elssler in which, dressed ‘en travestie’, she partnered her sister Fanny, Gautier denounced the male ballet dancer, paying his usual attention to legs: ‘Nothing is more distasteful than a man who shows his red neck, his big muscular arms, his legs with the calves of a parish beadle, and all his strong massive frame shaken by leaps and pirouettes’ (ibid.: 24). Gautier was not, however, writing about an actual male dancer, since the male role was performed by a woman. It is, however, significant that the thought of a male dancer seemed to conjure up for him associations with working class masculinity. His distaste recalls the distaste that, as J.S. Bratton has shown, middle class Englishmen felt about working class male performers in English music halls. As I have shown, Janin objected to the danseur noble’s aristocratic manners. If aristocratic and working class masculinity were equally distasteful for the middle class spectator, was there any a positive image available for middle class men? This is the problem that 25

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Gautier and Janin both faced when they came to write about Jules Perrot (1810–92) in his highly acclaimed performance in Le Zingaro (1840). When Gautier came to write about Le Zingaro, his obsession with dancers’ legs came back, as it were, to haunt him. Reporting that: ‘the spectators clapped their hands, stamped, and even threw bouquets on their own account’, Gautier observed that this had nothing to do with either the music or the story: ‘Perrot’s legs did it all. But what legs!’ (ibid.: 43). It is surely the prohibition on homosexual attachment that prompted Gautier to immediately qualify his enthusiasm: ‘Perrot is not handsome, he is extraordinarily ugly. From the waist upwards, he has the proportions of a tenor, there is no need to say more; but from the waist downwards, he is a delight to look at’ (ibid.). Having got that out of the way, Gautier went on to compare Perrot’s legs with classical sculptures and Raphael paintings before describing his pas de deux with Carlotta Grisi. Gautier’s conclusion was that: ‘Perrot displays a perfect grace, purity, and lightness: it is visible music, and, if the comparison be permitted, his legs sing very agreeably to the eye’ (ibid.: 44). Janin had a very similar problem. After outlining the plot of Le Zingaro, he went off on a long digression. Ballet, for him, was a feminine spectacle: ‘Speak to us of a pretty dancing girl who displays the grace of her features and the elegance of her figure, who reveals so fleetingly all the treasures of her beauty. Thank God, I understand that perfectly’ (Janin in Chapman 1997: 232). What he couldn’t understand was, of course, the male dancer. In giving reasons why men do not look right on the ballet stage, he referred to the social position of middle class men: That this bewhiskered individual who is a pillar of the community, an elector, a municipal councillor, a man whose business is to make and above all unmake laws, should come before us in a tunic of skyblue satin, his head covered with a hat with a waving plume amorously caressing his cheek . . . this was surely impossible and we have done well to remove such great artists from our pleasures. (Ibid.) The male dancer, dressed in sky-blue satin and wearing a feathered hat, was undoubtedly a (male) danseur noble of the neo-classical ballet. In this latest diatribe against him, Janin was perhaps suggesting that the aristocratic manners he exemplified were degeneracy and effeminacy, as he goes on to object to woman as queen of the ballet being ‘forced to cut off half her silk petticoat to dress her partner with it’ (ibid.). He concluded that ballet was a feminine sphere within which men either did not appear manly, or if they looked too manly did not appear ideal: ‘Today the dancing man is no longer tolerated except as a useful accessory. He is the shading of the picture, the green box trees surrounding the garden flowers, the necessary foil’ (ibid.). After this long and richly evocative denunciation 26

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of the male dancer, Janin, like Gautier, then did a complete volte-face, simply saying: So then, the more I am convinced of this truth, the more you can believe me when I say that Perrot is the most admirable danseur that can be seen! He seems incredibly light, even to those who have seen Taglioni’s exceptional lightness up close. (Ibid.)

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Gautier and Janin both seemed to struggle to find a language with which to describe what they liked about male dancers. The ones they disliked recalled for them decadent aristocrats, parish beadles, and green box trees. Perrot, however, was not an old fashioned danseur noble but a new male Romantic lead. When it came to finding a way to praise Perrot, it is surely significant that both compare him with Taglioni. This is surely proof that Romantic ballet had become a feminine realm. The problem was that there was no acknowledged distinction between ballet as aesthetic experience and ballet as erotic spectacle. To enjoy the spectacle of men dancing was, therefore, to be interested in men, but that was socially proscribed. The male ballet dancer, therefore, came too close for comfort to the blurred and problematic line that separates, or, as Sedgwick implies, fails to separate, necessary and approved homosocial male bonding from forbidden homosexual sexuality. Gautier and Janin made a melancholy, double disavowal: they had to deny themselves in advance the possibility of enjoying watching a male dancer; having done so, they were, therefore, unable to grieve this male dancer’s loss so that he lingered on as a melancholy ghost. Confronted with a performance by a male dancer who was clearly exceptional, they had to invent an absent male dancer (the melancholy ghost) to criticise and thus prove that they took no pleasure in watching male dancing. Then, they finally evoked another ghostly dancer, this time the first great Romantic ballerina, Taglioni. Lynn Garafola (1985) has pointed out that men were freer to enjoy the feminine spectacle of ballet when male dancers were eliminated and their roles performed by women dancers ‘en travestie’. The male dancer not only became out of place on the newly feminine ballet stage, but, because male appreciation of the spectacle of the ballerina took on sexual aspects, the ways that male dancers appeared on stage became a source of anxiety to bourgeois male spectators. The contradiction which led to the decline of the male ballet dancer under bourgeois patronage during the nineteenth century was this: on the one hand, the male dancer was required as a necessary foil to dance with the ballerina; but, on the other hand, his presence provoked anxiety, not only in relation to class position, but also in relation to the difference between homosocial and homosexual relations. The prejudice did not, therefore, arise because of any actual belief that male dancers were homosexual. The lengths to which Gautier and Janin 27

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went to prove that they didn’t like male dancing, surely, demonstrate their own fear of being thought to be interested in men. When, however, gay men did become involved in dance and ballet, with Börlin, Nijinsky, and Shawn, the homophobic structures were already there to police any infringement of heterosexual norms. HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE MALE DANCER: THE DANCE THAT DOES NOT SPEAK ITS NAME There is a widespread reluctance to talk about dance and homosexuality, surely making it the dance that does not speak its name. The reference here is to Oscar Wilde who, during his trial in 1895 for homosexual offences, made a celebrated speech in defence of the love that dared not speak its name in his century. Over the years since then, a homosexual culture or subcultures have developed with diverse, shifting memberships and significant inputs from artists and intellectuals. In recent years, partly as a result of the gay rights movement, theoretical work has been done on the way homosexuality has been and is represented in the arts and mass media, and research has been done into the work of gay and lesbian artists. While Melanie Weeks (1987), Christy Adair (1992), and Valerie Briginshaw (2001) have written about lesbianism and dance, until recently surprisingly little attention has been given to gay men and dance. One of the first scholarly books that considered homosexuality and dance was Judith Lynne Hanna’s Dance, Sex and Gender (1988). Although the sections on gay men reflect the large amount of material Hanna researched for the book, they show little sympathy, or understanding, of the situation in which gay people live in our society and Hanna seems to be unaware of the underlying sexual politics. She saw homosexuality as a problem for gay people, which of course it is; but she didn’t consider what sort of a problem. There is a difference between thinking of homosexuality as a psychopathology, and seeing any neurosis suffered by a homosexual as a result of internalising society’s negative image of homosexuality. The latter way of defining the problem opens up a fruitful avenue for examining gay art, but one which Hanna did not explore. Instead her concern was with ‘why male homosexuals are disproportionally attracted to dance’ (1988: 130), and she suggested ways in which, for gay people, an involvement in the dance world can alleviate or be an escape from their ‘problem’. The problem, however, is not just the result of internalising society’s negative image of homosexuality, but the fact that Western society is, and has been for hundreds of years, profoundly homophobic. The source of much of Hanna’s material on gay men in ballet was the essay ‘Toeing the line: in search of the gay male image in classical ballet’ written in 1976 by the Canadian writer Graham Jackson. This considered the institutional structures and pressures that influence and limit the 28

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production of ballets that deal with gay themes or subject matter and some of the ways in which a gay sensibility is expressed in or can be read into ballet. This essay has, until recently, stood out as one of the very few pieces to consider this subject. Written in the mid 1970s it had a very optimistic tone – coming out seemed for Jackson the solution for most gay men’s problems. Thus his central concern was with the fact that although a large proportion of gay men are dancers, choreographers, or hold administrative positions in the dance world, and there is a large gay audience for dance, ballet companies rarely if ever produce work that directly addresses the experiences and sensibilities of gay people. They don’t rock the boat. There are obvious reasons why there has been a silence on the subject of gay male dancers and choreographers. Arnold Haskell writing in 1934 is doubtless protecting individuals when he states: ‘of the outstanding male dancers that I know, and I know them all, not one is effeminate in manner, and very few indeed are not thoroughly normal’ (1934: 299). But he is surely also protecting the institution of ballet itself. With the liberalisation of laws about homosexuality and substantial changes in social attitudes, the continuation of the taboo on discussions of dance and homosexuality is surely both unnecessary and unhelpful. One possible reason why the taboo still persists is the need for dance and ballet companies to raise funding and attract sponsorship from private individuals and businesses. If this is the case, it is not a very good one, whereas the arguments for greater openness are surely compelling. Not talking about something doesn’t make it go away, and may, insidiously, make it take on greater significance than it really deserves. All male dancers are placed under suspicion with the result that, as is widely recognised, far fewer boys and men are involved in the dance world than girls and women. Moreover, homophobic prejudice can, as Jackson observes: ‘paralyse talented dancers from developing a personal dancing style reflective of their characters [and] limit the range of male dancing severely’ (Jackson 1978: 41). This holds true for gay and heterosexual dancers. The initial reasons for keeping quiet about gay male dancers are surely no longer valid, and silences now do more harm than good. Perhaps there are now more choreographers dealing with homosexual themes than there were when Jackson wrote ‘Toeing the line’, but only in the marginalised, underfunded, experimental fringes. In the mainstream, fear, prejudice, and the old boy network still ensure the status quo. The case of Matthew Bourne’s 1995 version of Swan Lake, which I discuss in Chapter 7, exemplifies this. It is a truism that fear and prejudice breed on ignorance. Homophobic mechanisms channel and block our understanding and appreciation of representations of masculinity that are made by both gay and straight dance artists. It is through understanding the ways in which these mechanisms work that their effectiveness is undermined, and the possibility of positive change is brought about. 29

2 LOOKING AT THE MALE

When we go to see a dance concert and watch male dancers performing, we each bring along our own miscellaneous bundles of ideas and experiences concerning masculinity. The ideological nature of these, their contradictions and limitations, were the subject of the first chapter. The dancers, choreographers, rehearsal directors, and others involved in producing the performance also bring with them their ideas and experiences, and these are present for the dancers as they perform on stage. Given the ways in which people are connected with one another through the society they live in, there is, of course, a considerable overlap between these ideas and experiences. They constitute a common discourse through which we are able to communicate with one another. Reading representations of masculinity in theatre dance does not, merely, mean recognising similarities between performances of masculinity in daily life and the way in which masculinity is embodied and represented by dancers on stage. It involves interpretation of information that is not a translation of a prior verbal text but the result of processes of corporeal investigation. Apprehension of the significance of a dance piece gradually accumulates over the duration of the performance. The time and space in which live dance performance takes place is a privileged one in which experience is intensified. What is represented through dancing can sometimes suggest an ideal not accessible in everyday life, and representation is, therefore, accorded particular cultural significance. Representations of masculinity in theatre dance are mediated through signifying systems; some of these are shared with other cultural forms while others are specific to dance. In the last chapter, I introduced Judith Butler’s idea that gender is ‘a sedimentation that, over time, has produced a set of corporeal styles’ (1990b: 275). Theatre dance forms have their own conventions and traditions. Sometimes we may see dancers perform canonical repertoire so beautifully or intensely that we can momentarily forget that what they are doing is constructed out of conventions. By making us believe that what they are performing is real for them, the dancers hide the work of representation. Or sometimes we may see a performance whose 30

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originality necessitates an unavoidable discontinuity with cultural traditions: indeed the signs that make up such a performance may not yet be readily assimilated and conventionalised. Or the performance may bring together sign systems to create juxtapositions or experiences that were previously inconceivable. Different kinds of dance performance may attract or absorb our attention in different ways. This chapter is concerned with the ways in which performances draw us in and represent masculinities for us to interpret. It investigates the sexual politics underlying the way theatre dance situates us as viewers in relation to the material it presents. An understanding of this can open up possibilities for reading these representations differently. This chapter is about the power relations that come into play when we see dance performed. In much Western theatre dance, male dancing bodies are supposed to be seen and read in a particular way. This is because of dominant ideas about gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, religion, and other components of identity. It is also because of the predominantly hierarchical and male-dominated structures of the Western dance world, and the kinds of cultural and aesthetic values which these produce and reinforce. This chapter, therefore, investigates what kinds of possibility exist for choreographers, spectators, and dancers to negotiate their own ways through the processes of making, performing, and viewing dance. It is concerned with the processes that limit spectators as they read dance, and considers how effective these limitations are. It investigates the signifying structures through which dancers and choreographers make representations of masculinities. It thus identifies, in broad terms, some of the main ways in which representations are supposed to conform to dominant gender ideologies, and indicates the kinds of strategy which artists sometimes adopt to trouble and subvert these. THE SPECTATOR AND THE GAZE The art historian John Berger, whose ideas I introduced in the first chapter, observed that in Western visual culture: ‘Women are depicted in a quite different way from men – not because the feminine is different from the masculine – but because the “ideal” spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of woman is designed to flatter him’ (1972: 64). The connection which Berger made between gender representation and an assumed male spectator is one which has subsequently been widely developed. The male gaze, first theorised by feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey in 1975, had, in its time, a revolutionary effect on feminist scholarship in many fields, including dance studies. She identified two different ways of looking at narrative film: a way in which the spectator, caught up in the story, identifies with the protagonist, and a more detached look of pleasure at visual display. 31

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Film scholar Steve Neale, whose ideas were also cited in the first chapter, applied Mulvey’s thesis to the spectacle of masculinity in mainstream Hollywood film. ‘In a heterosexual and patriarchal society,’ he wrote, ‘the male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look: that look must be motivated in some way, its erotic component repressed’ (Neale 1983: 14). In their determination to enlighten people about the way gender ideologies are inscribed in cultural forms, Mulvey and Neale described the process of inscription without acknowledging any possibility that spectators might exercise any agency in the way they watch work. They did not, however, actually say that spectators have no freedom in the way they respond to films, or that female spectators have no point of entry to them. So, while Neale argued that the male body could not be the erotic subject of another male look, he, nevertheless, qualified this by proposing that male dancers in Hollywood musicals were feminised because, for this film genre, the viewing subject was presumed to be female. What seemed most important to Mulvey and Neale was to recognise the extent to which the conventions underlying mainstream Hollywood films limited the possibilities for the viewing subject by assuming that the spectator was white, heterosexual, and male. Both the film screen and the stage are spaces where spectators are encouraged to make identifications with the subject positions which performers embody. Developing a feminist account of spectatorship in theatre, Jill Dolan pointed out that: ‘the male spectator’s position is the point from which the text is most intelligible’ and that if a female spectator ‘identifies with the male hero, she becomes implicit with her own indirect objectification’ (1991: 13). If she admires ‘the represented female body as a consumable object, she participates in her own commodification’ (ibid.). Nevertheless, as Sue-Ellen Case has cautioned, there are problems in applying film theory uncritically to live performance. Case noted that, initially, feminist theatre scholars thought that ‘the power relations of the Gaze in narrative cinema seemed homologous to operations of spectatorship in the theatre’ (1995: 330). However, as she pointed out, photographic technology focuses the gaze in a particular way which should not be conflated with the kinds of focusing structures through which spectatorship is constructed during live performance. Case warned that when one understands the gaze as something constituted through technical apparatus of perception, such as those used in the cinema, there is a danger of excluding from one’s account of spectatorship ‘any account of the “live”, and by extension, the “body” outside of the apparatus’ (ibid.). At issue are the structures through which looks and gazes operate within theatre dance and how these situate the spectator in a normative, habitual way as a passive and uncritical consumer of ideologically determined representations. 32

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It is not just norms of gender and sexuality that are reinforced through these habitual structures of looking and gazing. Writing in the 1950s, Frantz Fanon discussed the problems of black spectatorship. When a young black man sees a Tarzan film at a cinema in the Caribbean, Fanon suggested, he automatically identifies with the hero, Tarzan, against the savages in the film who are black. If, however, he views the same film in a European cinema, it is more difficult for him to identify with Tarzan ‘for the rest of the audience, being white, automatically identify him with the savages on the screen’ (1967: 153). For Fanon’s black male spectator, awareness of his blackness within a context of white racism makes identification with this ideal, white, male hero problematic and conflictual. As Brenda Dixon Gottschild has shown, watching African American dancers performing in blackface was uncomfortable and ambivalent for African American audiences (1996: 112–13). Ideals are aspirational rather than attainable and, as I showed in Chapter 1, white masculinity is itself conflictual. Richard Dyer has pointed out that, for the white, male spectator, Tarzan represents an unattainable ideal who uses his ‘white man’s muscles’ to defend nature against injustice and exploitation, sometimes defending the natives against whites whose actions would destroy their way of life (1997: 157). (I return to this in my discussion of US modern dance in Chapter 4.) Later feminist writers have suggested the situation for female spectators is also complicated. Angela McRobbie has pointed out that girl spectators can interpret the idealised image of the ballerina in ways that affirm and empower them as young women (1984). What Fanon, Gottschild, McRobbie, and, to a certain extent Dyer, are suggesting are restricted possibilities for reading ideologically loaded representations against the grain of their universalising intentions. At issue is the way white, heterosexual, male interests are disguised as universal and ahistorical ideals. These become a problem when enforced in violent ways in order to cover up and disavow conflicts within the construction of masculine identities. While my central concern is with masculinity, it is worth remembering that individuals are always complex and multifaceted, finding their identities within a wide range of economic, cultural, and political determinations. It is, therefore, necessary to expand the principle that spectators make identifications with performers through networks of gazes by including a wider range of potential viewing positions. Two further accounts of looking, which the art historian Michael Fried and feminist film theorist Kaja Silverman have proposed, offer ways of doing this. Michael Fried (1980) has distinguished between paintings that exemplify absorption and ones which project what he called theatricality. A ‘theatrical’ painting, in Fried’s terms, is one that makes a claim on spectators, causing them to want to see what the figures in the painting are engaged in seeing or doing. The figures themselves achieve this by drawing attention to themselves so as to make the spectator want to be like them or to experience 33

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what spectators imagine the figures are experiencing. The kinds of paintings in which Fried detected absorption are ones in which the figures have an inward focus. Because the figures are so absorbed in what they are doing, they allow the spectator a certain freedom to take in the piece as a whole, and become absorbed in it in their own way. Fried’s thesis suggests ways of theorising dance spectatorship.1 Some dancers and dance pieces reach out to, attract, appeal to, or claim the spectator’s attention. Some performances, thus, invite the spectator to identify with a dancer in her or his charismatic interactions with another dancer (for example during a duet); or alternatively the spectator can be drawn in by the intensity of the dancer’s performance (for example during a solo); or the performer may behave in a seductive or a dominating way. These are all instances in which the spectator’s gaze is focused in a way determined by the dancer or the performance. In Fried’s terms, these are ‘theatrical’. Fried’s notion of absorption correlates with Susan Foster’s description of what she calls reflective dance: Dances operating in this mode elaborate their own world of references by focusing on their own movement. Just as they reflect themselves, however, they also inevitably reflect the viewers in the process of searching for and producing meaning for the dances. (1986: 76) So, in this kind of spectatorship, the dancer’s sense of absorption can draw the spectator into the dance, not through a point of identification with the dancer but through involvement and fascination with the formal and aesthetic qualities of the choreography which he or she is performing. Abstract, storyless dance pieces generally position the spectator so that he or she looks in an absorbed way, while dancers in works which explore narrative situations or present interactions between individuals generally claim the spectator’s attention in what Fried called a ‘theatrical’ way. Where a male dancer claims attention in a ‘theatrical’ way, his active, dominating performance can have the effect of reinforcing norms of masculine behaviour. If he tries too hard, however, or seems too emotional, he may fail to appear sufficiently in control of himself or sufficiently detached and distant. A male dancer who is absorbed in the enveloping atmosphere which the performance of a piece generates, so that he barely acknowledges the spectator, conforms with norms of male detachment and self-sufficiency. But, by not being in control of the spectator’s gaze, he may not have any defence against being looked at in an erotic way. Both absorption and ‘theatricality’, as I shall show in subsequent chapters, are more likely to reinforce dominant gender ideologies than they are to open up alternative ways of watching and interpreting dance. Kaja Silverman has distinguished between the look and the gaze. By the gaze, she means the sets of structures initially described by Mulvey which 34

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influence ‘what we see when we apprehend the world not only through a particular image repertoire, but from the position which is assigned to us in advance’ by ideologically determined focusing structures (Silverman 1996: 182). Silverman suggests, however, that there can be ways of looking which acknowledge that the viewer actively initiates his or her own involvement within what they are watching. Some dance works, which I discuss in later chapters of this book, deliberately disrupt habitual patterns of spectatorship, and force audience members to become aware of their related situatedness as observers. This can lead them to develop more active and creative approaches to interpretation. Such works, which are generally associated with the tradition of avant-garde performance, often challenge and subvert the representation of normative gender ideologies.

11 CHOREOGRAPHER-CENTRED AND SPECTATOR-CENTRED DANCE ANALYSIS

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Critical investigations of spectatorship can have comparably disruptive effects. Some dance scholars, in the 1980s and 1990s, began to ask questions about the ways in which gender, ‘race’, sexuality, and other components of identity are represented in theatre dance, pointing out the ways in which much dance has failed to address them as female, black, or gay spectators. Two of the most controversial essays that did this concerned the ballets of George Balanchine (1904–83). Writing in 1987 about one of the pas de deux in Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments (1946), Ann Daly pointed out that, while this duet might be an archetypal courtship, ‘the desire expressed by their relationship belongs only to the man. About her own desire, the compliant ballerina remains silent’ (17). In a 1996 book, Brenda Dixon Gottschild pointed out that, in a culture that considers classical ballet to be high culture but sees jazz dance as merely popular entertainment, ‘it will not suffice to say that jazz dance influenced [Balanchine’s] work. That term serves to misname the Africanist legacy that, buried under layers of deceit, has been invisibilized’ (78). Balanchine has achieved institutional status. His citation as one of the Dance Heritage Coalition’s Irreplaceable American Dance Treasures states that he ‘was the foremost choreographer of the twentieth century and the architect of classical ballet in America’ (DHC 2000). Claims, particularly in the US, that theatre dance is a serious art form (that can take its place alongside visual art, music, and literature) in effect depend upon an acknowledgement of the excellence of Balanchine’s ballets. To have chosen work by Jerome Robbins (1918–98) to mount a claim for recognition of the validity of African American or feminist spectatorship would have been less threatening, since he is less central to the canon. If the issues that Daly and Gottschild raised are controversial, and their conclusions for some unacceptable (see Copeland 1993; Jordan and Thomas 1994; Banes 1998; 35

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Gottschild 2005), this raises questions about whose interests are served through maintaining the particular universal values which modernist choreography is supposed to exemplify. By demonstrating that, although pure abstract choreography such as Balanchine’s may not tell stories, it still mediates ideas about gender and race, Daly and Gottschild in effect challenged widely held beliefs about modernist choreography. These are that pure, abstract dance has progressed beyond representation (understood in the limited sense of imitation). Thus, for much of the twentieth century, the value of dance as art was widely believed to lie in formal, aesthetic properties that were timeless and universal (e.g. Banes 1980; Cohen 1981; Levin 1983; Levinson 1991). In this view its aesthetic value has nothing to do with gender, ‘race’, and sexuality. This means seeing an individual work solely as an instance of its choreographer’s style. This formalist way of reading dance focuses on the choreographer as author and origin of a work’s value. Both the author-centred and spectator-centred approaches to dance analysis can generate useful and informative insights, although questions about gender representation generally only arise within spectatorcentred approaches. As in other fields of cultural analysis, the birth of the reader should not necessarily bring about the death of the author. Cultural theorist Mieke Bal, explaining her semiological approach to analysing visual images, has suggested that neither an approach which is purely concerned with authorial intention nor one which focuses exclusively on spectatorship can provide a satisfactory account of the process of visual analysis. She points out that each model ‘can only account for ideal, totally successful communication’ whereas the artist (as sender) does more than transmit a clear message: ‘the package contains other, subliminal and unconscious messages’ (1995: 148). In turn, the spectator (as receiver) approaches the work within her or his own preoccupations. Bal, therefore, argues that: the receiver manipulates the sender, by being whom she or he is and by the affective, political and intellectual relationship between receiver and sender. Manipulation is not only an instance of (ideological) agency, but also of the historical embeddedness of that agency. Rather than the assumed (but in fact projected), authorial intention, the interaction between work and audience should be the object of a genuine historical inquiry. (Ibid.) By calling this process manipulation, Bal conveys the idea that the artist’s work is not complete without a spectator, but the spectator does not actually add anything to it by interpreting it. Where dance analysis is concerned, this situation is further complicated by the fact that dancers perform an intermediary role between choreographer and spectator. Where Bal proposes that the receiver manipulates the sender in the way they interpret 36

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their messages, I suggest that, in live performance, because the performer senses the audience’s response, dancer and spectator both interact through manipulating the message. The spectator responds to the performance itself while the performer frames the material in ways that may modify, limit, or direct the kinds of interpretative manipulation the spectator can make. Bal’s proposition that one takes the interaction between work and audience as the object of enquiry has important implications for dance studies. It means focusing on the dancer–spectator relationship during the moment of live performance and not treating the performance as merely a projection of the choreographer’s intentions. This means analysing not only the choreography which the choreographer as author sets, but also those aspects that only come into play during the live moment of performance itself. As Susan Foster puts it: ‘The dance itself rather than the choreographer suggests an interpretative itinerary for the viewer’ (1986: 242). This is to attribute agency to the dance itself in that both the choreographer and the dance give opportunities to the dancer and spectator. This shift, I suggest, is a prerequisite for an understanding of the way dancing bodies perform gender. Who is performing and what kind of affective, political, and intellectual relationship is created between dancer and spectator is crucial to the ideas about gender that are brought into play during a performance. In theorising the political component of the performer–spectator relationship, I am accepting Stuart Hall’s account of hegemony which underlies the British approach to cultural studies. Hall argued that, although dominant ideologies seem to be uniform and consistent, they only represent the world view of a dominant group. Majority audiences realise this and negotiate their own versions within them (just as McRobbie suggests girls negotiate their own version of the ballerina ideal). Hall suggests the negotiated version ‘contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements . . . it accords the privileged position to the dominant definitions of events while reserving the right to make a more negotiated application of “local conditions” ’ (1993: 102). It is, therefore, composite, conflictual, diverse, and ‘shot through with contradictions, though these are only in certain circumstances brought to full visibility’ (ibid.). In the moment of live performance, therefore, the relationship between the spectator and the male dancer is one in which dominant, supposedly natural and common sense definitions of normative masculinity may be acknowledged, but only through negotiation and adaptation; as a result, their conflictual and contradictory nature may, sometimes, become visible. This suggests that it is no longer possible to see a dance work as the expression, solely, of aesthetic values which transcend the circumstances of their creation. Rather than seeing the choreographer as a unified and universal subject who evokes timeless truths, it is necessary to see him or her as a complex and potentially conflictual subject, someone in touch with, and formed by, the 37

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circumstances of their time and place. Feminist art historian Griselda Pollock proposes we need to analyse any cultural text ‘for its complex inscriptions of historically specific and non-cogent, non-unified processes of subjectivity which are gendered, and classed and culturally defined’ (1995: 50). Many of the works that I discuss in the following chapters are powerful and fascinating because of the richness and depth with which their choreographers and dancers work through the complex and contradictory effects of gender ideologies. Whereas a dance ethnography might prioritise establishing the views of particular spectators at a particular performance, dance historians generally infer the spectator’s position from available evidence. Because of dance’s ephemerality, particular attention, therefore, necessarily falls on the primary sources that are available, including contemporary reviews. Dance critics negotiate their own versions of dominant ideologies and their writings are never value free. It is precisely because of this that their prejudices can provide valuable information about contemporaneous attitudes towards the male dancer, as I showed in the first chapter when discussing reviews by Gautier and Janin. Every company director since Diaghilev has paid close attention to the press. The Western dance world is one in which performances not only generate writing but writing in turn has an effect on the future development of dance. Some experimental dance works, during the last two decades, need to be seen as responses to articulate black, gay, and feminist writing, including writing about dance. Understanding how dominant ideologies work can enable the formulation of subtle and effective forms of resistance that can, in turn, lead to the stagings of alternatives. The significance of Hall’s account of hegemony is that dominant ideas mediated through cultural forms only remain dominant while the broader majority are prepared to accept them and, therefore, these need to be responsive, in a democratic and consensual way, to pressure for change. PERFORMATIVE SPEECH ACTS AND DANCE PERFORMANCE When Bal proposes that the artist as sender does more than transmit a clear message, she is using the deconstructive idea that there is no oneto-one relationship between a sign and what it signifies. Jacques Derrida used the idea that a sign always exceeds its literal meaning to critique J.L. Austin’s theory of performative speech acts. Since a deconstructive approach to speech act theory underpins the idea of the performance of gender that I have been using, it is necessary to explain what this is and clarify the relationship between performative speech acts and dance performance. Austin noticed that, whereas most statements use words to communicate meanings, there are special circumstances in which we use words to do 38

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things, such as promising, apologising, asking, or thanking. He called these performative speech acts because ‘the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action – it is not normally thought of as just saying something’ (1962: 6–7). Whereas one can use logic to check whether most statements are true or false, this is not the case with performatives. The most cited example which Austin gives is the act of saying ‘I do’ during a marriage ceremony (ibid.: 10). The actual statement itself cannot be checked logically without reference to the context in which it is uttered: for example, is the person already married to someone else? Austin, therefore, created a logical system of rules for establishing what he called the ‘felicity’ or ‘infelicity’ of promises and other performatives. Crucially for subsequent uses of the theory of performative speech acts within performance studies, he debarred from his system a few situations, including the use of speech acts by actors on stage. ‘Language in such circumstances’, Austin claimed, ‘is in special ways – intelligibly – not used seriously but in ways parasitic upon its normal use – ways which fall under the doctrine of etiolations of language’ (ibid.: 23, emphasis in the original). Derrida took up this passage and questioned whether speech acts ever only actually behave in what Austin describes as a normal way. Speakers never know exactly how their statements will be understood, and may not understand all the implications of what they say. According to Derrida, the speech act always, therefore, exceeds its literal meaning. Whereas Austin insisted that speech acts are dependent on their context, Derrida argued that any statement, including a speech act, ‘can be cited, put between quotation marks; in doing so it can break with every context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable’ (1977: 185, emphasis in the original). It is this citationality or iterability of the speech act which underlies Butler’s description of gender as a performative act. Butler, as I showed in the first chapter, argued that individuals perform their gender through the repetition of socially mandated discourses of stylised bodily acts. Individuals, she argues, are compelled to repeat acts which can neither be refused nor followed in strict obedience. Butler explains this as an instance of what Louis Althusser called interpellation (1995: 121–4). In Althusser’s well-known example, the policeman calls out to someone on the street ‘hey you!’ and the person turns round to face him. The policeman’s call, Althusser proposes, interpellates them into the discourse of the law, and their response to his call is an admission of their obligations as subjects (Althusser 1984: 47–8). Similarly, individuals are called upon to perform their gender and, as they do so, they acknowledge that they are subject to normative gender ideologies. Although individuals have no choice but to comply with the interpellating demand, these performative acts, following Derrida, nevertheless always exceed their literal meaning. The example of subversive gender 39

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performance that Butler discussed in several of her works is a drag queen. Gay Morris argues that, although Butler has not considered dance, the work of the US contemporary choreographer Mark Morris demonstrates that ‘dance, which can incorporate drag, offers far more subtle and wide ranging possibilities for attacking rigid gender categories than does drag alone’ (1996: 142). She supports this by focusing, in particular, on his performance of dual female roles as Dido and the Sorceress in his 1989 work Dido and Aeneas (which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 7). She points out that: the size, muscularity, and substance of his body considered ‘masculine’, [are] combined with an extreme flexibility and soft, fatty quality that is read as stereotypically ‘feminine’. Morris consciously emphasizes and uses these differing aspects of his body as an element to upset dichotomous gender categories. (Ibid.: 145–6) In Austin’s terms, one could say that Morris’s performance of femininity was not used seriously but in ways parasitic upon its normal use. He performed as a woman in the performance although spectators knew his biological gender. He was citing the behaviour, and gestural signs and conventions through which femininity is performed and in doing so is, in Derrida’s phrase, putting these between quotation marks. Commenting on the use of this deconstructive theory of performativity in theatre and performance studies during the 1990s, Susan Foster was wary of its usefulness for dance studies. ‘The vast majority of studies implementing the notion of performance,’ she observed, ‘neglect the body and at the same time use body to inflect textuality with a new vitality’ (1998: 22). Thus Shoshana Felman (2002), in her reading of Austin, points out that the physicality of speech production can scandalously eroticise, exceed, and thus undermine the literal meaning of a speech act. Butler, herself, seemed to confirm the danger to which Foster refers when she recently admitted that ‘Every time I try to write about the body, the writing ends up being about language. This is not because I think that the body is reducible to language; it is not’ (2004: 198). Foster’s concern is that, because of its roots in language and linguistics, this notion of performance is only concerned with the conceptual strategies of signification, and lacks ‘attention to repertoires of behavior other than those of the text’ (1998: 27). The signs and traces of embodied behaviour, which inform the conventions of theatre dance, may not be reducible to language, but they only signify meanings because they constitute a non-verbal discourse. The theory of performative speech acts, particularly as it has been taken up by queer scholars, can help elucidate some of the ways in which this discourse creates meanings. Indeed, there are correlations between Derrida’s critique of the attempt by Austin to exclude parasitic citations of speech acts, and 40

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the problematic exclusion of queer identities from normative masculinity (which I discussed in the first chapter). Derrida accused Austin of trying to surround felicitous performatives with a ‘kind of ditch or extended place of perdition which speech could never hope to leave’ (1977: 190). Isn’t the risk of parasitic citations, Derrida rhetorically asks, ‘its internal and positive condition of possibility? Is that outside its inside, the very force and law of its emergence?’ (ibid.). Foucault, Bersani, and others, as I noted in the first chapter, argued that homosexual men are essential to the maintenance of heterosexual norms because they are ‘the internally excluded difference that cements heterosexual identity’ (Bersani 1995: 36). Alan Parker and Eve Sedgwick have proposed a queer reading of one of Austin’s speech acts which fits the normative, coercive model I have been describing where the male dancer is supposed to appear active under the (male) spectator’s gaze. The speech act they cite is ‘I dare you’ which, in their example, becomes ‘I dare you to prove you are not a “wuss”’. Parker and Sedwick’s ‘wussiness’ is clearly a rhetorical trope into which readers can insert any queer identity. For my purposes, it fits the situation of professional male dancers in the West over the last century who, regardless of their sexual orientation, find themselves dared to prove that they are not effeminate, or unmanly, or gay. Parker and Sedgwick point out that the structure of the speech act ‘I dare you’ not only involves an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ but also tacitly implies a ‘they’ who will witness the dare: In daring you to perform some foolhardy act, ‘I’ necessarily invoke a consensus of the eyes of others. It is these eyes through which you risk being seen as a wuss [unmanly], it is as people who share with me a contempt for wussiness [unmanliness] that these others are interpellated. (1995: 8) They point out that the witness may not in fact share the prejudice and indeed the ‘I’ may only be issuing the dare out of fear that they themselves might not pass the test. For Parker and Sedgwick, the role of witness constitutes the space of the speech act in which is staged ‘a spectacle that denies its audience the ability either to look away from it or to intervene in it’ (ibid.: 10). This is surely a revealing way of understanding the roles of male performer and spectator as they negotiate dominant ideologies and manipulate the choreographer’s ‘message’ for the duration of a dance performance. THE MALE DANCER AND THE GAZE If for most of the last 100 years, the construction of male roles in dance and ballet has too often been overshadowed by the need to respond to the prejudice that dancing is not a masculine activity, choreographers and 41

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dancers have responded to this in different ways. It sometimes results in a ‘macho’ overcompensation – of trying to prove that ballet is, in fact, tough, or that modern dance is not soft like ballet. But there have also been instances where dancers have, seemingly, been unaware of, or ignored the prejudice, or found relatively acceptable ways of side-stepping it. Alternatively, as in the case of some of the gay choreographers whose work I discuss in Chapter 7, some dancers and choreographers have deliberately set out to undermine and attack restricted ideas about masculine identities. At issue is how the male dancer presents himself to the spectator’s gaze. Laura Mulvey (1975), as I noted earlier, first coined the term ‘the male gaze’, and proposed that cinema audiences have two different types of way of looking at narrative film: a look with which the spectator, caught up in the story, identifies with the protagonist, and a more detached look of pleasure at visual display. This latter is directed by the way characters within the narrative look at each other. As I have shown, Jill Dolan and Ann Daly both argued that this network of intersecting looks and gazes operates in theatre and dance to invite spectators to make identifications with some dancers on stage or to contemplate the visual spectacle which dance sometimes presents. Dance scholars have, of course, made revisions and objections to these arguments, some of which I shall consider later. The looks and gazes that make up spectatorship in theatre dance can result in dancers of both sexes becoming the subject of both male and female spectators’ gazes and thus permit cross-gender identifications (which may not necessarily be motivated by gender issues). In order to explore what happens in situations where the male dancer may be the subject of both male and female gazes, I turn to a discussion of the duet since this is a key signifying structure through which gender and sexuality is represented in theatre dance. Revising his 1949 book on the pas de deux for a new edition in 1969, Anton Dolin reflected with regret on what he saw as a move away from the gallant and chivalrous tradition of male partnering which his own dancing exemplified. Within the ballet tradition introduced to western Europe by the Ballets Russes and continued in particular in Britain by dance artists such as Dolin, the male role in the pas de deux tended to be inconspicuous and uncontroversial. Writing in 1969, Dolin regretfully acknowledged that, since the first European performances by the Bolshoi Ballet in 1956, a new style of partnering had come into fashion: ‘It is of no use to be, and remain, old fashioned, but I shall never reconcile myself to the current vogue of executing the lovely classical adagios (pas de deux) of Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty as if they were weight-lifting contests’ (1969: 12). In Dolin’s view ‘the good (male) partner will always try to avoid any appearance of hard work, however difficult it may be, and believe me, often is’ (ibid.). Whereas masculinity is normally signified through action, it is, therefore, hidden within this gallant tradition. 42

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The male partner’s gaze is crucial in signifying his masculinity. He never acknowledges the spectator’s gaze, and his own gaze is directed towards the ballerina. As Adrian Stokes put it: Her partner guides and holds her. And he – he then watches her pas with upraised hand, he shows her off. He has the air of perpetual triumph, and when the time comes for his own variation he bounds, leaps, bounces and rejoins the ballerina in the wings amid applause. Such is the abstract of the pas de deux, the crux of ballet. (1942: 81) Anton Dolin gives a similar account: ‘He is there to focus attention upon her from their first entrance until the last call is finished’ (1969: 12). This applies even when he is applauded: following the adagio the true ballerina expects her partner to lead her on. [ . . . he] should keep his whole attention on her and with obvious admiration at what she has accomplished. He knows that without him she could not have achieved such perfection, but it is gentlemanly not to show it! (Ibid.) By himself gazing at the ballerina, he identifies himself with the males in the audience and is, in turn, available to be the bearer of their looks. Here, the complex interplay of the spectator’s and male dancer’s gazes and projected identifications does not just determine how the spectacle is interpreted, but creates a sense of narrative. At the same time, this gentlemanly consideration for his female partner could also be attractive to a female spectator, a fantasy dancing partner who combines strength with tenderness, male authority with refined grace. So, while the conventional use of the dancer’s gaze signifies a degree of manliness, the gallant partner is, nevertheless, relatively inconspicuous, and gentlemanly rather than dominating. His behaviour, therefore, indicates a tacit acknowledgement of female spectatorship. Any consequent eroticisation of the male dancing body, however, would be a source of homophobic panic for an (assumed) heterosexual male viewer. The gallant pas de deux, therefore, attempts uneasily to balance the interests of actual female and largely imagined male spectators. The pas de deux between Apollo and Terpsichore in Balanchine’s 1928 ballet Apollon Musagète (Apollo and the muses) exemplifies this balancing act. In classical Greek mythology, the muses are minor deities who each preside over one of the arts or sciences, and their role is to inspire mortals. In Balanchine’s ballet, three of them danced solos for the adolescent Apollo, initially Serge Lifar, who then danced for them before choosing Terpsichore, the muse of dance, initially Alice Nikitina, as his dancing partner. This was the first of Balanchine’s extremely productive collaborations with the 43

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composer Stravinsky. At the time of its first performance, its ‘neo-classical’ combination of the clear, precise conventions of Marius Petipa’s late nineteenth-century pas de deux with modernist fragmentation was controversial. For much of the ballet, Apollo was the bearer of the male spectator’s look as he watched the three ballerinas’ solos. His interest in them, however, was seriously impersonal and artistic and, when he danced with Terpsichore, there was no sense that any personal relationship was involved. He almost never seemed to look directly at her, often facing in the opposite direction from her or looking past her, upwards. This began with a tableau that cited Michaelangelo’s painting of God’s creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Apollo, like Michaelangelo’s Adam, lay on his side on the floor, resting on one leg and pushing his torso up with one arm, his free arm raised in mid air with one finger pointing. Terpsichore sidled across the floor towards him on pointe, both looking away from each other. With her right arm she pointed up to the heavens, while her left arm reached down, towards his pointing hand, and their two fingers touched. Just as Michaelangelo’s God imparts the divine spark of life to his Adam by touching his finger, so Terpsichore, the muse of dance, with the same gesture, gave Apollo divine inspiration. The fragmentation, and the two dancers’ sense of detachment and absorption in what they were doing, had the effect of directing the spectators’ attention towards the unfolding sequence of shapes that the two dancers made together. This, as Peter Brinson and Clement Crisp have described it, culminated in a ‘“swimming lesson” with [Terpsichore] stretched in a beautiful proud curve on [Apollo’s] back as they move their arms in swimming motion’ (Brinson and Crisp 1970: 208). As the US dance critic Edwin Denby put it: ‘When the score and the choreography now and then exchange a smile, the dancers don’t presume to be in on the joke, they are attending to the powerful dance forces present’ (1965: 256). Apollon Musagète presented both male and female dancing bodies as absorbing, aesthetic spectacle. It, therefore, reached out to the spectator to claim ‘his’ attention, inviting ‘him’ to identify with the male partner and enjoy what he is seeing and doing: in Fried’s terms, this is theatrical. But the ballet also created an effect of absorption by drawing spectators in through their fascination with its formal and aesthetic qualities. Its modernist fragmentation may, at the time, have disrupted habitual habits of spectatorship and encouraged what Silverman called active looking: the female roles might therefore have appeared more self-sufficient and autonomous than ones in traditional ballets. Apollo’s role, however, conformed with norms of masculine behaviour. Dolin and Stokes, in effect, describe a situation where male dominance was breaking down. From a historical perspective, the disappearance of the male ballet dancer from nineteenth-century ballet companies came at a time when ballet was becoming a performance genre in which male 44

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patrons watched women dancing: in other words it became a feminine realm. When the male ballet dancer made his comeback with the Ballets Russes, for which Balanchine and Dolin both worked at the start of their professional careers, theatre dance was an area in which female and gay male patronage were becoming increasingly significant (as I show in the next chapter). Whereas film scholar Steve Neale said that male dancers were feminised through being the subject of a female gaze, I suggest it is more useful to say that the institution of Western theatre dance had become doubly feminised by these two significant shifts in patronage. The word ‘feminised’ is emotive. In ordinary life, people often sense when they are being looked at since this can sometimes be an uncomfortable experience. For some male spectators, an involuntary identification with the male performer might have a worrying potential to arouse shame and embarrassment for this man whose body is offered as sexual spectacle. Film scholar Richard Dyer points this out in his discussion of film star publicity photos, male pin ups, and paintings and drawings of the male nude. ‘On the one hand,’ he observes, ‘these men are there to be looked at by women. On the other hand, this does violence to the codes of who looks and who is looked at, and some attempt is instinctively made to counteract this violation’ (1982: 63). Dyer argues that images of men must appear active in some way in order to appear in line with dominant ideas of masculinity. Women in pin ups (and in nude paintings) almost always avert their eyes from their viewers and acknowledge them, thus allowing themselves to be surveyed as erotic objects. Men in pin ups, and much dance photography, look out actively, often upwards, barely acknowledging the viewer and thus resisting the attempt of the viewer’s gaze to objectify them. Both male and female pin ups are, therefore, in Fried’s terms absorbed, but their absorption signifies differently through gender conventions. Looking upwards, Dyer suggests, can signify masculine subjectivity: ‘In the case where the model is looking up, this always suggests spirituality: he might be there for his face and body to be gazed at, but his mind is on higher things, and it is this upwards striving that is most supposed to please’ (ibid.). As I have noted, Apollo looked upwards as if his mind was on higher things. Whereas women are usually shown in passive poses, men are generally shown caught in some sort of activity. Even if men are not in action, ‘the male image still promises actively by the way the body is posed. Even in an apparently supine pose, the model tightens and taughtens his body so that the muscles are emphasised, hence drawing attention to the body’s potential for action’ (ibid.: 67). At the start of his pas de deux, Apollo lay stretched on the stage floor looking up in a characteristic pose of masculine striving. He was posed with his body turning, resting on his arms, like David in the Sistine Chapel, caught in action with his body tensed, and his eyes, looking up in what Dyer would 45

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call a pose of masculine striving (1987: 118). These conventions of striving and active looking make images of men look masculine. Where men are presented in images without these conventions, their masculinity appears unstable. Apollo and Terpsichore’s ‘swimming lesson’ lift is one in which the male partner’s masculine strength and stability are signified. In other kinds of duet that do not conform to the gallant conventions, male strength can be shown within more exciting and dangerous lifts, and the male partner may also signify his masculinity through his ability to control his female partner. Ann Daly’s objections to one duet in Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments was that the ballerina appeared helpless and passive through being displayed in a vulnerable and sexually demeaning way towards the audience (1987). It would be simplistic to dismiss ballet pas de deux in general as no more than an exhibition in which the female dancer is an object to be manipulated. Duets signify social relations. The actual practice of partnering and lifting is one which requires a high degree of skill and co-operation between the male and female dancer, but the extent to which the spectator is made aware of this varies between one duet and another, and between different styles and traditions. Some signify hierarchies of dominance and subordination, others suggest more egalitarian relations. Sarah Rubidge suggests that there are certain questions that one can ask about the relationship implied in a duet: How often does the male initiate the lifts? How often is the woman used as a passive object? How often does the male dancer, by touching a part of his partner’s body, cause her to move? Does the female dancer initiate movement in the male in a similar way? How often do the partners bear each other’s weight equally in a duet – or trust their weight to their partner? (1989: 5) Rubidge’s observations suggest a way to compare male and female agency within a duet, but a balanced, ‘politically correct’ duet may not be very exciting. In narrative ballets such as Kenneth Macmillan’s Romeo and Juliet (1965) or Birgit Culberg’s Miss Julie (1950), love duets express a passionate struggle. The central duet in Balanchine’s Agon (1957), which is a storyless ballet, uses tensions between a resistant ballerina and a sometimes forceful partner to suggest an abstracted struggle. The male dancer’s active roles in such ballets can compensate for, or repress, the way in which he is the erotic object of either a spectator’s or another dancer’s gaze. NATURALISING MALE VIOLENCE The way in which the male pin up and the male partner in a duet are presented to the spectator – in Mulvey’s useful term, their to-be-looked46

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at-ness – is contradictory. As Dyer has pointed out, where the conventions are adhered to, the image resists being objectified and appreciated from an erotic point of view; yet it is only through appearing masculine that the pin up seems desirable. Any female or gay male spectatorship is, therefore, achieved through breaking the laws governing normative gender ideologies, and law breakers are liable to punishment. As I noted earlier in this chapter, Steve Neale has suggested that ‘in a heterosexual and patriarchal society, the male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look: that look must be motivated in some way, its erotic component repressed’ (1983: 14). Neale argues that the problem lies within, and must be resolved through, the narrative, usually through some sort of punishment. Punishment generally must be seen to follow in narratives where the central character goes against social convention, and this applies also in theatre dance. Neither women nor men are supposed to look erotically at men. Jocasta, in Graham’s Night Journey (1947), comes to a bad end for having desired Oedipus, as does he himself for having been the erotic subject of her gaze (see Burt 1997). As Graham Jackson (1978: 38–9) points out, gay ballets (in which men are the erotic object of the male gaze) such as Undertow (Tudor 1945) and Monument For A Dead Boy (Rudi van Dantzig 1965) are only acceptable if they end tragically. One of the most extreme forms of testing masculinity within a narrative is a fight. Neale points out that one moment when the film audience are allowed to look at men – and specifically at male bodies – as spectacle, is in the shoot-out of a Western film. These are ‘moments of spectacle, points at which the narrative hesitates, comes to a momentary halt, but they are also points at which the drama is finally resolved, a suspense in the culmination of the narrative drive’ (ibid.: 8). Male sexuality is commonly associated with aggression and violence, and Neale suggests that, within the shoot-out, there are structures that stop or punish erotic display. He argues that, in some Westerns, erotic looks by a male protagonist at another man result in sadomasochistic narratives (ibid.: 12). Sadism, as Laura Mulvey has pointed out: ‘demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory and defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end’ (1975: 14). What Mulvey describes here can, with a little adaptation, be applied to some male–female and male–male duets. Neale suggests that in Serge Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns the erotic component of the way the protagonists exchange aggressive looks during gun duels is also repressed and recuperated. This convention of exchanged looks is parodied through the use of extreme and repetitive close-ups, and thus the way that the film is edited makes the narrative start to freeze, and spectacle take over. As Mulvey observes, spectacle consists of: ‘stopping the narrative in order to recognise the pleasure of display, but displacing it from the male body as such and locating it more generally in the overall 47

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components of a highly ritualised scene’ (ibid.: 8). The dance example that most directly and knowingly draws on these filmic conventions is the knife fight between the two male rivals at the end of Carlos Saura’s dance film Blood Wedding (1981). This was, in effect, a male–male duet. Through a combination of mime and flamenco movement, the dancers alternated between a chilly male reserve, in which they managed to generate suspense around their latent, masculine potential for violence, and abrupt, carefully calculated, devastatingly brutal, rhythmic eruptions. The homoerotic component of their gaze, as they eyed one another, led to ritualised, slow motion penetration as, climactically, they knife each other. As Leo Bersani (1988) and others have argued, within Western culture, penetration signifies masculinity while being penetrated is a feminine position. Killing one another might be a tragic, no win situation, but it provides a powerful spectacle that seems to evoke natural, essential virility in a way that reinforces normative gender ideologies. Such male violence maintains a fantasy of men’s mastery and inviolability at the cost of denying their own vulnerability and ignoring that of others. The exchanges of looks between male protagonists in some of José Limón’s work, as I show in Chapter 4, seems to lead inevitably to fights between them. There were choreographed fights in many twentieth-century ballets and in US modern dance, and hard, warrior figures occurred in several of Ted Shawn’s works, also discussed in Chapter 4. The theme of male violence has been used as a guise for presenting a spectacle of the male dancer’s body because displays of fighting movement clearly use dancerly qualities which are appropriately masculine and thus unproblematic for the male dancer. DV8’s piece My Sex, Our Dance (1987) offers a useful counter example to this. Superficially, it seemed to present violent masculine struggle in a way that conformed to normative expectations but, in fact, subverted them by making visible and contesting the ‘naturalness’ of violent behaviour. It was performed in a high energy, risky dance style which conveyed the fraught and dangerous nature of male–male relationships. It started with Newson shaking hands with Charnock and then reaching out to touch him. Charnock flinched away from him and their interactions developed into a fight followed by a brooding truce and then more combat. Their interactions, therefore, explored the precarious line dividing, on the one hand, male bonding and trust and, on the other, fear and homophobia. The consequent tension erupted in violent sequences: one dancer hurled himself through the air backwards, sometimes to be caught but sometimes not; or they tripped one another up; or one hurled himself onto a mattress where the other was lying so that the latter had to roll out of the way. My Sex, Our Dance had no narrative closure. The dancers seemed trapped in endless cycles of struggle and truce. There was, however, one significant event in it. Newson has spoken of an incident, while making the piece, when he and Charnock had collapsed, worn out, lying one on top of the 48

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11 Figure 2.1 Lloyd Newson and Nigel Charnock in DV8’s My Sex, Our Dance, 1986. Photo © Eleni Leoussi.

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other on the mattress (Newson 1987). At this moment someone came into the rehearsal room and, seeing them lying there, was very embarrassed, excused themselves, and quickly left. This moment was worked into the finished piece. As it was performed in Britain, a heterosexual couple sat throughout the piece at a table in the far left, front corner of the performance space. They chatted quietly, sipping wine, and were apparently oblivious to the performance behind them. Stephanie Jordan describes them as: ‘the man and woman who canoodle and giggle at the café table on the stage’s edge and openly express their lighter attachment’ (1987: 23). At the moment when Newson collapsed exhausted on top of Charnock lying on the mattress, the woman at the table laughed. Although she was apparently laughing at something unrelated to what Charnock and Newson were doing, it exacerbated unease at their physical contact. The piece, therefore, maintained its excruciating tension throughout. It made the spectator long for a resolution: why couldn’t the two men develop an emotional intimacy? Why did they keep fighting one another when they both seemed to want the same things? But the only options for narrative resolution are tragic ones, as in Blood Wedding and Monument For A Dead Boy. Just at the moment when a temporary resolution seemed possible, as Charnock and Newson lay together exhausted on the mattress, the couple’s laughter intervened, breaking the men’s intimacy and reminding spectators how straight society views behaviour such as this. So, a lack of narrative resolution, on one level, produces critical awareness on another one. To see the piece as a whole as a plea for greater tolerance towards sexual minorities is, I think, to miss the point. Like much of DV8’s work, which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 7, it was a critique of masculinity as such, of men’s institutionalised fear of emotional intimacy, of the maintenance of tight physical boundaries around male bodies. My Sex, Our Dance revealed what the German writer Klaus Theweleit, in another context, called men’s ‘protective psychological body armour which functions as a dam to stop the flow of pleasurable sensation’ (1987: 434). Much of the literature about DV8 praises the company for their brave expression of the ‘truth’ about gender and sexuality (e.g. Winter 1989, Mackrell 1992). I would like to suggest, instead, that My Sex, Our Dance exemplified queer performativity, both in its citation of the trope of choreographed male fighting, and by putting in quotation marks the straight behaviour of its extras. What was, therefore, significant about this piece was its use of these performative citations to make visible the way normative gender ideologies are naturalised. Like other works I will discuss in later chapters, it denaturalised what might ordinarily appear normal male behaviour by making it appear problematic and extreme. The moment in My Sex, Our Dance when Charnock flinched as Newson attempted to touch him generated an affective sense of shame. Like other

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male–male duets that I discuss in later chapters, it transgressed the blurred and ambiguous line between appropriate and inappropriate male relationships. The danced relationship between Charnock and Newson seemed shameful because it revealed a failure to maintain tight physical boundaries around male bodies. As in other pieces I discuss in later chapters, My Sex, Our Dance showed men performing roles that appeared hysterical and ecstatic, and were haunted by the spectre of male failure. Failure to appear a proper man can be caused by failure to appear in control of oneself, or to seem overwhelmed by the tensions and contradictions within socially constructed male norms. The performance of failure neither reaches out to spectators to claim their attention nor leaves them to become absorbed in the piece in their own individual way. What is disconcerting is that, in effect, it fails to attain either state. Such ambiguous performances, nevertheless, have the potential to challenge the idea that masculinity is an unproblematic, unquestioned norm by their refusal to assert male mastery. In My Sex, Our Dance, this refusal operated both at the level of individual performances and within the choreographic structure as a whole which lacked narrative closure. Where choreographers refuse conventional narrative closure, as in My Sex, Our Dance, this can be seen as a deliberate rejection of a certain kind of Romantic pose which, as I noted in the first chapter, is associated with the notion of male genius. Christine Battersby (1989) has described the Romantic (male) genius battling against nature and engaging in an organic struggle to create a whole, a oneness, through his mastery of a sublime and terrifying (male) nature. Following Battersby, a male choreographer, during the rehearsal period, might be said to master his material by pulling it together into a coherent whole, while a male dancer can do the same through a masterful interpretation of awkward, difficult material in performance. If he can achieve this, he will seem to affirm his masculinity, whereas the same achievement for a female choreographer or dancer would not have the same positive connotations. A male genius, as Battersby has pointed out, is allowed to have feminine characteristics of sensitivity and emotionality, and his special status allows him to risk being considered slightly mad: ‘but a female viewed as hysterical and ecstatic has to fight off a much more mundane kind of cultural nonentity’ (1989: 145). It is in this context that the abstract structures of some experimental dances, that I discuss in later chapters, can challenge gender norms. Choreographers such as Cunningham and Paxton have investigated neutral, fragmented structures, while others, such as Brown and de Keersmaeker, have explored minimalist ones. The use of such structures constitutes a refusal to impose control in a masterful way and create an organic, unified whole. Alternative, anti-hierarchical choreographic structures open up new, egalitarian ways of thinking about social relations.

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BLACK MALE DANCING BODIES AND WHITENESS During a particularly interesting and revealing roundtable discussion about dance and gender in 1988, the African American choreographer Bill T. Jones presented a black artist’s perspective on the relation between performer and spectator. The other participants in the discussion were the choreographer Johanna Boyce and performance scholars Ann Daly and Carol Martin. While articulating perceptions about the experience of dancing which influenced her work, Boyce told Jones she imagined that being on display is a fearful thing for a man because it is a situation in which he doesn’t ‘have total control or empowerment’ over the people watching him (Boyce et al. 1988: 89). Jones said that, as a black man on stage being watched primarily by white spectators he felt that his state in the world was that of being ‘such a marginal, “special black” ’. He felt that he was a ‘commodity’ and that this ‘must be a feeling that women have’ (ibid.: 90–1). For Jones: There is something about the spectators saying, in effect ‘Perform for us. Show us your body’. So it made me extremely aggressive, and maybe that was my desire to impose masculine control – I also assume it was racial . . . It was a cruel and ironic way that I saw myself. You know: you’re a black man – take off your shirt. You’re allowed to wiggle your hips in public. You know what they’re all thinking, ‘Oh, I bet you have a dick down to your knees’. (Ibid.: 89–90) Some of the pressures which Jones identifies in this quotation about the need to be aggressive and impose masculine control concur with the general experience of male dancers as I have been discussing it in this chapter. But some of what he is saying, as Jones himself points out, is specifically concerned with black male experience. It reinforces the stereotype of the over-sexed black stud, and it also relates to African American history: Jones has often spoken about black slaves as commodities being forced to dance on the auction block (e.g. 1995: 73–4). What he was telling the other participants in the discussion was that, in a similar way to the black film spectator that Fanon discussed, he felt interpellated into performing a narrowly defined role that was not of his own making. Jones’s observations about being a marginal ‘special black’ recall Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer’s discussion the same year about the peculiar restrictions that black film directors and casts face. Because so few black films are made compared with films by white directors: each film is burdened with an inordinate pressure to be ‘representative’ and to act, like a delegate does, as a statement that ‘speaks’ for the 52

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black communities as a whole (. . .) This of course underlines the problem of tokenism: the very idea that a single film could ‘speak for’ an entire community of interests reinforces the perceived secondariness of that community. (1988: 4) The work of black artists such as Bill T. Jones and Alvin Ailey can often seem to be caught in this trap of tokenist representativeness. As Susan Manning has noted, black and white critics have interpreted Ailey’s flagship work Revelations (1960) – which I discuss in Chapter 5 – in different ways: ‘Whereas many white critics emphasize the universality of the frame of mythic abstraction, many black critics emphasize the frame of historical and cultural specificity’ (Manning 2004: 219). Performance scholar Peggy Phelan’s notion of the unmarked is relevant here. Commenting on the agenda adopted by some artists and performers to generate increased visibility for minorities and marginalised groups, Phelan has drawn attention to certain dangers this might bring. Visibility, she observes, is a trap: ‘it summons surveillance and the law; it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonial/imperial appetite for possession’ (1993: 6). Although underrepresented communities can be empowered by an enhanced visibility, Phelan points out ‘there is real power in remaining unmarked’ (ibid.). Clearly white, male, heterosexual men generally enjoy the privilege of being unmarked; but at the same time to be unmarked is to be without properties. Where white masculinity as a universal, is sometimes associated with blankness and can seem lacking in character, white ideas about the black, male, dancing body can sometimes hint at envy. As Richard Dyer has pointed out in his discussion of Paul Robeson: Black and white discourses on blackness seem to be valuing the same things – spontaneity, emotion, naturalness – yet giving them a different implication. Black discourses see them as contributions to the development of society, white as enviable qualities that only blacks have. (1987: 79) I discuss how Jones has dealt with this through his own work in Chapters 6 and 8. Just as I argued in the first chapter that homosexuality is fundamental to the construction of masculinity as the internally excluded difference, so black masculinity occupies an equally central position in relation to the construction of an unmarked, white, universal notion of masculinity. It is not just necessary to be aware of the kinds of factor that Jones raised during the roundtable discussion when considering performances by black male dancing bodies, but that there is also a need to analyse critically the whiteness of white, male, dancing bodies. 53

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MASCULINITY AND PRESENCE The theoretical framework I have been developing for analysing relations between male dancers and spectators has taken as its starting point ideas about the male gaze. I have examined what happens when some of the questions asked about the objectification of the female body are applied to the male dancing body. Some dance scholars, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, applied feminist ideas about the male gaze to dance analysis (Alderson 1987; Goldberg 1987–8; Dempster 1988; Daly 1989; Adair 1992). Subsequent scholarship has adopted a more critical or sceptical attitude (Jordan and Thomas 1994; Manning 1997; Thomas 2003), while Ann Daly’s gradual move away from feminist theory and ideas about the male gaze can be followed in her retrospective collection (2002). Rather than rejecting these ideas altogether, as many dance scholars seem to have done, my approach in this chapter has been to modify them in order to revise feminist accounts of spectatorship in dance. In doing so, I have focused on the way the spectacular aspects of men’s dancing generally reinforce conservative norms of masculine behaviour. I have, therefore, concentrated on the visual aspects of the process of perceiving dance. These ideas about spectacle and spectatorship form the basis for most of the discussions in the rest of this book. Spectators, nevertheless, interpret many aspects of dance performance through relating what dancers are doing to their own embodied experience. Some dance scholars, in writing about recent experimental dance performances, have theorised the presence rather than the visual appearance of the dancing body. For Ann Daly, presence is the core of the pleasure of watching dance: ‘Presence is the silent yet screeching excitement of physical vibrancy, of “being there”. It is one of the thrills of watching dance, to see someone radiate pure energy, whether it is in stillness or in flight’ (1989: 25). Experimental works in which dancers’ physical presence overrides the spectacular aspects of dance performance, as I show in later chapters, can sometimes trouble and subvert dominant gender ideologies to stage alternative ways of performing masculinities. Susan Manning, in her review of dance scholarship which uses ideas about the male gaze, argues that modern dance (though not ballet) has ‘projected a kinaesthetic power that challenged male viewers to see the female dancer as an expressive subject rather than as an erotic object’ (1997: 163). Along similar lines, Ann Cooper Albright has argued that it is through creating a powerful physical presence that dancers such as Isadora Duncan and Yvonne Rainer were able to resist being objectified as women by a voyeuristic male gaze. Duncan’s charismatic dancing made her audience share her experience of dancing, thus stopping them objectifying it as erotic spectacle. The clarity of Rainer’s radical analysis of ordinary movement in her Trio A had a similar effect by bringing her audience’s attention to the process of ‘making and remaking the self through movement’ (Albright 1997: 19). 54

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It is, of course, not Albright’s aim to consider how the male dancing body can resist being eroticised by a viewer’s gaze, but it is revealing to apply her observations about female dancers to the situation of male dancers. The kind of female presence that Albright believes is empowering for women has very different effects when exercised by male dancers. Where a male dancer creates a powerful physical presence he dominates and masters the audience in a way that, I have argued, may escape an eroticising gaze but does so by conforming to conservative norms of masculine behaviour. Trio A, which was first performed in 1966 at Judson Memorial Church by Rainer, Steve Paxton, and David Gordon, is an avant-garde work which, in my opinion, distances audiences by challenging and disrupting normal habits of watching dance. Paxton’s Flat (1964), which I discuss in Chapter 5, involved a radical examination of ordinary movement that paralleled Rainer’s investigations. Rather than creating a strong presence by bringing his audience’s attention to the process of making and remaking a masculine subjectivity through movement, which is what Albright said Rainer’s dancing achieved, Paxton’s work was marked by troubling absences – and I would argue Rainer’s work was similarly troubling. The lack of a reassuring presence in such work made audience members become aware of their own activities as observers. This is a necessary precondition for developing ways of seeing masculinity and femininity differently. Both Albright and Daly (1989) see presence as an affective relation between dancer and spectator, and view strong presence as more desirable and valuable than weak presence because the former can affirm gendered identity. This, however, doesn’t address Phelan’s point that ‘there is real power in remaining unmarked’ (1993: 6). In Phelan’s view, performance’s ontology is its disappearance, which teaches us ‘to learn to value what is lost, to learn not the meaning but the value of what cannot be reproduced or seen (again)’ (ibid.: 152). She points out that it is the presence of the living bodies of the performers that cannot be saved or recorded. The specificity of performance, she has reminded us, is its liveness: ‘Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations’ (ibid.: 146). Presence and absence are not binary opposites. In Phelan’s account there are always presences and absences in operation during performance. The implications of this become clear when Phelan applies it to the work of feminist performance artists such as Adrian Piper, Sophie Calle, and Angelica Festa. All these artists have used absence and disappearance to create a space for the performance of aspects of women’s experience that cannot be represented within cultural representation because this only permits the reproduction of male sex and gender. Some female choreographers, as I show in subsequent chapters, have also used absences as a way of representing aspects of their perceptions of masculinity that 55

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cannot be represented within the norms and conventions of mainstream theatre dance. This is also the case where some men’s experiences, both straight- and gay-identified, cannot be represented. Absence and disappearance can, therefore, be powerful, in troubling or uncanny ways, where they draw attention to gaps and limitations within normative cultural representation. André Lepecki proposes that: ‘critical theories of dancing practices must consider how it is that “presence” challenges the very stability of “the body” ’ (2004: 6). I take this to mean that, by troubling and undoing the simple binary of presence or absence in order to realise a multiplicity of presences, dance performance can challenge the processes of social and cultural construction that render some bodies marked and others unmarked. The kinds of presence that dancers project and the absences they call to mind determine the ideological positions that spectators can take up in relation to the performance. They, therefore, both enable and restrict the ways in which embodied memories and histories, that are shared by performer and spectator, are evoked during performance. The kinds of memory and history that are evoked have the potential to either reinforce or destabilise constricting cultural discourse that only permit the reproduction of male sex and gender. For example, Martin Hargreaves (2000) has argued that the male swans in Matthew Bourne’s version of Swan Lake (1995) are haunted by the absence of the bodies of the female swans in the classic, late nineteenth-century ballet. Casting male dancers in these roles would not be significant if the swans in Swan Lake had not up until then been feminine. (I discuss Bourne’s Swan Lake in Chapter 7.) Hargreaves (2000, 2004) suggests that ghosts (emanations that are simultaneously both present and absent) from past performances and of past performers are often a factor brought into play as spectators watch and interpret live performance. These ghosts create a dialectic of difference between present and past that impacts on the performance of gender. In this way both male and female dancing bodies have the potential to destabilise norms. I have been arguing that the potential for male dancing bodies to do this underlies anxieties about the male dancer, but, as I show in later chapters, the trouble that he sometimes causes can also have positive consequences. CONCLUSION I have outlined in these first two chapters a general framework for analysing theatre dance as a signifying practice which mediates hegemonic gender ideologies. The constraints and restrictions placed on male dancing bodies, which I have identified in this chapter, correspond with the problematic and conflictual elements within the construction of masculine subjectivities that I outlined in the first chapter. In theatre dance, therefore, the acceptable 56

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male dancer is one who, when looked at by the audience, proves that he measures up to supposedly unproblematic male ideals: he looks actively at his female partner or upwards in an uplifting way; he appears powerful, uses large, expansive movements, but is stoical rather than emotionally expressive; he controls, displays, and forces changes in women dancers in duets. Some choreographers, however, have been able to problematise and disrupt normative conventions to produce works which challenge dominant norms of gendered behaviour. The qualities that make a male dancer appear acceptable can sometimes be used in a denaturalising and destabilising way. To dismantle the concept of the dominant male point of view, and to consider how representations of masculinity in theatre dance appear to spectators who look from other points of view, is to read dance against the grain of the generally accepted account of dance history. It is this revisionist view of dance history that underpins the analyses offered in the rest of this book.

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3 NIJINSKY

Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950) is a key figure in the reintroduction of the male ballet dancer to the stages of European theatres at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for initiating and developing representations of masculinity that have dominated ballet and even, to some extent, modern dance throughout the century. From reminiscences of the first performance of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris in 1909, it is clear that Nijinsky became a star over night, and he went on to become probably the most famous dancer of the twentieth century. Nijinsky was the first international superstar of the globalised media, and then became the first superstar to find the pressures so unbearable that he suffered a breakdown. He was the first male dancer to challenge conservative nineteenth-century gender ideologies, becoming retrospectively a gay icon. For the twentyfirst-century reader, Nijinsky indeed has become what Marcia Siegel calls ‘an unknowable, infinitely manipulable presence in the dance universe’ (2002: 3). This chapter considers the legacy which has come down to us in the name of ‘Nijinsky’. Nijinsky the man and dance artist played the key role in transforming ideas about the male dancer, but it is also necessary to acknowledge the parts that other individuals, organisations, audiences, and writers have played in this transformation. What the Ballets Russes contributed to the development of representations of masculinity in theatre dance is easier to map out. The tradition of male partnering in the pas de deux was reintroduced to the West. The company’s first programme in Paris in 1909 included the Blue Bird pas de deux from Sleeping Beauty, showing Petipa’s development of the supported adagio (i.e. a duet with lifts).1 In 1910 Diaghilev included Giselle (in the Moscow version) in his programme of ballets. European ballet audiences realised that the pas de deux had not looked right without a good male partner, and Nijinsky was certainly that, though some might have argued that Mikhail Mordkin (1880–1944), also with the Ballets Russes that season, was as good. In addition, the Polovtsian Dances in the opera Prince Igor similarly showed Western audiences what they had been missing since the male corps de ballets in western European theatres had been disbanded in the mid-nineteenth century. 58

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All this is probably not what comes to mind when the pre-1914 Ballets Russes is mentioned. This is the period of exotic ballets, with the ‘new’ choreography by Fokine (1880–1942) and costumes and sets by Bakst (1866–1924) and Benois (1870–1960), that showcased Nijinsky’s talents. Lynn Garafola has argued that Diaghilev in effect dethroned the ballerina in his desire to create works that celebrated the masculine body beautiful (1999: 248). There was no precedent in European theatre dance history for a piece such as Fokine’s Le Spectre de la rose in which the male role (Nijinsky’s) is clearly the central one and the female dancer (initially Karsavina) plays a fantasising spectator’s role. These roles extended ideas about male dancing in daring ways. Clearly Diaghilev (1872–1929) brought about the creation of these ballets to show off his lover’s talents. While Diaghilev’s pleasure at the spectacle of male dancing bodies was a factor in developing male dance, Nijinsky’s dancing didn’t just appeal to female and homosexual male spectators. He was a star; and performers, as Richard Dyer (1979, 1987) has pointed out, only become stars because their persona appeals to broad cross-sections of the general public. Nijinsky’s persona was a construction that helped towards the success of the Ballets Russes project as a whole. Diaghilev, as Garafola (1989) points out, was a brilliant publicist. What the public took to be ‘Nijinsky’ should therefore be thought of as a continuum between his onstage roles and his interpretation of them, the style of the pieces he himself choreographed, and the image of him generated for publicity purposes. Fokine, who choreographed most of Nijinsky’s new roles, appears to have left dancers a very free hand in interpreting and fleshing out the bare skeleton of the choreography that he had indicated to them.2 While Fokine enjoyed a certain autonomy, he would have been working to a scenario and within the constraints of commissioned or arranged music. Diaghilev and his associates would already have indicated very specific ideas about the piece before Fokine actually got to the rehearsal room, and they would have taken an active interest in the ballet’s progress. The visual artists themselves contributed to the way Nijinsky’s roles mediated his gender. The posters and deluxe souvenir programmes moulded his image as did the costumes they created for him. There is the jewelled male brassiere designed by Bakst which Nijinsky wore in Schéhérazade (1910), or the Bakst costumes in Narcisse and Le Dieu bleu, which, as Garafola suggests, with their: ‘abbreviated skirt, sharply demarcated waist, exposed collarbones and shoulders teased conventions of masculinity’ (1989: 39). Nijinsky did more than just create the central roles in these exotic ballets. His own choreography contributed towards the development of modernism and neo-classicism in ballet. Through the choreographic innovations that he introduced and his sister Bronislava Nijinska (1891–1972) developed, ways of representing gender were developed which were much more radical and critical than those of Fokine. While the roles he created within Fokine’s 59

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choreography challenged existing gender ideologies, the avant-garde modernism of his own and his sister’s choreography constituted a more radical assault on normative gender ideologies. Part of what is so interesting about Nijinsky is that he did things in dance that no one had, up until then, considered possible. I noted in Chapter 2 Steve Neale’s thesis that the male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look and is feminised if it is the erotic object of a female look. But can this idea be applied to the comparatively innocent pre-1914 audiences who watched Nijinsky dance? There is some evidence in Ballets Russes’ critical reception of unease at some of Nijinsky’s performances but there is scant evidence from that decade which suggests critics or commentators were aware of the possibility that women or gay men could look at his dancing body in an eroticised way. As I will show, it is only in the 1920s that gender and sexuality started to become a focused issue in discussions of his sister’s and Jean Börlin’s ballets. This chapter, therefore, examines representations of masculinity in Fokine’s ballets and in Nijinsky’s own choreography, then ends with a briefer discussion of how things changed in the 1920s. BALLETS RUSSES AND HOMOSEXUALITY The reintroduction of the male dancer to the European theatre stage in 1909 in new and sometimes unorthodox images came at a time when there was much discussion and widespread insecurity about the nature of male identity. As Amy Koritz notes: ‘That this shift occurred despite the homosexual orientation of the Diaghilev circle, and after the Wilde trials increased the danger for homosexuals, makes it all the more extraordinary’ (Koritz 1995: 131). It was a time when the feminist movement was emerging and middle class women were becoming powerful in their roles as consumers and as patrons of the arts. It was also a time when, as Jeffrey Weeks has shown (1977, 1985), men who were sexually attracted to other men were thinking about themselves using the newly defined category of homosexual, a term that was first used in English in 1892. In this context, the project of the Ballets Russes spanned contradictory extremes, as Diaghilev and his choreographers struggled to discover whether the codes of conventional masculine behaviour would encourage or suppress their artistic expression. Paradoxically, it was at this time of complex and somewhat contradictory changes that it became possible, within the field of ballet, to create these new, unorthodox representations of masculinity. The audiences who saw the Ballets Russes in those years were very different from those who in the middle years of the nineteenth century had rejected the male dancer. The latter were almost exclusively male. In nineteenth-century Paris, these were the young men about town, members of the Paris Jockey Club, for whom an entré to the loges and meeting 60

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spaces at the Opera House was a means of meeting available females (Guest 1966: 28; Garafola 1985: 36; see also Nochlin 1991: 75–94). Diaghilev’s audiences up until 1914, as Lynn Garafola (1989) points out, were the élite of society, artists, and those who, by supporting his enterprise, gained entry to that élite.3 Chief among his supporters were women: Misia Edwards (later Sert), the Marchioness of Ripon, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Lady Juliet Duff, Margot Asquith, Lady Cunard, and later Coco Chanel. The very high quality of the Ballets Russes productions and the technical accomplishments of individual dancers, together with Diaghilev’s legendary skills as publicist, lent respectability to his company’s challenging, new representations of masculinity. In addition to this, the increasingly significant female constituency in the audience clearly enjoyed watching male dancers and Nijinsky in particular.4 Suzanne Moore has argued in relation to the female gaze that ‘the codification of men via gay discourse enables a female erotic gaze’ (1988: 53), and Nijinsky’s dancing would seem a clear example of this. The many prominent figures in the audience who were homosexual would also have been appreciative of Nijinsky’s performance: for example Cocteau, Compte Robert de Montesquiou, Proust, Lytton Strachey, and Maynard Keynes. A second factor that permitted the creation by the Ballets Russes of challenging, new representations of masculinity, was the Russian-ness of those involved. In Britain, prevalent concerns about the decline in masculine norms focused on the frailty of English or Western men. Nijinsky and the male dancers in the Ballets Russes were neither. One English magazine commented thus on the popularity in London society of the Ballets Russes: We want to know the truth about these semi-Asiatic and semiEuropean people . . . Of this [Victorian] disease of super-civilisation these Russians are emphatically free . . . they are pagan with the pure untroubled paganism of the healthy child. (Quoted in Chadd and Gage 1979: 22)5 The Victorian disease was degeneracy and decadence. As I discussed in the first chapter, there was, at the time, a widespread debate about the way this ‘super-civilisation’ was causing modern European men to lose touch with their ‘essential’, ‘natural’ masculinity (Kimmell 1987). As some scholars have noted, contemporary writing about the Ballets Russes suggests that semiAsiatic and semi-European Russians were considered to be closer to an essential, ‘primitive’ virility than the average English man, and thus male Russian dancers were, to western European eyes at least, partly exempted from some of the restrictions of Victorian gender norms. One great, but largely unmentioned, source of fear about masculinity during this period was homosexuality. Jeffrey Weeks has argued that the strong homosocial relationships between men during the nineteenth century were deeply ambivalent and became increasingly dangerous for the 61

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respectable as awareness of homosexuality grew (Weeks 1977; Richards 1987). The Oscar Wilde trials had brought about a new and widespread public awareness of homosexuality, and between the 1890s and the end of the First World War extensive legislative and medical attempts were made to define and control homosexuality (Foucault 1979; Weeks 1986). This brought about a new awareness among men who were homosexual of a sense of identity arising from their sexual preferences, and of the existence and vulnerability of other homosexual men with whom they might have something in common (Weeks 1977). It was on the strength of their reception in Paris that the Ballets Russes’ reputation was founded. Under the Code Napoleon, sex between men was not illegal in France from 1792 until 1942. Many literary figures in France during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were homosexual and the Arts generally enjoyed a greater prestige in France than in Britain. Attitudes towards sexual mores were more relaxed in France than in England at the time, and there was a little more tolerance of homosexuality – it was, for instance, to France that Oscar Wilde went for refuge after his release from Reading Gaol. Many French doctors, like their colleagues in other Western countries, nevertheless considered homosexuality to be an illness. There is no particular association of homosexuality with ballet prior to the time of the Ballets Russes. It was only with Diaghilev that ballet became an area in which homosexual men became involved as artists and as audiences, and that a homosexual approach developed to the appreciation and interpretation of ballet. Diaghilev’s artistic affiliations (prior to his adoption of a more avant-garde approach on the eve of the First World War) were with the fin de siècle aesthetic and art nouveau movements in the Arts, and with an ideology of art for art’s sake. He seems to have gone out of his way to meet Oscar Wilde and Beardsley (Buckle 1975: 65), publishing one of the latter’s drawings in his magazine Mir Ikusstva (‘The World of Art’). How much he consciously acknowledged a specifically homosexual contribution to these artistic movements is not known. No one writing about the development of homosexual identity in the early years of the twentieth century has yet considered the role played by ballet, but the promotion of the male ballet dancer by Diaghilev and the development of new unorthodox images by Nijinsky must have had some impact on this development. Nijinsky’s homosexuality is sometimes played down or discounted. His sister Nijinska, in her Early Memoirs (1981), mentions a few of Nijinsky’s infatuations with young girls in St Petersburg while he was a student. In the diaries which Nijinsky wrote in 1919, while becoming increasingly unstable, there are accounts of meetings with female prostitutes in Paris and St Petersburg. He also hinted at his initial reluctance to give himself sexually to Diaghilev (Acocella 1999: 104); but he nevertheless noted: ‘I 62

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loved [Diaghilev] sincerely, and when he used to tell me that love for women was a terrible thing, I believed him’ (ibid.: 111). According to Anton Dolin, Diaghilev disliked obvious homosexuality and hated any signs of effeminacy (Dolin 1985: 50). Kevin Kopelson begins his book, The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky, by acknowledging that Nijinsky didn’t consider himself homosexual (1997: 2). Nevertheless, during the period 1909–13 Diaghilev’s artist collaborators and his close associates, who helped with the creation of Fokine and Nijinsky’s ballets, knew that Nijinsky was Diaghilev’s sexual partner. It therefore seems reasonable to take this into consideration where it is relevant and useful in looking at his work. The vast majority of those who saw Nijinsky would have had no idea of his relationship with Diaghilev. Nijinsky’s roles in Fokine’s ballets, despite their unorthodox representations of masculinity, could have been interpreted from a normative point of view. From this point of view, their male prowess, Nijinsky’s male ‘genius’, and his ballets’ archaic, exotic, or ‘oriental’ distance would have appeared acceptable. At the same time men who were homosexual and some heterosexual women watched Nijinsky dancing and appreciated the spectacle of male sexuality this presented. This was, I suggest, an example of what Stuart Hall has called a negotiated reading (see Chapter 2) that ‘accords the privileged position to the dominant definitions of events while reserving the right to make a more negotiated application of “local conditions”’ (1993: 102). Local conditions, here, were the tastes and interests of a minority group of rich, cultured, and educated men who were attracted to good-looking men. These conditions enabled female spectatorship. In my view, Nijinsky’s L’Après midi d’un faune and Le Sacre du printemps, and, following the First World War, his sister Nijinska’s Les Noces, rather than negotiating a subversive definition of normative gender ideologies, presented a more direct challenge to them because of their avant-garde nature. To demonstrate this, I will therefore consider differences between representations of masculinity in Fokine and Nijinsky’s ballets, and then examine representations of masculinity in modernist ballets from the early 1920s. MALE PROWESS IN NIJINSKY’S ROLES

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A much reproduced drawing by Jean Cocteau shows Nijinsky in the wings after Le Spectre de la rose (Figure 3.1). Like a boxer between bouts, he lies back exhausted on a chair holding a glass of water while Vassili, Diaghilev’s valet, fans him with a towel. In the background, looking concerned, are Diaghilev, Bakst, and Misia Edwards (later Sert) and her husband. Part of the mythology about Nijinsky concerns his incredible leap out through the window at the end of this piece, and, in general, the extraordinary agility and elevation of his jumps. It would appear that Cocteau’s drawing is not a total invention, as Marie Rambert describes the scene in her 63

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autobiography.6 Fokine, however, talked down Nijinsky’s leap (1961: 180–1). Anton Dolin claims that he had danced most of Nijinsky’s roles, either with the Ballets Russes or subsequently, and with many dancers from the original casts. In his opinion Nijinsky’s roles were not that demanding technically. This is perhaps to miss a crucial point about the attitude towards technical feats shared by Nijinsky, Pavlova, Fokine, and other dancers of their generation from the Imperial Theatres. They disliked the tours de forces performed by the older generation of ballerinas and male dancers, feeling that these looked mechanical and were unsympathetic to the creation of an artistic feeling in performance. (But the younger dancers had all been trained to perform and all did perform the virtuoso roles in the Petipa repertoire.) Bronislava Nijinska, in her Early Memoirs, gives us several very detailed accounts of her brother’s performances and how he prepared for them. She tells how his daily practice was geared towards developing his strength and that he would practise much more difficult feats than were needed for his roles. She also says that he would practise to minimise the preparations for jumps, and that he worked at finding how to land softly afterwards, so that, when he was on stage, his performance would appear effortless and flowing. The description that Rebecca West gives us of the effect is echoed in many other accounts: The climax of his art was his jump. He leaped high into the air, and there stayed for what seemed several seconds. Face and body suggested that he was to mount still further, do the Indian rope trick with himself as rope, hurl himself up into space through an invisible ceiling and disappear. But then he came down – and here was the second miracle – more slowly than he had gone up, landing as softly as a deer clearing a hedge of snow. (Quoted in Buckle 1975: 390) It would seem that Nijinsky did possess extraordinary strength and agility but that this was accompanied by hard work at creating an illusion of effortlessness. As Nijinska remarked: ‘Do you remember how many transitions, how many nuances there were during the course of his leap? These transitions and nuances created the illusion that he never touched the ground’ (1986: 86). What all this amounts to is that whatever Dolin may have believed, Nijinsky did produce a spectacle of famed and mythologised strength and agility on stage. While it was Diaghilev who commissioned these roles, it was Fokine who came up with the steps. As Garafola (1989) points out, Fokine is a transitional figure between the nineteenth-century ballet tradition and twentieth-century modernism. Judging by survivals such as Le Spectre de la rose (1911), or from descriptions of ballets such as Narcisse (1911), as far as the steps of Nijinsky’s solos are concerned, these were fairly traditional. Compared with Nijinsky’s subsequent innovations, Fokine’s 64

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11 Figure 3.1 ’Memories of the Ballets Russes: backstage after Le Spectre de la rose’. From Jean Cocteau, Dessins, 1923. © ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London 2006.

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choreography is conventional, in phrasing and use of space. Aided by Fokine and Nijinsky’s musicality, jumps and effects co-ordinate with appropriate musical climaxes, while, spatially, there are circles that boldly encompass the stage, and strong diagonals to give Nijinsky the appearance of mastering the space, and, by doing so, dominating the audience. These are devices for displaying traditional male virtuosity. Steve Neale, as I observed in Chapter 1, proposed that whereas women are a mystery to be investigated and exposed, men are tested. The evidence suggests that in these virtuosic roles, Nijinsky passed the test. Fokine himself was keen to dance Nijinsky’s roles in 1914 after the latter’s break with Diaghilev and the company. Fokine’s male solos clearly conformed to conventional expectations of male strength and prowess, and supported the notion that the Russian male dancers were less tainted by civilisation and more in touch with ‘natural’ masculinity than their Western contemporaries. In Michael Fried’s terms these were ‘theatrical’ ballets (see Chapter 2): Fokine was an extraordinarily skilled and innovative storyteller, and the roles he created for Nijinsky invited spectators to identify with him. Nijinsky’s own ballets, as I shall show, exemplified what Fried called absorption. NIJINSKY AS GENIUS Nijinsky was not just famous for his strength, agility, and for his exceptional skill in partnering a ballerina. He was also hailed for his extraordinary expressiveness and the uncanny way he ‘got into’ his roles. His performance as Petrouchka is the prime example of this. The action of the ballet Petrouchka (1911) was set during a Lenten carnival fair in St Petersburg during the 1840s. The opening section was a big crowd scene full of incidental events leading up to the performance of three magic puppets – Petrouchka, the Doll (initially Karsavina) and the Moor (Orlov in blackface) – all controlled by the menacing Magician (initially Cecchetti). The second scene showed Petrouchka thrown by the Magician into his celllike box, miming his hatred for the Magician, and getting over-excited when the latter brings his love, the Doll, into his room. His innocence, Garafola suggests, contrasted with her knowledge. Disappointed or frightened by Petrouchka’s antics, she hastily retreated. The next scene showed the Moor to be equally incapable of responding to the Doll when she came into his cell. But, when Petrouchka came in after her, the Moor, enraged, gave chase. The final scene showed the fair ground, this time in full swing at night. Eventually the carousing of the crowd was interrupted by Petrouchka emerging from the Magician’s booth chased by the Moor who, in turn, is followed by the Doll. Before a stunned crowd, the Moor killed Petrouchka (Figure 3.2). When a merchant called a Guardian of the Peace, the Magician showed that Petrouchka was just an inanimate puppet and all dispersed except for the Magician. As the music ended, Petrouchka’s 66

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11 Figure 3.2 The death of Petrouchka: Adolf Bolm as the Moor, Tamara Karsavina as the Doll, and Nijinsky as Petrouchka in costume as the Faune. Photo Karl Struss, New York 1916. Courtesy of Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

1 ghost appeared on top of the booth to frighten the Magician by frantically waving his arms. Nijinsky’s role contained both dynamic dancing and demanding mime. His sister, Nijinska, records: 11

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When Petrouchka dances, his body remains the body of a doll; only the tragic eyes reflect his emotions, burning with passion or dimming with pain. . . . Petrouchka dances as if he is using only the heavy wooden parts of his body. Only the swinging, mechanical, soul-less motions jerk the sawdust-filled arms or legs upwards in extravagant movements to indicate transports of joy or despair. . . . Vaslav is astonishing in the unusual technique of his dance, and in the expressiveness of his body. In Petrouchka, Vaslav jumps as high as ever and executes as many pirouettes and tours en l’air as he usually does, even though his petrouchkian wooden feet do not have the flexibility of a dancer’s feet. (1981: 373–4) It was for his dramatic expressiveness in roles such as Petrouchka and the sensuality of his performance of roles such as the Golden Slave in Schéhérazade 67

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(1910), as well as for his technical abilities, that Nijinsky was acclaimed as a genius. As Christine Battersby has argued (see Chapter 1), the idea of genius has, sometimes, been invoked to allow male artists to give expression to emotions that, over the last two centuries, have been characterised as feminine. But genius is also close to madness. In Nijinsky’s case, it becomes, in the hands of some writers, a back-handed compliment. Prince Peter Lieven, for example, suggested: I think the neatest and at the same time the truest estimate of Nijinsky’s intellect was given me by Misia Sert, one of Diaghilev’s best friends. She called him an ‘idiot of genius’. This is no paradox. In our enthusiasm over the ‘entity of genius’ our admiration goes to the dancer’s creative instincts and not to the conception of his brain, as for example, his role in Petrouchka. (1980: 89) In 1941, Alexandre Benois was even more dismissive of Nijinsky’s intelligence. For him Nijinsky was someone who only came alive for the stage: ‘Having put on his costume, he gradually began to change into another being, the one he saw in the mirror. . . . The fact that Nijinsky’s metamorphosis was predominantly subconscious is in my opinion, the very proof of his genius’ (1941: 289). But wasn’t he really saying, in the knowledge of Nijinsky’s subsequent psychological breakdown, that his subconscious metamorphosis was proof of his incipient madness? Writing at a time when Diaghilev’s short-lived association with the avant-garde was largely forgotten, Benois and Lieven disapproved of the radicalism of Nijinsky’s choreography. Both, therefore, helped create the negative, dismissive view of Nijinsky’s work that survived until the publication of Buckle’s biography and Nijinska’s memoirs. But from the point of view of hegemonic norms, the idea that Nijinsky was a genius in his dancing, and in his onstage creation of roles such as Petrouchka, is a comparatively safe and unthreatening one. It could easily be recuperated within conservative ideas about masculinity. NIJINSKY’S UNORTHODOX ROLES IN FOKINE’S BALLETS For those who knew to look for it, Nijinsky’s roles were nevertheless transgressive, presenting a spectacle of male sexuality. This raises the question how far his roles in ballets such as Narcisse, Schéhérazade, Le Spectre de la rose, and in his own L’Après midi d’un faune (1912) broke with the nineteenthcentury tradition, and in what ways did they still appear to be acceptable interpretation of classical or ‘oriental’ themes? 68

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Many contemporary descriptions of Nijinsky ascribe androgynous qualities to his dancing, stressing its male power and strength but female sensuousness. Richard Buckle quotes several descriptions of Nijinsky’s performance of the Golden Slave in Schéhérazade (1910), including Fokine’s comment that ‘The lack of masculinity which was peculiar to this remarkable dancer . . . suited very well the role of the Negro slave’ (1961: 155). The ambiguity of Nijinsky’s masculinity and sexuality in Schéhérazade would also be read in relation to a similar ambiguity about the role played by Ida Rubinstein as Zodeida, the Sultan’s favourite (Wollen 1987: 5–33; see also Batson 2005). Fokine then likened Nijinsky to a ‘half-feline animal’ but also to a stallion ‘overflowing with an abundant power, his feet impatiently pawing the floor’ (1961: 155). Alexandre Benois, who wrote the libretto for this ballet, described Nijinsky’s performance as ‘half-cat, half-snake, fiendishly agile, feminine and yet wholly terrifying’ (quoted in Buckle 1975: 160). Amy Koritz has noted that the London critics often used the same vocabulary when writing about qualities in Nijinsky’s dancing that they used to describe that of the two female ballet stars Karsavina and Pavlova (1995: 132). In her view, the Ballets Russes raised the status of ballet to high art through the presence of good male dancers; but this new status was legitimated by a shift from an emphasis on star performers to an emphasis on ‘the “masculine” role of choreographer as creator’ (ibid.: 133). The power of the male choreographer as author, she argues, had the effect of desexualising the male dancer. In the pre-war period, the person who came closest to publicly naming Nijinsky as a homosexual was C.W. Beaumont in a foreword to a deluxe limited edition of George Barbier’s drawings of the dancer. These, Garafola suggests, ‘borrowed the iconography of “decadence” and art nouveau to “homoeroticize” the body of the Ballets Russes star’ (2000: 71). In his foreword, Beaumont asserted that ‘Nijinsky is not a man in the true, robust sense of the word’ and suggested that roles such as Le Spectre de la rose ‘are not parts for the descendants of Mars and Hercules’ (1913: n.p.). The word homosexual was implied but not actually stated (as it would be about Börlin), and the book would only have been seen by a small readership, most of whom, Garafola suggests, were probably themselves homosexual. Garafola argues that the androgynous quality of Nijinsky’s dancing may have related to the image of the androgyne in the work of many homosexual visual artists of the Aesthetic movement at the end of the nineteenth century (1989: 56). The androgyne presented the image of a graceful, innocent, often languid youth, unspoilt by the world. Emmanuel Cooper (1986) has suggested that many homosexual artists of the Aesthetic movement saw in the androgynous male a positive image of the homosexual as a third sex. According to the ‘scientific’ explanation of homosexuality initially proposed by Karl Ulrichs, homosexual men were women born in men’s bodies, and constituted a third sex. Those homosexuals who subscribed 69

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to the notion of a third sex saw this as a slightly effeminate ‘in-between’ man or woman.7 The role of Narcisse which Nijinsky created in Fokine’s Narcisse (1911), can be interpreted as a straight piece of classical mythology, but is also open to interpretation as an image of the third sex. The figure of Narcissus has a history of use by homosexual artists that goes back to Caravaggio. Nijinska’s description of Narcisse exemplifies all the qualities associated with the Aesthetic androgyne – grace, innocence, and unspoiltness: His body of the youth in love with his own image emanated health and the athletic prowess of the ancient Greek Games. It could have been dangerous to portray in a dance the sensual and erotic Narcisse, driven to ecstasy by his own reflection in the water. Vaslav had so interpreted this scene that all such implications disappeared, dissolved in the beauty of his dance. Each pose on the ground, each movement in the air was a masterpiece. (1981: 366–7) Alternatively, the vigorous classicism of Nijinsky’s presentation of the role might be interpreted from another, different homosexual perspective that looked back to Classical Greece as an example of a robust, manly culture in which male homosexuality was normal (see Dyer 1990: 22–5). What made Narcisse acceptable to straight audiences, apart from its classical origins, was the fact that it was a moral fable that warns against the dangers of self obsession.8 For transgressing social norms, Narcissus is punished. On another level (following the argument in Chapter 2) Narcissus also has to be punished for being the erotic subject of the (male) spectator’s gaze, as must the Golden Slave in Schéhérazade who was the object of Zodeida’s desiring gaze. In the Slave’s case, the discourse through which Nijinsky’s highly ambiguous and exotic roles might nevertheless have appeared acceptable was that of Orientalism. As Edward Said (1978) has pointed out, for the nineteenth-century European (and by implication for the Ballets Russes’ audiences) the Orient was associated with the freedom of licentious sex (see also Aldrich 1994). In the Romantic imagination, Mario Praz (1967) identifies a literary and artistic tradition which combined the imagery of exotic places, the cultivation of sadomasochistic tastes, and a fascination with the macabre (see also Nochlin 1991: 41–3). Schéhérazade, with its orgy and subsequent execution, is clearly an example of this. Kevin Kopelson also points out that Russians of Diaghilev’s class had owned slaves (serfs) until 1861 (1997: 15). For Russian viewers, the Golden Slave was oriental, but, for Western viewers such as Proust, he was also Negro (ibid.: 64). Peter Wollen points to the ambiguous nature of the identity of the Russian ballet as both of the East and the West. It was a fusion of French ballet traditions and indigenous Russian Orientalist traditions, in for instance Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov. Drawing on dancers and visual 70

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artists from St Petersburg, it was part of European Russia in contrast to more ‘Eastern’ Moscow. ‘Yet by a strange reversal the trend was turned around and, in the form of the Ballets Russes, Paris (cultural capital of Europe, the “west”) began to import Russia, the “east”, in a deluge of exaggerated Orientalism’ (Wollen 1987: 21). The Ballets Russes never performed in Russia and both Diaghilev and Nijinsky were dismissed from the service of the Imperial Theatres.9 Bakst, Benois, and Roerich (who designed set and costumes for Polovtsian Dances and Le Sacre du printemps and worked with Stravinsky on the libretto for the latter) never worked for the Imperial Theatres after 1909, Fokine leaving in 1918. After 1911, Nijinsky was unable (or Diaghilev may have encouraged him to believe he was unable) to return to Russia because he had defaulted from his military service. Yet these artists claimed, as Benois put it, to be presenting Russian ballet to Europe, making new works that would embody ‘all the beloved old with a fresh and stimulating manner of presentation’ (Benois 1936: 194). One can, therefore, conclude that the project of the artists and intellectuals in Diaghilev’s circle was to negotiate through the ballet their identity as Russians, in ways that significantly contradicted and opposed hegemonic Russian definitions. For Diaghilev and Nijinsky as homosexual men, this marginal position also enabled a limited, but contained, expression of homosexual experience. Nijinsky’s homosexuality was signified primarily through ambiguities within the stories, and through qualities of costume and decor. It was not signified by the virtuosic solos for which he became famous. In the case of the Golden Slave, Fokine’s innovative methods of combining mime and dance into expressive movement was a vehicle for expressing a transgressively sensual and eroticised male image, but in a context within which transgression was seen to be punished. The violent deaths at the end of Schéhérazade might have been appreciated as an erotic spectacle, but this was in an acceptable form that could be displaced from ‘normal’ Europeans onto oriental (or Negro) ‘Others’. Richard Dyer’s comments on the Rudolph Valentino film The Son of the Sheik (1926) could equally be applied to Schéhérazade:

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The audience could take it two ways. Shocked by the sexual explicitness, it could dismiss the depicted events ‘anthropologically’ as foreign behaviour. Drawn to the characters, however, it could welcome the film as a sunlit dream of sexuality. In a period not yet saturated in Freudian ideas, such dreams were still possible. (1992: 101)

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The status quo of conservative gender ideologies thus remained intact. It is only through the modernism of his own choreography that Nijinsky directly confronted norms of masculine behaviour. 71

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THE RADICALISM OF EARLY MODERNISM A useful starting point for characterising the modernism of Nijinsky’s ballets is another of Cocteau’s drawings, showing Stravinsky playing Le Sacre du printemps (Figure 3.3). Growing out of the composer’s shoulders, as he sits hunched over the piano, are closely packed rows of geometrically distorted figures. The word ‘angular’ has been used to describe both Stravinsky’s music and the movements in Nijinsky’s choreography. It conjures up both their modern feeling and their primitivism, as does Cocteau’s drawing through its light-hearted, but knowing, references to the new, fragmented vocabularies of cubist and futurist painting, as well as its reference to ‘primitive’ African sculptures. Here is a seeming paradox that Nijinsky and Stravinsky, when producing their most ‘advanced’ works, were both involved in manipulating material gleaned from Russian academic research into archaic and defunct folkloric artefacts and traditions. Simon Karlinsky has given us a useful account of the way Stravinsky used such material in his early ballets for Diaghilev. The Firebird, Karlinsky

Figure 3.3 ’Stravinsky playing Le Sacre du printemps’. From Jean Cocteau, Dessins, 1923. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006.

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argues, is still a product of the nineteenth-century aesthetic. It mingles themes from Russian folklore with melodies from a reputable folk song collection, and couches them in ‘the most advanced and elegant musical idiom of the time, French Impressionism’ (1983: 234). In Petrouchka Stravinsky turned his back on both ‘the ethnographic approach and the western-style sugar-coating of folklore implicit in the Russian nineteenthcentury aesthetic’ (ibid.), and went even further along this road in Sacre in which ‘Lithuanian and Slavic materials were deformed . . . with a sovereign freedom that may be termed cubistic’ (ibid.). When one examines contemporary accounts of Nijinsky’s work, a similar pattern emerges. First, these suggest that Nijinsky was reacting against the nineteenth-century tradition, and against the impressionistic vagueness of Fokine. When working secretly with her brother on L’Après midi d’un faune, Nijinska wrote in her diary in 1911: ‘Not long ago Fokine freed himself from the old classical school and the captivity of Petipa’s choreography, and now Vaslav is freeing himself from the captivity of Fokine’s choreography so that, again, we enter a new phase in our art’ (1981: 328). Writing to his mother in 1912, Stravinsky also felt Fokine only went half way: ‘At the beginnings of his career he appeared to be extraordinarily progressive. But the more I knew of his work, the more I saw that in essence he was not new at all. . . . New forms must be created, and the evil, the gifted, the greedy Fokine has not even dreamed of them’ (quoted in Buckle 1975: 269–70). In 1913, the composer told Henry Postel du Mas: ‘Nijinsky is capable of giving life to the whole art of ballet. Not for a moment have we ceased to think along the same lines. Later you will see what he can do . . . he is capable of innovation and creation’ (quoted in Craft 1976: 37).10 Jacques Rivière also saw the general move towards modernism in dance as a reaction against the nineteenth century, characterised by the artificiality of Debussy. He detected in Fokine’s work ‘a certain artfulness, a certain vacillation, some sort of inner vagueness’ (1983: 117) and felt that the innovation of Nijinsky’s choreography for Sacre lay ‘in doing away with dynamic artificiality, in the return to the body, in the effort to adhere more closely to its natural movements, in lending an ear only to its most immediate, most radical, most etymological expressions’ (ibid.). Just as Stravinsky exercised a sovereign freedom in deforming folk idioms, Nijinsky took a high-handed approach towards his source material. Fokine had been highly critical of the inauthentic nature of the danses de caractère (folk-derived dances that occur as divertisements) and period dances of the Maryinsky repertoire of the early 1900s. When he, himself, choreographed such dances, he was proud of their imaginative realism. In his memoirs he speaks of learning folk dances on his travels in Russia and later in western Europe, and of his efforts to research the dances of classical Greece from sculptures and artefacts in museums and libraries (Fokine 73

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1961). Nijinsky, however, wasn’t interested in authenticity for its own sake. There is a story of how Bakst took him to the Louvre to look at Greek sculptural reliefs when Nijinsky was working on Faune; Nijinsky became far more interested in the galleries of Egyptian reliefs (Buckle 1975: 188). When Nijinsky was making Sacre, he used the geometric patterns that Roerich had devised for the costumes as inspiration for choreographing circle dances (traditional Russian khovorods) and groups (Hodson 1986: 71). Nijinsky’s interest in Gauguin’s paintings (Buckle 1975: 107, 331) is surely significant here. Linda Nochlin has argued that Gauguin: [rejected] what he conceived of as the lies of illusionism and the ideology of progress – in resorting to flatness, decorative simplification, and references to ‘primitive’ art – that is to say, by rejecting the signifiers of western rationalism, progress, and objectivity in toto. (1991: 51) Faune also resorted to flatness. All the movement material was based on a severely horizontal, frieze-like flattening of walking. The floor patterns of the movement were straight, parallel lines in a narrow track right at the front of the stage; the back cloth for the ballet in the Théâtre du Chatellet in May 1912 was placed only 2 metres behind the proscenium arch (Schouvaloff 1993: 99). What was important for Nijinsky and Stravinsky was not the authenticity of the source material but the meanings that, in its fragmented form, it evoked in a dislocated, modern context, and the affective impact they could achieve through its use. To some Russian audiences at the time, Stravinsky’s progressive use of folk sources would have been interpreted as an expression of the Russian soul, achieved through rejection and purification of extraneous western European cultural influences. But Stravinsky was an immigrant, having more or less left Russia after 1909. The ballet scores that he wrote for Diaghilev, written in western Europe, are often best known by their French titles, and were premiered in Paris, the most advanced cultural metropolis of the day. Nijinsky also was in exile. Raymond Williams has suggested that the experience of exile, and of migrating to a foreign metropolis, was central to the creation of the formal innovations made by the early modernists. Williams argues the experience of being an immigrant is a theme that: underlies in an obvious way, the elements of strangeness and distance, indeed of alienation, which so regularly form part of the repertory. But the decisive aesthetic effect is at a deeper level. Liberated or breaking from their national or provincial cultures, placed in quite new relations to those other native languages or visual traditions, encountering meanwhile a novel and dynamic common environment from which many of the older forms were obviously distant, 74

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the artists and writers and thinkers of this phase found the only community available to them: a community of the medium; of their own practices. (1989: 45) It is this concentration on the medium itself that is, of course, the hallmark of modernist work, but it is also the key to understanding the revolution in representational practices. Nijinsky was, undoubtedly, a modernist in Williams’s terms. As a choreographer, he purged the ballet vocabulary of outmoded representational forms and conventions. It took him numerous rehearsals to prepare L’Après midi d’un faune (some accounts say 90, some 120), although the piece only takes eleven minutes to perform. This was because of his revolutionary approach to interpretation. As Nijinska explains: the number of rehearsals was not excessive if one takes into account the ballet’s completely new technique of presentation, and if one also remembers the marvellous level of execution finally achieved by the artists. Up to then the ballet artist had been free to project his own individuality as he felt . . . Nijinsky was the first to demand that his whole choreographic material should be executed not only as he saw it but also according to his artistic interpretation. (1981: 427) The key to his new approach is the idea that expression came through the movement material itself and not through mime or acting. Marie Rambert tells a story about Nijinsky rehearsing a new dancer in the role of one of the nymphs. He told her off for acting out a moment when the Faune frightens her. He wasn’t interested in facial mannerisms. All she had to do was get the movements right (1972: 62). Nijinsky wanted dancers to focus in on the performance of the movement itself. In Michael Fried’s terms, he wanted them to be absorbed in it, rather than to use it as a platform for ‘theatrical’ projection. It is the movement material on its own that is expressive. Jacques Rivière makes the same point while discussing Sacre. In Nijinsky’s dance, he argues: the face no longer plays a part of importance; it is merely an extension of the body – its flower. It is above all the body that speaks. . . . By breaking up movement and bringing it back to the simple gesture, Nijinsky causes expression to return to the dance. All the angles, all the breaks in his choreography, are aimed only at preventing the escape of emotion. (1983: 120) Rivière’s emphasis on feeling corresponds with a trend among a young generation of French intellectuals. In 1911, under the joint pseudonymn 75

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Agathon, two young writers, Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, produced two influential newspaper surveys or ‘enquêtes’: L’Esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne (‘Spirit of the New Sorbonne’) and Les Jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui (‘The Young People Today’) in which they attacked the scientific rationalism of late nineteenth-century French intellectual culture. In its place they proposed a non-rationalised, non-scientific, and non-utilitarian, masculine morality, which valued the spiritual over the material, the moral over the artificial. As Joan Acocella has observed in her introduction to Kyril FitzLyon’s recent translation of Nijinsky’s diaries, Nijinsky himself wanted its publication ‘to right the balance of power in the world, to wrest authority from the thinkers, return it to the feelers’ (1999: xxiv). These, then, are the aspirations and the new means at Nijinsky’s and subsequently at Nijinska’s disposal. What difference could a less rational, more affective performance make where gender representations are concerned? NIJINSKY’S BALLETS AND GENDER REPRESENTATION Nijinsky’s first ballet, L’Après midi d’un faune (1912) is set to Debussy’s Prelude à l’après midi d’un faune of 1894 that was itself inspired by Mallarmé’s poem of 1876. The poem presents the reveries of a young Faune. These include an encounter with two beautiful nymphs which may be recollected from a dream, a fantasy, or a real event. Mallarmé was one of the poets that Verlaine dubbed Les poètes maudites, pure of heart but despised and rejected by both mother and society, and accursed (‘maudites’) by God. Nijinsky’s amoral interpretation of the poem is surely within this tradition.11 The ballet’s first performance provoked heated debate in the French press, and charges of indecency (Buckle 1975: 284–9). These largely concern the ballet’s ending. The Faune, having surprised a group of nymphs, carries back to his rock a veil that one of them has dropped, and rubs it against his crotch. As it is usually performed now, the Faune stretches out on top of the veil while making a couple of pelvic thrusts, jerks his head back in pleasure, and then lies still. Richard Buckle suggests that when Nijinsky first performed this he actually mimed masturbation (ibid.: 284). Whether or not this was the case, the ballet’s ending focused the audience’s attention towards his penis and thus suggested male sexual excitement. As a classical male role, the Faune superficially resembles the title role of Fokine’s Narcisse. The difference, however, is in its attitude towards morality. Underlying the myth of Narcissus is a warning about unnatural behaviour – being unmoved by the love of Echo, being obsessed with personal appearance. The Faune, however, is ‘pure’, ‘natural’, and innocent. The movement style of the ballet was simple walking steps and jumps, dance stripped of every vestige of balletic style and performed with an absorbed focus.12 This exquisite surface, by being outside balletic convention, 76

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created an ideological space for the ballet that was outside social norms. The Faune, as Nijinsky shows him, is amoral, and the piece a deliberate provocation to society to condemn such spontaneous sexual behaviour, as if he were saying only a depraved mind could see anything depraved in this (Figure 3.4). It was surely Nijinsky’s marginal position – as Russian immigrant, as someone from a poor, one-parent family in Diaghilev’s privileged bourgeois and aristocratic circles, as someone in a sexual relation-

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11 Figure 3.4 Vaslav Nijinsky in costume as the Faune.

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Photo Karl Struss, New York 1916. Courtesy of Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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ship with another man – that allowed him to produce a representation of ‘natural’ masculinity that ran so strongly against convention. He was also a Russian artist, forceful, earthy, intensely idealistic, and innocent, yet without illusions, like a character in one of the novels by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy that he wrote about in his diaries. As Sokolova, who danced in the ballet with Nijinsky, recalls: Nijinsky as the Faune was thrilling. Although his movements were absolutely restrained, they were virile and powerful, and the manner in which he caressed and carried the nymph’s veil was so animal that one expected to see him run up the side of the hill with it in his mouth. (1960: 41) By animal, I take Sokolova to mean the animality of virile sexuality. Nijinska’s description of his later ballet for Diaghilev, Sacre, stressed the animality of the male dancers in a more shameful and abject way: The men in Sacre are primitive. There is something almost bestial in their appearance. Their legs and feet are turned inwards, their fists clenched, their heads held down between hunched shoulders; their walk, on slightly bent knees, is heavy as they laboriously straggle up a winding trail, stamping in the rough, hilly terrain. (1981: 459) In the reconstruction of Sacre that Millicent Hodson produced for the Joffrey Ballet, the men look bestial. They characteristically make their entrances leaning forward as Nijinska describes above. Their postures are like those of the figures in the famous nineteenth-century Russian painting of The Volga Boatmen by I. Repin (1844–1930). The angle at which the men in Sacre lean, and the slightly pointed hats they wear, make them look as if they are about to jump forwards and upwards, and penetrate into one of the massed groups of women. In the first act, men fight each other in the ‘Games of the rival clans’. The Ancients, in the second act, wear bear skins with the animals’ heads fitting on their own like hoods. As Roerich noted, this was ‘to show that the bear was man’s ancestor’ (quoted in MacDonald 1975: 89). Grouped with other men round the circle, in which the Chosen One is trapped and will dance herself to death, they perform a dance sequence which includes a movement where they drag their left foot across the floor like an animal pawing the ground. Throughout the Chosen One’s sacrificial solo, they wait for her death spasm, the signal for them to rush in and grab her, hoisting her high in the air. All these are instances of the bestial quality in Sacre’s male roles.13 Sokolova recalls the heat on stage every time Sacre was performed (1960: 44). Millicent Hodson suggests this may have been partly due to the ritualistic nature of the movement – circle dances that generated altered 78

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mental states (1985: 41). It must also have come from the effort expended by both sexes in jumping, throwing themselves on the ground and straight away springing back up again, running and stamping. Although the actual movement material was very different from Faune, the emphasis on its ritualistic quality resulted in a performance that had an absorbed rather than ‘theatrical’ focus. The male dancers had more dynamic leaps and jumps than the female ones; these were the sorts of movement for which Nijinsky himself was famous in his roles in other men’s ballets; however, in Sacre, rather than hiding effort and exhaustion, these were if anything exaggerated. There was no way that the male dancers in Sacre could have been thought of as effeminate. If Faune presented a pure, ‘natural’ masculinity, in Sacre Nijinsky had stripped this of both its acceptable classical setting and its sexiness, to produce a more extreme representation of ‘natural’, uncivilised masculinity. The men in Sacre may have been unattractive but the affects that their performance produced were intense. Their physical presence was, perhaps, more significant than their appearance. The first performance of Sacre on 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées has gone down in history for the disturbance that split the audience. That it was the revolutionary character of the choreography, and not the music, that split the audience was proved by the fact that the latter was ecstatically received when performed on its own in a concert in Paris early in 1914. It was the unrelieved intensity of the dancers’ ritualistic performance and the ways in which male dancing bodies were presented that audiences had found most difficult to accept.

1 NIJINSKA AND GENDER REPRESENTATION

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Nijinska’s ballet Les Noces (1923) is a clear descendant of Sacre: in the sequence of Stravinsky’s output the score immediately follows Sacre (though it took him years to finish) and shares with it a similar rhythmic complexity and melodic harshness. Thematically both refer to Russian folk melodies and practices. Nijinska saw her work as the further development of the choreographic advances initiated by her brother. At the end of her life she wrote: When the critics indicated the influence of Faune in my choreography of Les Noces, they were wrong. I was formed as a choreographer more by Jeux and Le Sacre du printemps. The unconscious art of those ballets inspired my initial work. From them, I sought to realise the potential of my brother’s creativity in terms of neo-classical ballet and modern dance. (1981: 469) The music for Les Noces is sometimes said to be the piece of Stravinsky’s which Europeans find most inaccessible. It takes as its starting point texts 79

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that record rituals and superstitions surrounding Russian peasant wedding celebrations. The Russian peasant world view remained a mixture of Christian and pagan superstitions much longer than it did in most Western countries. There was never a period of religious reform such as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe. Simon Karlinsky suggests that in Les Noces some of the invocations sung by the wedding guests are thinly disguised pagan survivals (1983: 236). Boris Asaf’yev (1982), writing in Russia in 1929, proposed that two conflicting themes are bound together in Stravinsky’s music for Les Noces: the women’s grim, downtrodden threnody (lament), and the men’s grotesque, drunken buffoonery. The first and third sections – blessing the bride, departure of the bride – are strident laments, while the second and last sections – blessing the groom, the wedding feast – are bawdy and grotesque. Key to the work’s affective impact was Nijinska’s modernist use of pointe work. Pointe has been, since its development in the early 1800s, the prime signifier of femininity in ballet. But, rather than using it to create the atmosphere of delicate ethereality that one finds in the all-white acts of so many nineteenth-century ballets, Nijinska used pointe to emphasise the brittle nervousness of the Bride and her female companions at what is for them the dreadful prospect of marriage. The traditional Russian wedding, Asaf’yev wrote, is virtually a funeral rite. He did not imply that Les Noces divides simply into feminine and masculine sections, but argued that these themes are inexorably but conflictually connected: The authority of tradition speaks to women: life is a burden, bear it come what may, bury your maidenhead, and with it your will. The buffoon says: life is mime, the rite of the family is theatrical farce. . . . The laughter of buffoonery . . . serves to assuage the bitterness of female grief and blunt the wild impulsiveness of the male procreative energy. (1982: 130) The ballet, like the music, is the battle between these two powerful old themes. Asaf’yev, cut off from the West in post-revolutionary Russia, would not have seen the ballet performed. In Nijinska’s choreography the themes of the piece divide clearly along gendered lines, and there is never any compromise or let up in the bitterness of female grief. The Bride remains totally frigid and slightly turned away from her husband all through the final wedding feast. This is more obvious in the British Royal Ballet’s version (1966) than in the Paris Opéra version (1976). In the feast, the two families are seated on a platform, back stage, while the guests dance in front of them side by side in segregated blocks and wedges. The music here is at its rowdiest, with sometimes two or three different things being sung at once. The male and female dancers never completely come together; sometimes the men are jumping up at the moment that the women are 80

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landing from their own jump, which is following a different rhythm in the music. It is in the earlier scenes that the differences between the material given to the male and female dancers is most apparent. The groups formed by the women are generally in lines, strung out on either side of the bride as they weave patterns holding the yards of rope-like hair that are being ceremonially braided. This linearity matches the accompanying thin, strident lament of the soprano who sings the part of the Bride. The men’s groups have more depth, just as the male voices that accompany them are more resonant. The men form a semi-circle behind the Groom at the beginning of the second scene, form up in little walls of dancers two or three deep, and, at the end of the scene, perform a vigorous circle dance that could almost be straight out of Sacre (see Garafola 1992: 66–7). One of the most striking aspects of Nijinska’s choreography is the extraordinary, pyramidal tableaux in the first two scenes. At the end of the blessing of the Bride, the women guests, one after the other on alternate sides, lay their heads one on top of the other in a vertical line. The last two each lay a rope-like hair braid on their side which emphasises the triangular shape of the group. Finally the Bride takes her place, putting her elbows on top of the pile and propping her head on her hands, while her mother and father stand symmetrically at either side blessing her with raised arms. There is a similar group in Blessing the Groom, but here four men kneel forwards at the front, three men then lie backwards on top of them with their arms spread wide, two more men do the same on top of them, and then the Groom walks easily into position behind so that his head is at the apex. The energy in the women’s pyramid is downwards with the weight of all those heads precariously held in line. In the men’s group the energy is upwards: it is like a football scrum, and the way they support one another is much easier, recalling the ease with which men sometimes touch one another in all-male situations. In another, similar motif, each man in a group lays his head on his forearm and walks sideways in an awkward crouch. This unnatural pose, moving sideways across the stage while facing front, recalls typical Nijinsky poses in Sacre and Faune. A block of men form up in this position and move sideways across the stage like a screen behind the Groom. Here and elsewhere, this motif is surely a reference to lying in bed, and thus to the bedding of the couple at the end of the feast. Both this and the pyramid speak of these men’s almost insolent, masculine ease in their bodies, and happiness at their status in patriarchal society: this contrasts with the female lack of ease about the power men express through their bodies. Nijinska’s fragmented modernism made the audience aware of the men’s physical ease by stressing the women’s lack of it. This was unprecedented and would not occur again at this scale until Pina Bausch began to make work in Wuppertal in the 1970s (see Chapter 6). 81

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L’HOMME ET SON DESIR AND LES BICHES I have argued that, before the war, the homosexual sensibility which informed the creation of Nijinsky’s eroticised roles enabled a female spectatorship. Nijinska’s post-war ballets created possibilities for female spectators to look at the male dancing body in a different way from gay male spectators. After the war, public awareness of homosexuality had increased and the connection between ballet and homosexuality was beginning to be mentioned in French dance criticism. Two ballets from the early 1920s exemplify different aspects of this. L’Homme et son désir, made in 1921 by Jean Börlin (1893–1930), the choreographer and leading dancer in Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois, wasn’t intended to be a homosexual ballet but Börlin’s nakedness, nevertheless, inspired homophobic comments. By contrast, Les Biches, choreographed by Nijinska for the Ballets Russes in 1924, exemplified a calculated and knowing exposition of sexual ambiguity without, however, attracting any adverse criticism. L’Homme et son désir, a Brazilian-themed ballet, was initially conceived by the poet and diplomat Paul Claudel (1868–1955) as a project for Nijinsky. While French ambassador in Rio de Janeiro, he had met Nijinsky there in 1917 where Claudel saw one of his last performances with the Ballets Russes. Having developed his initial concept with the young composer Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), who was working at the embassy, and Andrée Parr, artist wife of a British diplomat, Claudel only found out about Nijinsky’s mental breakdown on his return to Paris. After Diaghilev had turned the project down, Rolf de Maré (1898–1964) agreed to take it on. Claudel, who had been fascinated by Dalcroze’s innovative stagings of theatre work on a visit to Hellerau before the war, had come up with the idea of staging his ballet on four narrow tiers of an almost vertical stage set. As Claudel explained, on the top tier: the hours of the night file past, dressed all in black and wearing golden head-dresses. Below is the Moon, led across the sky by a cloud, like a servant walking ahead of a great lady. Right at the bottom, in the waters of the vast primeval swamp, the reflection of the Moon and of her servants follows the regular march of the celestial couple. (Cited in Häger 1990: 126) In the middle platform, the main action took place performed by Man – an everyman – who danced out his passions and desires, pacing along his narrow strip like a tiger in a cage. As Man, Börlin wore almost invisible, tight briefs that matched the shiny, yellow makeup with which the rest of his body was covered. While Bengt Häger (1990) has suggested that the ballet was an unqualified success, Charles Batson (2005) has translated French reviews that demon82

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strate that the ballet had a more mixed reception. Milhaud’s music – for five strings, four woodwinds, seventeen percussion instruments, and vocal quartet – was progressive but difficult, with allusions to indigenous Brazilian music. Though Claudel, an eminent figure, wrote serious pieces explaining his intentions, Batson notes that many reviewers adopted an ironic tone (2005: 198). Almost all the references to Börlin’s performance, Batson suggests, either attacked or made a joke about his being naked on stage. Tellingly, one review spelled out the recent change in attitudes towards male dancing. Le Petit Bleu noted: ‘Nijinsky’s legs started ToutParis’s fad for masculine thighs . . . Aesthetic and predictable manifestation of a homosexuality already daring and become predictable since’ (quoted in Batson 2005: 202). The positive qualities of open, passionate expressiveness, that Claudel and Rivière had admired in Nijinsky’s performance, and the moral masculinity, that Agathon advocated in the ‘enquêtes’, had now become suspect in a more anxious, post-war climate. A large proportion of the younger generation of French men having died in the trenches, the post-war French government actively adopted pronatalist policies. In this climate, Börlin’s naked and expressive Man did not seem the sort of man who would father the sons to replace those so traumatically lost in the war. Diaghilev, as I have already noted, did not appreciate effeminacy or obvious homosexuality, and clearly appreciated the manly spectacles Nijinsky and Nijinska choreographed for him. This is evident in a letter he wrote in 1923 to his friend and secretary Boris Kochno while Les Biches was being made: Here everything is going along better than I expected. Poulenc [who Diaghilev had commissioned to compose the music for Les Biches] is enthusiastic about Bronia’s choreography, and they get along excellently together. The choreography has delighted and astonished me. But then, this good woman, intemperate and anti-social as she is, does belong to the Nijinsky family. Here and there her choreography is a bit too ordinary, a bit too feminine, but on the whole it is very good. (Quoted in Buckle 1979: 418) Having said he felt Nijinska’s work was sometimes feminine, Diaghilev went on to talk about the entrance of the three young men (who have been described as sportsmen, bicyclists, or Olympic athletes): ‘The dance for the three young men has come out extremely well, and they perform it with bravura – weightily, like a cannon. It doesn’t at all resemble Les Noces, any more than Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin resembles his Queen of Spades’ (ibid.). One gets the impression it is the male dancers that Diaghilev is most interested in, and likening them to a cannon is a most revealing simile. 83

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The men’s entrance is an ostentatious one. They are out to show off before the women, as Haskell puts it, ‘like bucks before a groups of does (biches)’ (1928: 148). Despite this dazzling entrance, the women, however, behave as if unimpressed – two women ignoring the men altogether. This had the effect of making the audience see the men, and this sort of macho display, from a more complex point of view, and thus with a detachment which, as with Les Noces, was surely a consequence of Nijinska’s modernism. A reviewer in The Times described Les Biches as an ‘atmospheric and allusive’ ballet which followed the course of a group of young people’s ‘amorous adventures centring round a pale blue sofa, which is sat upon, jumped on, peeped over, or pushed about by everyone concerned from one end of the ballet to the other’ (Anon. 1924: 12). One shouldn’t overestimate the extent to which Nijinska had artistic control over this or indeed any of the ballets she made for Diaghilev. Although, like Fokine, she would have enjoyed relative autonomy over the actual process of choreography, decisions about music, design, and libretto were Diaghilev’s prerogative, and he and his circle also made contributions during rehearsals. In Les Biches, he suggested that she play with an extravagantly long cigarette holder as she danced the Rag Mazurka, having seen her constantly smoking on stage while running rehearsals. Diaghilev, the ballet’s designer Marie Laurencin, and Misia Sert were all apparently involved in making changes to the Girl in Blue’s costume, progressively shortening it and making her look more boyish (Buckle 1979: 420; Baer 1986: 40). It is never entirely clear what gender she was supposed to be. Batson observes: ‘When the men choose to continue their duets together, ridiculing the advances of one particularly flirtatious woman, no voice is raised to proclaim that these are not truly manly men’ (2005: 207). Because their entrance had gone off like a cannon, nothing else seemed to matter. Whereas Parisian critics had criticised Börlin’s Man for his mannered grace and unfettered emotions, they approved the muscular displays of the men in Les Biches. Börlin’s ‘theatrical’ expressivity (in Fried’s sense) contrasted with the more absorbed and atmospheric performance qualities in Les Biches. Through absorption and modernist fragmentation, Nijinska’s choreography, like that of her brother before her, created an ideological space that enabled heterosexual female and gay male spectators to negotiate their own ‘local’ readings of male dancing bodies, even when these only superficially conformed to hegemonic norms. The cool, sophisticated quality of Les Biches and of Nijinska’s next two ‘modern’ ballets for Diaghilev – Le Train Bleu (1925) and Romeo and Juliet (1926) – was very different from the hot, intense atmosphere her brother had created in Faune and Sacre. Homophobic ballet criticism was already beginning to limit the range of male dancing to harder, more manly types of muscular display. But at least, for those who knew to look, Nijinska showed that this wasn’t necessarily the kind of masculinity that women wanted. 84

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4 AMERICAN MEN

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Men don’t dance. This, according to Walter Terry, was the message that one of Ted Shawn’s fellow divinity students had for Shawn, after the latter’s first public dance performance in Denver in 1911. When Shawn cited as examples the men of the Russian ballet, and the dances of men in almost every culture, the reply came ‘that’s all right for Russians and pagans but not for Americans’ (Terry 1976: 41). This is a witty anecdote but also a telling one, in that it brings together key issues facing white men in the US who go into serious theatre dance. First, ‘Men don’t dance’ is not far from ‘ “real” men don’t dance’, that is, there must be something wrong with those who do. With this go all the homophobic anxieties that remind white men of the need to conform to prevalent and culturally specific heterosexual norms of masculine behaviour. Second, what is or is not right for US citizens is a question of US cultural identity. At the start of the twenty-first century, while Russian men have continued to have a high profile on the international ballet scene, US men are now dancing on stage and have played a large part in the development of US modern dance. Shawn did a great deal to enable this. It must to some extent be as a result of Cold War rhetoric (Gilbaut 1985; Prevots 1998) that there has been and still is among some critics and commentators a deep-rooted belief that the US leads the world in the modern arts. A perceived link between aesthetic modernism, scientific, technological, and democratic progress, and national identity has informed the way US modern dancers have understood their role. Third, there is the comment about pagans. Cotton Mather (1663–1728), the influential Puritan minister in Boston at the time of the Salem witch trials, referred to ‘pagans’ in some of his sermons against dancing. Christian ideas had a much greater impact on dance in the US than in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Shawn and his fellow student were studying for the Methodist ministry. Christian beliefs were sufficiently important for him and for the other two choreographers whose work is discussed in this chapter – Martha Graham and José Limón – to create a number of dance pieces that referred to biblical themes and Christian subjects (see Manor 1980, 1992).1 Graham herself was simultaneously 85

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attracted and repelled by the idea of Puritanism while there is an almost baroque, Catholic fervour in some of Limón’s work. Shawn, Graham, and to a lesser extent Limón, each in their own way, developed in dance the image of a heroic masculinity which is valorised with reference to nature, heterosexuality, and religion, and presented in a style and vocabulary that looks muscular and hard. The masculine ideal which their work evokes is entirely a product of white, Western social forces and depends upon an ideologically distorted view of non-Western masculinity. There are now many excellent histories of US modern dance. This chapter does not set out to retell this story or recount the development of roles for men in modern dance in the US. Instead it presents readings of a few well-known pieces. What emerges from these is a recurring theme of ‘natural’, essential masculinity as signified through dance. I argue that these pieces, and the masculine ideal which they reinforce, can be seen as conservative and defensive responses to challenges to white, male hegemony. The resulting way of performing masculinity has persisted on the dance stage for a large part of the last 100 years, and has developed an autonomy of its own. Choreographers have not been able to ignore it: they have had to take it on board, adapt it, reject it, or react against it. It has become an immediately recognisable norm or positive stereotype, through or against which choreographers have tried to map out different positions in relation to the problems surrounding masculine identities. What, therefore, are these problems, and what are the threads that bind modern dance in the US to essentialist ideals of American manhood? MEN IN THE US The US association of masculinity with toughness renders male dance problematic, dancing still being, in many people’s minds, a feminine realm. Marcia Siegel sums this up thus: Dancing is an equivocal activity in any society that places a low value on the arts in general, but it becomes even more dubious where men have been celebrated as kings of the frontier, masters of the gun, the ax, and the plow. (1981: 305) This may be how men in the US have been celebrated, but the reality has, of course, been somewhat different. Throughout the period which this chapter covers, there have been continual conflicts and sources of insecurity about the nature of masculine identity as various, sometimes contradictory factors have seemingly threatened to weaken or undermine it. A heavyhanded return to ideals of ‘natural’, essential, instinctive, and ‘traditional’ masculinity is, of course, only one of many differing responses to such insecurities: but it is this sort of response that underpins the representations 86

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of masculinity one finds in the choreography of Shawn and Graham. Why, then, has this idea of American man as a gun-slinging, axe and plough wielding frontiersman developed? By the beginning of the twentieth century, the prairie was increasingly being ploughed up and the expansion westwards into unsettled land was ended. While men in the US might still dream of the frontier life that Siegel invokes as a viable avenue through which to establish their identity as men, the frontier had effectively ceased to exist. In general, modern civilised lifestyles and values were widely perceived to be having a harmful and deleterious influence on the effete, educated, Eastern male elite. There was widespread concern about the feminisation of US culture (see Douglas 1977) which had a softening and degenerating influence on traditional male lifestyles and ideals. Other factors, also, were affecting men, and white-collar male workers in particular. The rise of women’s suffrage and changes in the world of work, with women increasingly entering the job market, meant that jobs which up until then had been the preserve of white-collar male workers were now being done by women. Women were becoming powerful as consumers and as patrons of the Arts. It was, for example, women who, in the early 1900s, generated a fashion for the tango and foxtrot and the new ragtime dances. This, as Belinda Quirey observed: left many middle-aged men in the world of the waltz, and unwilling to learn new tricks. Many of their middle-aged wives, on the other hand, had taken to the new style. There was therefore a demand for good partners and this was supplied by many professionals. (1976: 87) Professional male dancing partners, sometimes called gigolos, were often regarded by husbands with scorn and suspicion. When Shawn first became interested in dancing around 1910, dance in the US was almost exclusively a female preserve. Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, and Ruth St Denis are often described as the founding mothers of modern dance. Ted Shawn first came to public prominence as St Denis’s dancing partner, but quickly turned this questionable role into the more respectable one of co-director, with St Denis, of the Denishawn School and Dance Company. He, then, worked hard for the rest of his life to overcome US suspicions about professional male dancing and, as I noted in Chapter 1, the arguments he used were formed in the climate of nineteenthcentury gender ideologies.2 What was distinctively American within Shawn’s concerns about degeneracy was the evangelical, Protestant, ‘muscular’ Christian approach he derived from his religious training (Putney 2003). Just as Protestant churches used sport as a ‘net’ to catch young men and drawn them into the fold, Shawn used athletic, masculine movements to attract men to dance. 87

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Shawn’s choreography and his later writings can be seen as part of a widespread reassertion of ‘natural’ male energy that, as I pointed out in Chapter 1, informed the writings of Lord Baden-Powell, Theodore Roosevelt, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. This amounted to a reassuring rebuttal of the charge that men are growing soft. Michael S. Kimmell (1987) has called this sort of conservative reaction to changing masculine norms of identity a ‘pro-male’ response. For Shawn, the rebuttal took on a literally muscular form. For much of the nineteenth century, there had been no premium on fitness among middle class males. As Susan Bordo has put it, the bulging stomachs of successful businessmen and politicians ‘were a symbol of bourgeois success, an outward manifestation of their accumulated wealth’ (1990: 94). At the end of the century, however, Bordo suggests that: social power had come to be less dependent on the sheer accumulation of material wealth and more connected to the ability to control and manage the labor and resources of others. At the same time, excess body weight came to be seen as reflecting moral and personal inadequacy or lack of will. (Ibid.) The underlying morality here was, of course, Christian. There was a racial dimension to this new concern with masculine fitness. I pointed out, in the first chapter, that Shawn’s first performance as a dancer was the year before the publication of the first Tarzan novel. The whiteness of the pro-male reaction against the perceived threat of feminisation and degeneracy needs to be seen in the context of imperialism and white supremacy. Whiteness is a social construction. As James Baldwin, in fiercely ironic mode, argued: ‘No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country’ (1998: 178). Richard Dyer has pointed out that white masculinity, as a social ideal, draws on notions of purity that derive from Christianity. An aspiration to maintain physical self control that is central to white masculinity can take on Christian spiritual attributes. ‘The white spirit,’ Dyer suggests, ‘could master and transcend the white body, while the non-white soul was a prey to the promptings and fallibilities of the body’ (1997: 23–4). To carry the white man’s burden meant cultivating ‘a hard, lean body, a dieted or trained one, an upright, shoulders back, unrelaxed posture, tight rather than loose movement, tidiness in domestic arrangement and eating manners’. These are all ways in which ‘the white body and its handling display the fact of the spirit within’ (ibid.). Just as Christian teaching urges eternal vigilance against sin, so whiteness requires constant maintenance to defend it against degeneracy. For Shawn, white people who danced to jazz music were endangering themselves. Writing in 1946, he said he was: 88

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sick at heart that we, this whole vast country of millions of white people, still kept on dancing dances of Negro derivation. Have we lost completely the qualities that made us a great nation? We were capable in the past of creating our own dances. Why is it in this last period that we have let this Negroid influence so completely obliterate everything else? (84) Martha Graham held more integrationist views of US dance than Shawn, but comments she made in 1932 nevertheless betray her underlying commitment to the virtues of white, Christian self-control. ‘The Negro dance’, she wrote, ‘is a dance towards freedom, a dance to forgetfullness, often Dionysiac in its abandon and the raw splendor of its rhythm – it is a rhythm of disintegration’ (1978: 99). The white ideal is one that does not disintegrate. Shawn did, however, approve of Negro spirituals which he said were ‘the highest form of art that has emanated from the Negro people’ (1946: 99), presumably because of their Christian message. Indeed, along with other white US choreographers in the 1930s, Shawn found spirituals ‘a rich source of material’ for making dances (ibid.). As Susan Manning (2004) has recently pointed out, in the 1930s these choreographers and many white critics saw no discontinuity when white bodies danced black subject matter – a practice she calls ‘metaphorical minstrelsy’. At the same time these critics, Manning also notes, were reluctant to accord the same value and significance to similar dances created and performed by African American choreographers. Whiteness depends on the maintenance of difference. As a European writing about modern dance in the US, I am often struck by its optimism. US dancers seem to dance bigger, harder, and with more positive intensity than most Europeans. Critics in the US, for their part, have sometimes found the pessimism of some European choreographers problematic. Their initial reaction, for example, to Pina Bausch’s work showed this (see Daly 1986), as did Mark Morris when he jokingly renamed Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker ‘de Tearjerker’ (Acocella 1993: 220). Almost all the dance works discussed in this chapter were popular and outgoing in a characteristically American way. However, in order to gain a better understanding of the way these works represented masculinity, it is necessary to take note of a few underlying and sometimes anxious negatives within the rhetoric surrounding US modern dance. It is widely believed not to be held back by the old fashioned and restricting traditions and conventions of European ballet. Dancing, Shawn seems to have constantly told journalists, is not a sissy art. Graham, despite blood memories from her puritan ancestors, believed dancing was not sinful. White dancers, audiences, and critics in the US during the 1930s saw no contradiction in the idea that white dancers could express the essence of African American 89

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experience better than African American dancers. In other words, while US modern dance in the 1930s asserted its identity as positive and outgoing, it was nevertheless defined by exclusions. People whose identities are defined by restrictive boundaries, as Parker and Sedgwick (1995) have pointed out, are vulnerable to being dared to prove that they have not transgressed these boundaries. Judith Lynn Hanna implied this when she noted ‘the effort and time Shawn and his Men Dancers spent trying to prove that they were not what Shawn and many members of the company were’ (1988: 141). Following Parker and Sedgwick, I argued in Chapter 2 that, when social prejudice dares a dancer to prove that he is not unmanly, this involves not only the dancer himself but also his audience who are interpellated into the role of witnesses, even if they themselves do not subscribe to the prejudice. For this reason, those moments when dancers and audiences managed to resist interpellations and ignore prejudices are particularly cherishable. Barton Mumaw, the young star of Ted Shawn and his Male Dancers and Shawn’s lover during the 1930s and 1940s, recorded some such moments in his autobiography. While the company were on tour, he recalled: We were constantly made aware of a more subtle response to our work by young men, students mostly, each of whom confided that his Old Man preferred him to run the risks of injuries in a football game rather than accept the challenge of an art that was equally strenuous . . . Some dared to knock on stage doors, or come back to the locker rooms of college gyms to talk to us about dancing. Others approached us on campus or on small-town streets, pathetically pretending a fascination with our streamlined De Soto [car] in an attempt to disguise their real interest. (Sherman and Mumaw 2000: 129) If Mumaw thought that pretending to be interested in their De Soto was pathetic, the reader should beware of reducing these young men’s subtle response to dance to no more than a disguise for homosexual attraction. The point is that it didn’t really matter to Mumaw what their sexuality may have been, only their sensitivity to dance. There is a danger of reducing representations of masculinity in Shawn and Limón’s dances to no more than an expression of their homosexuality, and reducing men in Graham’s work to no more than an object of her heterosexual, female desire. There is a related danger of disavowing anything that might diminish these choreographers’ status as canonical figures and thus only acknowledging positive aspects of their respective sexualities. What made Shawn, Graham, and Limón important choreographers was the richness and depth with which they worked through the complex and contradictory effects of the gender ideologies of their times. In what follows, I will discuss the complex interactions in these 90

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choreographers’ works between whiteness, Christianity, and sexuality, and the tensions among these. As I discuss elsewhere in this book, tensions, contradictions, and instabilities, rather than limiting dancers and choreographers, have often proved extraordinarily productive for them. SHAWN’S MEN

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Marcia Siegel has interpreted Ted Shawn’s choreography for the male dancer as an expression of US cultural values which could not be represented within the European dance tradition. She argues that Shawn’s principal contribution to US choreographic development was his focusing of attention on heroic, male body images: He must have decided early on that there was no reason the arms and upper body had to be round, light, and delicate, as dictated by the decorative European ballet. They could be strong and ready for work just as well. As a corrective, his thinking was quite logical. The things men do when dancing are strong and do demand great physical endurance, precision, and daring. The whole ballet convention consisted in more or less hiding these attributes, with elaborate costuming, passive role-play, and that soft, aggression-denying upper body. . . . Shawn wanted to restore or complete the energy system that has been emasculated by tradition. The clumsiness of his efforts at choreography doesn’t invalidate his vision. (1979: 307) Whereas Siegel suggests Shawn completed an energy system that had been emasculated by tradition, her description suggests that his choreography only expressed the ‘positive’ male attributes of strength and expansiveness, narrowing the range of the male dancer’s expressiveness to the more aggressive side of male behaviour. She argues this by equating, on the one hand, the US with the modern and, on the other hand, Europe with ballet. When Shawn argued with his fellow divinity student in 1911 he cited the men of the Russian ballet as positive examples of male dancers. No one could have said of Mikhail Mordkin (1880–1944), who toured the US with Pavlova in 1909 and then with his own company in 1911–12, or Adolf Bolm (1888–1951), who led the Polovtsian warriors in the Ballets Russes’ Prince Igor, that they indulged in passive role play, or presented a soft, aggression-denying upper body. It was the US exponents of ballet that were problematic. Writing in 1946, Shawn claimed that: At the beginning of my own career, the dance parts performed by men had become less and less creditable – men ballet dancers were being largely used as props for a danseuse during an arabesque – while the training of men was such that men and women were trained 91

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together and there was little differentiation of the movement, with the result that dancing for men was under a cloud; but in these later years, my group of men dancers, focusing on masculine problems of the dance have also enriched the field until today no one who has seen my men dance can tolerate effeminacy in the male dance. (1946: 98–9) While Shawn’s historical gloss is perhaps self-serving, he certainly developed his own style through gradually rejecting the conventions of European ballet movement. Similarly, like many early US modern dancers, he replaced balletic mime with ways of developing gestural expression derived from the work of Francois Delsarte (1811–71).3 The aggressive masculine stance of his work should not, therefore, be seen solely as a consequence of rejecting ballet. It needs also to be located within specifically modern US social and religious ideologies. Shawn’s earliest solos such as Savage Dance and Dagger Dance (both 1912) and Dance Slav (1913) were concerned with ancient, pagan, and mostly non-Western warrior cultures, as were subsequent pieces such as Invocation to the Thunderbird (1918), Spear Dance Japonaise (1919), and Pyrrhic Warriors (1918). As with later works such as his Negro Spirituals and the Cuban themed Cutting the Sugar Cane (both 1933) for Ted Shawn and his Men Dancers, these involved the white, male body performing black, Asian, American Indian, or other non-white subject matter. Such impersonations are, from a twenty-first century, multi-cultural point of view, unacceptable. Underlying them, however, is the still prevalent conception that whiteness is everything and nothing. David Lloyd (1991) has traced the philosophical basis for this conception back to Kant in the eighteenth century who argued that rational human subjects make universal judgements from a position of disinterestedness. Lloyd calls this position the ‘subject without properties’. As Richard Dyer explains, non-white people were thought to be either incapable of, or not yet ready to take up disinterested subjecthood: What is involved is not the ascription of racial inferiority, much less evil, to non-whiteness but their not being deemed subjects without properties. They are particular, marked, raced, whereas the white man has attained the position of being without properties, unmarked, universal, just human. (1997: 38) Being without properties, Shawn and his white male dancers thought they could capture what Shawn felt was most dignified and valuable, from his supposedly universal, disinterested point of view, about the non-white cultural traditions his works claimed to represent. (This was also the case with Graham’s female dancers, as I shall discuss shortly.) 92

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Another related quality associated with the unmarked nature of whiteness is an aspiration to disembodiedness. As Dyer explains: ‘To be without properties also suggests not being at all. This may be thought of as pure spirit, but it also hints at non-existence, or death’ (ibid.: 39). If it was only by impersonating non-white cultures that Shawn could signify positive, stoical masculine characteristics, then all that was left for white masculinity was transcendence and death. These recur in the pieces Shawn created on white-identified themes. In his solo Adagio Pathétique (1923, also known as Death of Adonis: Plastique), naked wearing only a fig leaf and covered in thick white makeup to resemble a classical marble statue, Shawn moved through a series of choreographed poses on a sculptural plinth (Figure 4.1). As Jane Sherman records: ‘Copied from famous statues of Adonis, they showed his awakening, his adventures of the hunt, and the finale when he was gored by the wild (albeit imaginary!) boar’ (1979: 96).4 Shawn, along with many late nineteenth- and twentieth-century homosexuals looked to Ancient Greek

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11 Figure 4.1 Ted Shawn in Death of Adonis.

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Photo courtesy of Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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society as an ideal, manly culture within which homosexuality was considered normal. But it is striking that Shawn’s almost naked but heavily made up performance on stage seems to have been not only acceptable but even popular (Sherman 1979: 96–7; Terry 1976: 109), while two years earlier in Paris, as I noted in Chapter 3, Börlin’s naked and heavily made up performance in L’Homme et son désir was criticised. Animating poses from classical sculptures was a recognised American Delsarte exercise. Sherman has written that Shawn fluidly changed positions in an extremely controlled and disciplined way. This was surely a sign of the self control of the white Christian spirit. Discussing the appearance of heavily muscled stars such as Stallone and Schwarzenegger in Hollywood action movies, Dyer has identified characteristics that also apply to Shawn’s white-identified dances. Looking like a statue, Dyer notes, evokes the classical: A hard, contoured body does not look like it runs the risk of being merged with other bodies. A sense of separation and boundedness is important to the white male ego . . . Only a hard, visibly bounded body can resist being submerged into the horror of femininity and non-whiteness. (1997: 152–3) Shawn’s stoically contained absorption in his extremely condensed representation of Adonis’s life and death corresponded with contemporary pro-male responses to a perceived crisis in masculine identity. Börlin’s more spontaneous expression of masculine passion and desire, in comparison, seemed dangerously uncontrolled. If some Parisian critics attacked Börlin’s Man for its homosexual associations, Shawn’s Adonis was not only de-eroticised but literally deathly. Within the Western Christian tradition, the image of the dying white body has been presented as beautiful and inspiring. This must have given Shawn’s solo a particularly powerful charge for audiences in the 1920s who were more schooled in Christian belief than most of those who look back at this period from the twentyfirst century. Narratives of transcendence or death occurred in some of the whiteidentified pieces performed by Ted Shawn and his Ensemble of Men Dancers which Shawn founded in 1933 after the break-up of Denishawn. One such was Polonaise (1933) which was often the opening piece on the company’s programmes. In this, the dancers had bare upper bodies and legs, and wore skin-coloured trunks. As Barton Mumaw recalls: Jess [Meeker, company pianist] never struck the first chord until he was certain that the curtain had risen entirely to reveal our seeming nudity. We were used to a moment of complete silence before we began to move. But the London audience [at His Majesty’s Theatre 94

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in 1934] gave a great audible unanimous gasp that startled us off our feet into the dance with unprecedented ballon. (Sherman and Mumaw 2000: 131) In many ways Polonaise staged the same kinds of white, male subjectivity as Adagio Pathétique. Susan Foster has noted similarities between Shawn’s group choreography for men and the practice of sculpture posing: ‘Never undulating or contracting but sometimes twisting in the manner of classical Greek sculpture, dancers locomoted and then posed, turned and then jumped, ran to a new place, and posed again’ (2001: 164). The documentary film The Men who Danced: The Story of Ted Shawn’s Male Dancers 1933–1940 (Honsa 1986) begins with a reconstruction of the ending of Polonaise together with a fragment of black and white film footage of it from the 1930s. In this, opposing lines of men with clenched fists face one another and alternately dance advancing and retreating as if attacking each other. They, then, combine together to form an elegantly neo-classical pyramid as they hoist Barton Mumaw upwards. This final image suggests a heroically uplifting transcendence. Labor Symphony (1934) is one of several pieces Shawn choreographed that represent the male world of work. Male work as a subject offered a safe, unequivocally masculine range of movements, which as I showed in Chapter 1, Shawn praised as a subject for male dancing. Labor Symphony had four sections. The first three represented men’s work on land, forest, and sea. The fourth section was titled ‘Mechanised Labor’ and, as Mark Franko has observed, ‘is essentially a machine dance in which the men perform the movement of interlocking mechanical parts’ (2002: 44). The dancers were bare chested and wore dark sleeves on their lower arms, which allowed Shawn to make patterns out of black and white as dancers progressed fluidly through successive tableaux. Photographs also show that, as in Polonaise, they held their fists clenched, thus helping pump up the muscles in their arms and torsos. ‘Mechanised Labor’ ends with the dancers ‘scattered across the floor like disparate and dysfunctional parts of a broken mechanism’ (ibid.: 46). As with Adonis, this group dance, therefore, ended with the pathos of a kind of death. The earlier solo’s disciplined fluidity of animated poses corresponded with the anonymity of the later mechanised group movements. Shawn settled on this factory theme at around the same time that the workers’ dance league and other left-wing dance groups were beginning to make dances about work (ibid.; Prickett 1989, 1990; Graff 1997) although Franko notes that, unlike the work of left-wing dancers, Shawn’s, ‘Mechanised Labor’ did not address the loss of work through unemployment. He argues that the dance eroticised and thus feminised the male dancers’ bodies as spectacle just as the dehumanisation of the factory assembly line alienated male workers by taking away their sense of self 95

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worth and dignity. Susan Foster, however, argues that Shawn’s group choreography never hinted at homo-eroticisism. She notes that the men constantly retained a distance from one another, never touched or assisted one another, except when the choreography dictated that dancers assembled together to create a single shape. Polonaise and ‘Mechanised labor’ both staged white, masculine sociality in a way that was entirely in accord with muscular Christian propriety. ‘Shawn sequestered sexuality so effectively’, Foster argues, ‘that no one in the audience could even speculate about whether the dancers . . . might embark on other kinds of bodily explorations after the concert’ (2001: 168). Shawn, as Foster points out, was in effect a closet homosexual. His decision to locate the headquarters for his men’s company in the countryside at Jacob’s Pillow rather than in New York meant that he was isolating himself and his dancers from the urban gay culture which George Chauncey (1994) has shown was developing at that time in New York. In my opinion, it is not profitable to try and identify the kinds of homosexual imagery in Shawn’s dances that occur in the contemporaneous drawings of New Yorkbased artists such as Paul Cadmus or Pavel Tchelichew. Shawn did not produce programmes for the kinds of intellectual, metropolitan gay men who patronised these painters. He toured his work exhaustingly to ‘middle America’. A review, in the Berkshire Evening Eagle, of a 1937 performance by the company is typical of notices the company received: Men, brought the first time by their wives, returned of their own accord, and found that the dance, as an exhibition of art, muscular poise and co-ordination, was as exciting as a track meet and a wrestling match. They agreed with Shawn, that ‘dancing is not a sissy art’. (Quoted in Schlundt 1967: 47) The point to notice here is not necessarily the men’s approval, but the fact that their wives were Shawn’s core audience. Similarly, as Julia Foulkes (2001) notes, while resting at Jacob’s Pillow between tours they raised extra income through hosting women’s lunches and tea lecture demonstrations. Shawn seems to have cultivated the same audience he would have reached if he had become a Methodist minister rather than a choreographer, just as his distaste for degeneracy derived from the doctrine of stoical, muscular Christianity. Foster argues that Shawn constructed a closeted version of homosexuality from explanations of homosexual behaviour developed by the English writer Havelock Ellis. Writing in the 1890s when homosexuality was generally seen as an illness and, as Jeffrey Weeks puts it, ‘a product of particular national vices or periods of social decay’ (Weeks 1977: 62), Ellis assembled a considerable body of anthropological, historical, religious, and literary evidence to show that homosexuality was a common and recurrent part of human sexuality. Ellis’s 1892 book Sexual Inversion was banned and has never been published in Britain, and his subsequent books 96

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were all published in the US. The publicity Ellis received because of this meant that, as Weeks notes, hundreds of homosexuals and lesbians (Shawn among them) wrote to or visited him with their problems, life-histories, information, and views. Many of these correspondents found their way, as examples, into Ellis’s books. ‘Given the conspiracy of silence,’ Weeks notes, ‘this was a major achievement’ (ibid.). Shawn may have found in Ellis’s writings a way of disavowing his own homosexuality. Weeks, nevertheless, argues that Ellis played a key role at that time in liberating homosexuality and enabling the formation of liberal, reformist opinion. What limited Shawn, I suggest, were conservative, late nineteenth-century, white Christian doctrines. Nevertheless, as Foster demonstrates, while Shawn succeeded in raising the status of male dance in the US, he achieved this by remaining within a closet of his own making. Shawn’s work thus tried, within the social restrictions of the period, to occupy common ground, albeit of a problematic kind, between a homosexual and straight point of view. But such value-free common ground never exists. The restrictions may allow a limited expression but at the same time they block and deform it. Shawn undoubtedly did much for male dance, but, by keeping carefully within the bounds of conservative propriety, he unfortunately limited the range of male dancing to tough, aggressive expression. MALE DANCING AFTER SHAWN

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Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey both started their careers as members of Denishawn. In contrast to the blue eyed, blonde whiteness of Denishawn, Humphrey and Graham’s companies in the 1930s and 1940s were ethnically diverse, reflecting more of the social make-up of urban America, although it was not until the 1940s that Graham included Japanese American and African American dancers in her company. Metropolitan experience was among the factors which, as I noted in Chapter 3, Raymond Williams associated with the development of the formal innovations of early modernism. Writing about her teaching with Charles Weidman in New York in 1928, Doris Humphrey stated: The students were stimulated by our enthusiasm for some discoveries about movement, which had to do with ourselves as Americans – not Europeans or American Indians or East Indians, which most of the Denishawn work consisted of, but as young people of the twentieth century living in the US. (Quoted in Cohen 1972: 61) The austerely abstracted works that they each created in the late 1920s and early 1930s – such as Humphrey’s Colour Harmony (1928) or Graham’s Lamentations (1930) – must, in part, be seen as a reaction against Shawn 97

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and St Denis’s exotic and elaborately costumed narrative pieces. However, many of Graham’s pieces, such as Primitive Mysteries (1931), cited American Indian cultural practices, albeit in an abstracted way. There was, admittedly, abstraction in St Denis’s musical visualisations and in pieces such as Shawn’s Polonaise, but the harsh, austere, fragmented qualities in Graham and Humphrey’s pieces contrasted with the more balanced and harmonious qualities of the older choreographers’ works. The kinds of universal value, which Graham and Humphrey’s abstracted works suggested, were influenced by the gender of the dancers. Martha Graham created dances for a company that was exclusively female until the late 1930s. The Humphrey Weidman company consisted of both men and women, Humphrey working mostly with the women and Weidman working with the men (Limón 1999: 36–7). José Limón was a member of the company from 1930 until it dissolved in 1940, subsequently founding his own company. He recalls in his autobiography that when he first showed Doris Humphrey his piece Chaconne (1942) she commented: ‘This is one of the most magnificent dances I have ever seen. It is that for a number of reasons, but chiefly because it is a man dancing’ (ibid.: 115). In many ways the excitement which Martha Graham seems to have felt in response to the male dancing body corresponds to Humphrey’s belief in the importance of Limón’s masculine performance. The rest of this chapter examines what it was that, in a predominantly female field, they believed only the male dancing body could evoke. GRAHAM’S MEN Martha Graham, in many ways, continued and extended the way of presenting the male dancer that Shawn initiated. When, in 1922, Shawn temporarily split from Ruth St Denis and toured with his own company, it was Martha Graham who was his principal partner. There was, however, a passionate intensity and eroticism in her work that was never present in Shawn’s. Graham started choreographing group pieces in 1926 but it was not until 1938 that she included male dancers in her company. Erick Hawkins joined Graham’s company to be its first male dancer in 1938 and was subsequently, for a while, her husband. Merce Cunningham joined her company in 1939. This section examines the sorts of quality Graham choreographed for Hawkins in American Document, and for Cunningham and Hawkins in her 1944 piece Appalachian Spring; it concludes with a discussion of male roles in her subsequent ‘Greek’ pieces. The formal structure of American Document was an adaptation from a Minstrel Show with an Interlocutor, episodes, and processionals which loosely referenced the Cake Walk. As Susan Manning points out, bizarre as this reference to black-face performance may seem to us in the twentyfirst century, it seemed unexceptional in the 1930s. Graham made what 98

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was, at the time, an extremely popular piece, this being unusual for her. It was, however, so closely tied to its particular historical context that it was not performed after 1944. It survives principally in photographs by Barbara Morgan (1980). Susan Manning (1995, 2004) is largely responsible for a renewed scholarly interest in the piece. American Document consisted of five main sections: Declaration, Indian Episode, Puritan Episode, Emancipation, and The After Piece. The Interlocutor recited texts taken from American history supplemented by material written by Graham herself. The Indian Episode was accompanied by a letter from 1811 of just complaints against white settlers by Red Jacket, an American Indian chief. Emancipation (i.e. the end of slavery) included lines from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address while earlier versions of the piece included references to Sacco and Vanzetti, and to the Scottsboro boys. These were cases that, at the time, were symbols of political injustice for the American left.5 The Puritan Episode inter-cut lines from hellfire sermons by Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards with sentences of mystical eroticism from the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon. In the Indian and Emancipation sections, Graham’s female dancers performed abstract, modernist representations of American Indians and African Americans, their white, unmarked bodies allowing them to represent culturally marked bodies. Hawkins, however, only danced the role of a white US man. The Puritan Episode consisted of a duet in which Graham made no secret of her powerful erotic attraction to Hawkins’s male body. In The After Piece, a female trio was followed by a male solo. During the trio, the Interlocutor recited: ‘We are three women./We are three million women./We are the mothers of the hungry dead./ We are the mothers of the hungry living./We are the mothers of those yet to be born’ (Graham 1942: 573). These roles are gender appropriate, and the choreography seems to have consisted of emotionally expressive, bending movements conveying lamentation and despair. Hawkins, however, strode on for his solo in an upright, powerful way. Wearing only black woollen tights and showing his bare upper body, he made simple, clean, linear shapes. The text here was: ‘This is one man./This is one million men./This man has a faith./It is you./This man has a fear./It is you./This man has a need./It is himself,/And you./This man has a power./It is himself,/And you’ (ibid.: 574). In both cases, the spoken text invited the spectator to identify with the dancer, just as the expressive quality of the movement reached out and demanded attention. As Manning has pointed out, the text for this section, written by Graham, echoes the inspiring rhetoric of President F.D. Roosevelt’s inaugural addresses. The text for the trio echoed Roosevelt’s ‘I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished’ (1937) while ‘This man has a fear’ echoed ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’ (Roosevelt 1938: 11). Hawkins’s ‘one man’ in The After Piece represented the spirit of Roosevelt’s 99

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New Deal for the Common Man – the political and economic strategy adopted to propel the US out of the depression. As Mark Roth has noted, the New Deal represented ‘a major modification of the American Dream. The ideal of individual success [was] transformed into an ideal of success through collective effort under the guise of a strong director’ (1981: 47). Mark Franko suggests Hawkins’s final solo signified an anti-fascist utopia. He points out that in The After Piece there is a change of the pronoun in the spoken text from the three women’s ‘we are’ to the single man’s ‘this is’ (2003: 199). ‘We are’ suggests a merging and blurring of women’s interpersonal boundaries, while the impersonal ‘this is’ is separate and detached. If Hawkins’s ‘one man’ is ‘you’, he is a representative man, in the way that members of democratic assemblies are elected representatives. The combination of the political and the erotic, however, is troubling. Roosevelt may have interpreted his huge electoral majorities as a popular mandate for strong leadership, but, in 1938, there were also strong political leaders in the USSR, Germany, Spain, and Italy. It is very difficult to say what, on an aesthetic level, distinguishes the image of Hawkins striding strongly forward (brilliantly captured in Barbara Morgan’s photograph) from similar, half naked, male heroes in contemporaneous Nazi German or communist socialist realist art. While Hawkins, in effect, performed the central role in American Document, between 1938 and 1944 Graham made a number of works that present a central female character (performed by herself) and two male roles initially danced by Cunningham and Hawkins. These pieces are generally acknowledged to present her most rounded and interesting male roles, but it could be argued that this was sometimes achieved at the cost of subordinating the roles she created for herself – for example the Bride in Appalachian Spring (1944). In these two-man pieces, Deborah Jowitt suggests, Graham presented herself poised between two antithetical males: Hawkins was called ‘The Dark Beloved’ in the sombre, seething Deaths and Entrances, and he played this role – sexually alluring, masterful, potentially dangerous – in more than one dance. Cunningham was ‘The Poetic Beloved’, a slightly mystical, even androgynous figure: he was the blithe acrobat to Hawkins’s whip-wielding ringmaster (Every Soul is a Circus), the winged Pegasus to his swaggering husband (Punch and the Judy), the gentle Christ figure in El Penitente, the fanatic Revivalist in Appalachian Spring. After Merce Cunningham left the company, Graham made no more dances that expressed this double image of man. Perhaps the male roles also embodied a duality within herself: sensuality and idealism; or the taskmaster/perfectionist and the undisciplined, irrational visionary. (1988: 228–9) 100

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Appalachian Spring is a particularly interesting example of how Graham was dealing with male roles at that time. The piece shows an American wedding in a small frontier farmhouse in the first half of the nineteenth century. The cast consists of the Bride, Husbandman, Revivalist preacher, the older Pioneer Woman, and four young women who are followers of the Revivalist. They all come on stage in a formal procession, and throughout the piece, as well as a duet for the Bride and Husbandman, the principal characters each have a solo during which everyone else is frozen still. Following Jowitt’s suggestions above, the two male roles can be seen as projections of different sides of Graham’s own desires and aspirations, although it doesn’t make much sense to see them as those of the Bride – the role Graham herself danced in the piece. As Marcia Siegel points out, Appalachian Spring reworks themes originally explored in her earlier solo Frontier (1935). In this piece, a woman dancing, by a fence on the prairie, seemed torn between repressive religious feelings and the spatial freedom symbolised by the new land of the (open) frontier of unsettled country. She was, thus, evoking imagery that, as we have seen, was clearly associated with US masculine values. In Appalachian Spring, the two men seemed to represent these two sets of opposing values: the Husbandman expressed a straightforward love of freedom, space, and the natural cycle, while the Revivalist vented the tortured and convoluted feelings of his (and Graham’s) puritanical fervour. The movement material which the Husbandman performs is very straightforward in contrast to the mercuric distortions of the Revivalist’s solos or the nervous temperamental quality of the Bride’s role. Marcia Siegel conjures up the flavour of the Husbandman’s role: The husband’s movements are large and expansive. The actual steps he does when he first takes centre stage are a conglomeration of kneeslapping, rein-pulling mime motifs; balletic turns in the air; and leggy, travelling jumps, reachings, and stampings. You feel he’s showing off, but not in a narcissistic way; rather, he’s giving vent to his happy feelings and pride, his natural assertiveness and drive. (1979: 147) He also surveys the horizons and makes some gestures which suggest ploughing or working the land. Edwin Denby, in 1945, wrote that the Husbandman’s role ‘suggests farmer vigour and clumsy farmer mirth’ (1986: 314). The stamping gestures he makes are part of the traditional image of the farmer: in the folk song ‘Oats and Beans and Barley Grow’: ‘First the farmer sows his seed/Then he stands and takes his ease/Stamps his foot and claps his hand/And turns around to view the land’. This recalls atavistic notions of fertility. The Husbandman is supposed to be virile and fertile. The quality and nature of his movements fit in remarkably with Shawn’s description of the way male dance movements 101

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relate to the movements of male work activities referred to earlier.6 Like Shawn’s manly, Christian male dancer, the Husbandman looks hard and muscular in a role that is expansive and, in a stoical way, tough, if not exactly aggressive, and he definitely does not have a soft, aggressiondenying body. For all that, the Husbandman is hardly a deeply observed character. Like most of the men in Graham’s pieces, he is flat and one-dimensional. The role of the Revivalist is the exception to this; as both Jowitt and Siegel suggest, he is more rounded. This is surely because this role articulates one of Graham’s central themes, the contradictory pull of repressive, oldfashioned, evangelical Protestantism. I noted that American Document’s Puritan Episode staged a dichotomy between Puritanism and the erotic. There is a quality of torture and inner contradiction at the heart of some of Graham’s best work that comes from her Presbyterian upbringing and her consequent love–hate relationship with Christianity. The Revivalist’s main solo represents a sermon that is all hellfire and damnation. He starts it by stamping one foot repeatedly on the ground and then hitting himself with a clenched fist on the side of the trunk. There are stamping movements in the Husbandman’s solos, that, I have suggested, connote virility and fertility. By stamping and then hitting himself, the Revivalist is starting off his sermon by condemning everything the Bride and Husbandman are looking forward to enjoying, both the pleasure of being close to the land, and of being close to each other. The solo continues with wild, angular movements and asymmetrical gestures, bewildering leaps and risky falls. Two films of Appalachian Spring show differing interpretations of the Revivalist’s role. David Hatch Walker in the 1976 film projects hellfire straight at the bride and groom. Bertram Ross, however, in the 1959 film, is less fierce; his Revivalist is surely aware that he himself is not immune to the perils and weaknesses of the flesh7 (Figure 4.2). The Revivalist is surely meant to enjoy playing up to, and exerting his power over, the four excitable girls – at one moment rolling from the floor up into their laps. As Margaret Lloyd notes: ‘With a not entirely impersonal reverence, the young followers surround him, praise him in unusual measure’ (1974: 72). The virtuosity demanded by the Revivalist’s role makes the straightforward, stoical manliness of the Husbandman’s movement material look boring in comparison. It is noticeable that the expressive range of movement in the Revivalist’s solo is far greater than that of the Husbandman or of Shawn’s muscular Christian dancers. Paradoxically, then, Ross’s (Christian) Revivalist seems less restricted than them by the need to maintain a decorous, Christian propriety. The way most of Graham’s male dancers move may, nevertheless, have much in common with Shawn’s muscular Christians. Hawkins joined Martha Graham’s company having previously danced with Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan. Graham suggested to Cunningham that he 102

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Figure 4.2 Erick Hawkins in the first performance of Copland’s Appalachian Spring in 1944.

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Photo courtesy of the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.

take ballet classes at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet. According to Bertram Ross, who joined Graham’s company in 1954 after her split with Hawkins, when Graham choreographed parts for men she didn’t like demonstrating movements ‘because she did not have a man’s body’; she would give movement directions verbally instead (Mazo 1991: 44). This is confirmed by Tim Wengerd, who danced with the Graham company in the 1970s. As Wengerd observes: ‘This being the case, Hawkins and Cunningham probably had major shares in the creation of their roles from the start, and Martha shaped the material to suit her purposes (1991: 52). Wengerd suggests that the same basic male types recurred throughout her career: adored men, feared men, man the unattainable, even man dehumanised: ‘Few men in dance are allowed to be as thoroughly tortured as Orestes, as adored as Oedpius, as loathsome as Jason, and as simply joyous as all the men in Diversion of Angels’ (ibid.). The most flat and caricatural male role Graham choreographed seems to have been Jason in Caves of the Heart. This is a role whose movements, Wengerd suggests, 103

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resemble Shawn’s Spear Dance Japonaise. Wengerd describes Jason as ‘a sort of cardboard-cut-out Greek Hell’s Angel’ who is only allowed to show his humanness after he has been utterly undone, but prior to that he is 100 per cent male chauvinist pig (ibid.). Compared to the roles in Appalachian Spring, male roles in the dark, brooding ‘Greek’ dances and in pieces such as Diversion of Angels are reduced to caricatures of posturing machismo. At the time when they were first made, the force of Graham’s presence incited spectators to see them through the eyes of the central female character. As she grew older and modern dance moved on, it became possible to discount what is potentially disturbing about these hyper-masculine roles and see them as just an aberration, a personal quirk of Graham’s. Of course ‘we’ don’t see them the way she does. As Martha Siegel puts it: Graham had been making display dances for men since she had first had men in her company [and she] didn’t gloss over the idea that the woman was physically turned on by what [the male dancer] was doing. All through the 1940s and 1950s men were Graham’s villains, and though to us they may look pompous and grotesque, to her heroines they were fatally erotic. (1979: 316) Jill Johnston has drawn attention to the transgressive eroticism of these works: Martha Graham, she wrote in 1968, was clearly ‘an inverted homo hetero sado masochistic sodomist . . . Who was the lady kidding? She’s an incredible ball-breaker. So bloody serious. So hell-bent for leather etc.’ (1968: 11). Both, however, were writing at a time when the emotive way Graham’s work appealed to spectators had become unfashionable. This was not how critics responded at the time the pieces were created. Sali Ann Kriegsman (1981: 191–201) has assembled a comprehensive survey of critical responses in 1938 to Graham’s new-found eroticism in American Document’s Puritan Episode. With characteristic cosmopolitan sophistication, Lincoln Kirstein noted that, ‘The tenseness of its emotion, the extreme projection of restrained physicality, rendered the adolescent elements in the audience uncomfortable’ (1938: 230). Margaret Lloyd felt the duet ‘administered a new kind of shock . . . not so much for its eroticism as for its lack of taste’ (1938: n.p.). Graham as a woman was permitted explicitly to eroticise the male dancing body as the object of her heterosexual female gaze because her work was identified as white, heterosexual, Christian, and American. Like Shawn, Graham gave her male dancers a range of movement that was almost always limited to represent only the more macho side of male behaviour. They are tough – so much so as to be tight and insecure about their boundaries, defending themselves against the dare to prove that, though dancers, they are not unmanly. Like Shawn’s male dancers, they exemplified a positive stereotype, albeit one with hidden internal contradictions. 104

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LIMÓN, MODERNISM, AND ETHNICITY

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As I noted earlier, when Limón first showed Doris Humphrey his piece Chaconne (1942), she told him it was magnificent for a number of reasons, but chiefly because it was a man dancing. It was set to J.S. Bach’s Chaconne for violin and it was first performed in a Bach-themed dance concert. John Martin, reviewing this in the New York Times, stated his view that Bach’s music was unsuitable for choreography, causing Humphrey to write in its defence. From her reply it emerges that one aspect of what she admired in Limón’s dancing was that she felt it expressed universal, modern male values. What she proposed was, in effect, a positive stereotype:

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I see in the Chaconne implications of what one of the Greek philosophers meant when he said, ‘every good citizen should dance in order to understand the State and be a good citizen.’ Here are courage, balance in every sense, authority without boastfulness, power tempered with intelligence, the possibilities of the whole mature man brought to a high degree of perfection. (Quoted in Cohen 1972: 255) Humphrey’s own work often stressed shared, communitarian values, and, where it had any narrative content, the characters or roles were of a generalised, humanistic view of somewhat impersonal ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in society. Her vision was not a particularly optimistic one. One Christian motto she adopted from the American Shaker sect (whose rituals she used as a source for her 1931 piece The Shakers) was ‘Ye shall be saved when ye are shaken free from sin’. One might surmise that, for her, dance was the expression of the individual’s best contribution to human society, and modern dance a modern expression of this. Limón himself argued in his 1948 essay ‘The Virile Dance’ that men dancing reveal themselves for what they are, and thus express the ‘truth’ about masculinity: ‘Since dance and gesture were his long before the spoken word, he still has the power to reveal himself more truly in this atavistic language [dance] not only as an individual but also “en masse”’ (1966: 82). Limón was not repeating Graham’s argument that the body cannot lie, but proposing that man as a dancer can choose between the good of revealing himself truly and the evil of dissembling through dance. These are the alternatives facing the three Kings that Limón writes about in ‘The Virile Dance’. The Biblical King David danced ‘a ritual of surpassing purity and power and showed the man as dancer at his most sublime’ (ibid.: 83). Louis XIV of France danced too, but, for Limón, this was an arrogant, mincing expression of the cynical licentiousness of his regime. An (unidentified) twentieth-century European King, who has been deposed and lives out a seedy exile dancing in night clubs in Paris, represents ‘the fearful spectacle of a sick world in extremis’ (ibid.: 85). Limón expressed the hope that: ‘it will be a saner world when the President of the US, as 105

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chief magistrate, will lead the nation in solemn dance on great occasions before the Dome of the Capitol’ (ibid.: 86). While Hawkins as ‘one man’ in Graham’s American Document evoked the masculine spirit of strong leadership during the New Deal, Limón, writing in the more uncertain time of the beginnings of the Cold War, again saw dancing as an expression of political ideals. It is intriguing, therefore, that Limón revealed in his autobiography that when Graham first started planning American Document she approached Limón to ask him to be her leading man (Limón 1999: 87). Limón’s feelings of revulsion at decadent night club dancing recalls Shawn’s denunciations of degeneracy, though for Limón the problem was European rather than African American. Like Shawn, however, Limón’s argument drew on the authority of Christian propriety to suggest a white, Christian, American spirit within a controlled, male body. But whereas Shawn and Graham’s Christian self-control had a Protestant origin, Limón was a lapsed Catholic. An autobiographical fragment about the Limón company’s 1950 Mexican tour illuminates this. The tour was arranged by the Mexican painter Miguel Covarrubias who took Limón sightseeing between engagements. Limón reveals he was especially susceptible to Mexican baroque art. After a rapturous description of the baroque ecstasies of Catholic saints in a small, gold-encrusted, and fabulously over-decorated side chapel, Limón admitted: ‘Miguel knew the devastating effect this was having on me. Here was sublime theater. Both of us, renegade Catholics, rebels against our backgrounds, were enraptured, as artists, by the scene’ (ibid.: 130). The art historian Erwin Panofsky commented on criticisms about the sentimental theatricality of baroque art. He wrote: The feeling of Baroque people is (or at least can be in the works of great masters) perfectly genuine, only it does not fill the whole of their souls. They not only feel, but are also aware of their own feelings. While their hearts are quivering with emotion, their consciousness stands aloof and ‘knows’. (1995: 75) It was Limón’s ability to be fully immersed in the intensity of his feelings in the golden chapel but yet also stand aloof and ‘know’ that, following Panofsky, I am identifying with the baroque. At their finest, Limón’s dance performances seem to have exemplified this baroque self awareness that comes from acknowledging the possibility of such rapturous devastation. Limón was a successful Mexican-American who had kept in touch with his roots. This was doubtless a factor behind this and other US State Department-sponsored tours by the José Limón Dance Company to Mexico, South America, and Europe (that I return to in the next chapter).8 According to Barbara Pollack, Limón told South American audiences (speaking in Spanish): 106

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In North America, with all our crudities, we are Americans. We are not afraid to declare ourselves, and have done so in our dance. The academic dance from Europe is not adequate to express what we have to say. Hemingway and Faulkner write in English, but they write as Americans. In the same way, we are trying to find a new language for American dance. (1993: 37) The difference between Spanish- and English-speaking Americans seems therefore, for Limón, to have been less than the difference between Americans (Northern and Southern) and Europeans. Limón performed a number of Mexican- and Spanish-identified roles in pieces both he and Doris Humphrey choreographed, including his Danza de la Muerte (1938), Danzas Mexicanas (1939), and La Malinche (1949), and Humphrey’s 1947 Lament for Ignatio Sánchez Mejías (after a poem by Lorca). Writing in 1949, Margaret Lloyd described Limón as: ‘tall-dark-and-handsomer than any movie star (and without aid of celluloid), an infinitely more varied personality, and a real artist to boot’ (Lloyd 1974: 201). But she also noted that ‘With his Aztec-Hispanic features, his dark eyes and straight dark hair, the virile strength of his broad shoulders, he is virtually type-cast in the role of Ignatio Sánchez Mejías, though he is probably taller than the average bull fighter’ (ibid.: 198). Jill Johnston, who took classes at Limón’s studio in the 1950s, later noted: ‘You could never forget that José was Mexican. He was incredibly exotic, huge, sensual, and noble’ (1994: 95). As Susan Manning notes, Limón, who was of Spanish and French as well as Indian origin, looked very distinctive but his difference from his predominantly white, Northern European colleagues was only noted when he performed in works that cast him in the role of other (2004: 193). A number of Limón’s pieces centred on a conflict between two men. One of his early pieces for the José Limón Dance Company was La Malinche (1949), in which he danced the role of a Mexican Indian in a conflict with a European conquistador played by Lucas Hoving. In The Moor’s Pavane, made later the same year, Hoving played Iago, another European courtier, while Limón danced the role of Othello, the Moor. In both roles, Limón was non-European, but whereas he was cast to type as a Mexican in La Malinche, he was more universally other while playing Othello in The Moor’s Pavane and in The Traitor (1954), where Limón as Judas comes into conflict with Hoving as Jesus. Hoving hinted to Naomi Mindlin at the end of his life that there was a homoerotic edge to the tension between his role and Limón’s in The Moor’s Pavane (Mindlin 1992: 15). Ann Murphy (2002: 66) and Susan Manning (2004: 198–9) both mention that Hoving and Limón were, for a while, in a sexual relationship. This adds another dimension to their danced partnerships on stage, although one that few at the time would have consciously perceived. 107

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THE MOOR’S PAVANE AND THE DANGERS OF MALE INTIMACY The Moor’s Pavane (1949) is based on the play Othello, Shakespeare’s plot being reduced to a simple narrative involving the handkerchief which the Moor (Othello) gives to his wife (initially Betty Jones). In one duet Iago (initially Hoving) makes Emilia (initially Pauline Koner) aware that he wants her to get it for him, and Emilia achieves this when Desdemona drops it during a group sequence. Emilia then teases Iago with it, playing hard to get, and then in turn Iago taunts the Moor with it, provoking him to kill Desdemona. This last event takes place on stage hidden behind Iago and Desdemona’s backs, and is followed by a dénouement.9 The piece started with a ‘Pavane’ – a formal, centrally focused, symmetrical group section for the four dancers – which evoked an image of flowing, balanced, stately, ideal social relations.10 The dancers returned to this in variations and developments throughout the piece. As the narrative tensions increased, it gradually degenerated into a tense, anguished ritual. The tempo varied and the initial, square floor patterns became increasingly unbalanced and baroque, finally veering into a skewed diamond on a steep diagonal out of which the Moor and Desdemona broke to run wildly around the stage. Thus the unfolding narrative of increasing tension between the community of characters was expressed as much within this group dance as within the duets and mimed sections. Only the Moor himself remained stately, ideal, and noble throughout the piece, expressing the ‘truth’ about masculinity, although it led him to a tragic end. Shakespeare’s Iago is European and, in contrast to Othello’s blackness, is probably a blonde, blue-eyed white. Limón’s the Moor, however, was not, as far as I can see, marked as black; Spain, after all, was a Moorish province. Limón gave Iago’s role a gracefulness of carriage and gesture that hinted at the European ballet tradition. Hoving, who created the role, was born and brought up in Holland and had worked with Jooss and Laban before coming to the US. From Limón’s point of view, the role of Iago must have represented the sort of arrogant, mincing court dancing about which Limón subsequently expressed such dislike in his essay ‘The virile dance’. Iago was light on his feet, and used his hands and arms precisely extended to make obsequious gestures. He taunted the Moor, then stepped back, smiling, to watch the result. By contrast, the Moor was much more grounded and weighty in his movements, and his increasing emotional turmoil was conveyed through a repertoire of expressive mannerisms. He grasped a taut fist, then pushed it away from him, turning his fingers outwards into a tortuously twisted shape; he bent over forwards or arched backwards, almost as if he had a terrible pain in the stomach. The Moor confronted people eye to eye, pulling their heads towards his own to search their souls. It is through this repertoire 108

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of mannerisms that Limón, surely, believed he was evoking the ‘truth’ about masculinity. The contrast between Iago and the Moor thus conveyed both gender and notions of honesty and guile. Limón’s the Moor was informed, I suggest, by a baroque sensibility. Through this role he reached out to spectators, inviting them to feel, along with him, the full, emotional impact of these dramatic situations and yet to be able, as Panofsky put it, to stand aloof and ‘know’. Lucas Hoving, commenting on the role of Iago, mentioned the possibility that there is a homoerotic motivation behind Iago’s hatred of the Moor (Mindlin 1992: 15). This suggests the possibility of reading the violence and aggression between this pair of men (and other similar pairs in Limón’s oeuvre) in relation to tensions between appropriate and inappropriate relations. As I argued in Chapter 1, men are in a double bind in that, while they are encouraged to work closely together in the interests of men, there is no clear dividing line between approved forms of male homosocial bonding and expressions of male homosexuality. Iago’s relationship with the Moor exemplified this double-bind. As the Moor’s second-in-command on Cyprus he was in a position in which he had to work as closely as possible with the Moor in the interests of maintaining Venetian (patriarchal, Christian) hegemony. But, as a white spectator, Iago simultaneously feared and was fascinated by the otherness of the Moor’s body. This conclusion can not only be derived from the relationships as mapped out in Shakespeare’s play, but from key elements within the choreographed encounters Limón devised between the Moor and Iago. These can be interpreted as sexual and homoerotic. Furthermore, from a homosexual point of view, betrayal and degradation are themes that occur in the works of Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet, a point I will return to in relation to queer dance pieces of the 1980s. Several times Iago came up behind the Moor to whisper in his ear, elegantly placing his hands on the Moor’s shoulders, and crooking his right leg forwards to partially encircle the Moor’s body. It was as if he was about to press his body up tightly against the Moor from behind. In his combative duets with the Moor, Iago was more than once dragged across the stage, lying on the Moor’s back. On one level, the Moor’s expressed disgust and his rejection of Iago was because of what the latter was telling him (that Desdemona had been unfaithful), but it also surely had to do with the intimate manner in which Iago made his approach. In the sequence where Iago taunted the Moor with Desdemona’s handkerchief, Iago got down on his knees and arched his back as he twice rubbed the handkerchief against his own body from his crotch up to his face. Iago was implying that he had had sex with Desdemona and, thus, that the Moor was a cuckold (in Shakespeare’s play, he suggested Desdemona had slept with Cassio); but the manner in which Iago conveyed this, drew the Moor’s attention to the sexual attractions of Iago’s own body. He was, 109

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thus, revealing himself as a (male) erotic object to the Moor’s (male) gaze, thus evoking the forbidden realm of homosexual sexuality. Shawn’s male dancers sometimes, as in Polonaise, threatened one another in ritualistic ways as if to ensure they kept their distance from one another. Limón and Hoving did the opposite, staging fights almost as an excuse for physical contact whose eroticism could be covertly interpreted from a homosexual point of view. The closest that Limón constructed for himself was quite unlike Shawn’s. The latter seemed only concerned with refuting an association between dance and effeminacy. Limón, in the period following the Second World War and during the onset of the Cold War, had to deal with a very different set of fears about homosexuality, which I will consider in more detail in the next chapter. While a US President has yet to realise Limón’s dream of a solemn dance on great occasions before the Dome of the Capitol, Pauline Koner recalls the original cast of The Moor’s Pavane reassembling in 1967, at the request of President Johnson, to dance at the White House during a state visit by the King of Morocco. As Koner notes: ‘The King seemed quite pleased but the following morning, though the reviews were good, some did question the subject matter’ (1989: 235). The piece would never have been presented on this diplomatic occasion had its homoerotic subtext been public knowledge. This incident is just one more example of the many ways in which, as I have shown in this chapter, notions of whiteness, Christianity, and US national identity were inextricably interwoven in the way Shawn, Graham, and Limón created works for male dancing bodies.

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5 DANCING IN THE CITY

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During a speech on ‘Art and the Inner City’ at the 1968 annual conference of the now defunct Association of American Dance Companies, Eleo Pomare said: The art we as artists create comes from the life which is the food we eat. In America today the inner-city is symbolic perhaps of our modern times of sophisticated plenty; isolated poverty in our midst; and distant catastrophic Asiatic death [in Vietnam]. Certainly our violent slums are just fingers that point to our violent wars which in turn ask us as rich Americans, as Christians, as artists, as human beings – Am I my brother’s keeper. We all know what our answers have been. (1968: n.p., emphasis in original) Pomare threw this challenge down to his colleagues only a year after the White House performance of The Moor’s Pavane with which the last chapter ended. In this speech he talked about his ‘Dancemobile’ project in which his company toured community centres and parks in deprived areas of New York and the adjacent boroughs performing pieces from their repertoire from the back of a truck. When Pomare spoke of ‘modern times’, he was referring to his own formative experiences as a child in Columbia and then as a dancer and choreographer in post-war New York. His experience was a very long way from the ‘modern times’ of the first half of the twentieth century that had formed Shawn, Graham, and Limón. Differences in world view and experience are inseparable from differences in aesthetic sensibilities. This chapter looks at representations of masculinity in the work of two black American choreographers – Pomare and Alvin Ailey – and two white ones – Merce Cunningham and Steve Paxton. Through a discussion of their work, it examines their responses to the new, more complicated problems concerning gender, sexuality, ‘race’, and national identity in the US during the post-war period. Pomare is probably best known today for one short solo he created for himself in the 1960s, Junkie, because it is recorded on a commercially available video of the 1984 Dance Black America festival. Junkie was part 111

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of a 35-minute piece Blues for the Jungle (1966). This ended with a range of inner-city African American characters trying to mount a protest demonstration but stopped by a black New York cop. Reviewing a performance of this in 1967, Marcia Marks recorded: As Mr. Pomare’s junkie swung down the aisle [of the theatre in New York’s 92nd Street YMHA] hawking The New Amsterdam News, climbed to the stage where the tall policeman had routed the motley crew of jungle dwellers, and slunk across the deserted stage, turning to toss his papers contemptuously into the policeman’s face, the audience burst into cheers. (1967: 74–5) Here was a dance artist as anarchic outsider, expressing disrespect towards the law and the government. He was doing so in a work that broke with the conventions of mainstream theatre dance. Here, as elsewhere in Blues for the Jungle, dancers broke proscenium by performing in the auditorium itself. Here also was an audience who didn’t just clap politely at the end but cheered at the action. In emphasising this, my intention is to suggest some commonality between Pomare’s politicised and ‘realist’ dance theatre and the experimental dance practices of Cunningham and the dancers associated with Judson Dance Theatre. Without wishing to blur the differences between the works of Ailey, Pomare, Cunningham, and Paxton, I want to suggest that, where representations of masculinity are concerned, their works had enough in common to make a useful set of comparisons to explore in this chapter. In the last chapter, I demonstrated that Shawn, Graham, and Limón staged heroic male dancing bodies that appeared to conform to white, Christian, heterosexual values while repressing the underlying contradictions within the construction of masculine identities. Ailey and Pomare not only asserted the specificity of black experience as something distinct from, but not subordinate to, white experience but did so by developing movement vocabularies and choreographic forms whose hybridity would have been anathema to Shawn. Some of their most interesting works dramatised situations where lone individuals appeared to be on the edge of breaking down by using fragmentation to draw attention to underlying contradictions within the construction of masculine subjectivities. Hybridity and fragmentation also occurred in Cunningham and Paxton’s works. Their use of avant-garde strategies also disrupted and problematised the aesthetic values that informed the work of Shawn, Graham, and Limón. In doing so, they found ways of presenting male dancing bodies that refused to conform with the kinds of positive stereotypes in these older choreographers’ works. These positive stereotypes, of course, no longer had much currency in post-war US. By the 1940s and 1950s pressures to conform with traditional, tough norms of masculine identity and behaviour were 112

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giving way to new models of masculinity. These came as a result of the rise of corporate US along with new anxieties about homosexuality that were a consequence of the Cold War. If degeneracy and feminisation seemed to be undermining traditional masculine ideals around the beginning of the twentieth century, by mid century the problem seemed to have shifted to problems in the world of managerial work and suburban family life. Barbara Ehrenreich (1983) has discussed pressures on office-working, family men. The rise, in the 1950s, of the affluent consumer economy, she has suggested, gradually eroded the opportunities for men to live up to traditional American male values. Since consumerism was the motor driving the post-war economy, men had to be persuaded to set aside muscular, Christian values, with their associated Protestant work ethic, and spend. Writing in 1950, David Riesman proposed that the requirements of business dictated that the male role should move away from the goal-oriented, entrepreneurial man (who might have dreamed about frontier-breaking) to the easy-going, likeable male colleague. In this new, industrial society, it was not things that mattered or were a problem, but other people. Corporate culture, in his view, promoted conformism and false intimacy. ‘Today it is the “softness” of men,’ he wrote, ‘rather than the “hardness” of material that calls on talent and opens channels of social mobility’ (Riesman 1950: 127). These soft men, however, could not of course be homosexual. The Second World War had had a decisive impact on the development of gay and lesbian communities in the US. It had brought large numbers of people together and thus created situations in which individuals had greater opportunities to recognise their sexual orientations, and in which homosexual behaviour became far more commonplace for large numbers of people. In the 1950s, organisations such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis formed to campaign for gay and lesbian rights. Homosexual behaviour, however, was deemed to be un-American because it undermined Christian, family values and thus abetted the communist conspiracy. Senator McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives instigated purges of known homosexuals in state and government employment, creating an atmosphere of homophobic oppression (D’Emilio 1983: 41–53). Susan Manning has argued that Limón’s 1954 piece The Traitor, although ostensibly about Jesus and Judas, was also about the betrayals forced by McCarthy (2004: 198–200). Art historians Moira Roth (1977) and Fred Orton (1994) have argued that the composer John Cage and his partner Merce Cunningham, together with their close friends and associates the painters Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who were also for a while a gay couple, adopted an avant-garde ‘aesthetic of indifference’ in their work as a way of avoiding detection as homosexuals during this repressive period. As I shall show, Alvin Ailey was homosexual but adopted very different strategies for hiding the fact. 113

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For people in the US up until the 1940s, modernism in the arts had been largely associated with Europe in general and Paris in particular. Whereas modernism was international, the US was, in terms of political outlook, isolationist for most of the twentieth century up until 1943. US entry into the Second World War was accompanied by a change of political direction. The US people, some then argued, needed to take on the mantle of world leadership and make the twentieth century the American century (Wilkie 1943). Eva Cockcroft (1985) and Serge Guilbaut (1985, 1990) have described the transitional process, through which US abstract expressionist painting was taken up and promoted abroad through State Department-sponsored exhibitions, as part of the internationalisation of US culture. Abstract expressionism was cast in the role of the ‘free’, progressive, and above all modern art of the ‘free world’ in contrast to socialist realism, the politically restrained, and old fashioned representational art advocated by the Communist Party. As Naima Prevots (1998) has shown, US dance companies were also sent on foreign tours funded by the State Department through the dance panel of the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA). One of the fascinating details that emerges from Prevots’s research is the fact that ANTA received applications to support foreign tours by both Ailey and Cunningham’s dance companies. The way in which the dance panel responded to these provides a further point of comparison between the two choreographers. Two separate applications were made on Cunningham’s behalf. In 1955 the music panel wanted to support a Pacific Asian tour by John Cage, David Tudor, and Cunningham’s company, but this was turned down by the dance panel at three successive meetings, despite a direct appeal by the composer Virgil Thompson representing the music panel (Prevots 1998: 53–4). When in 1960 Cunningham and Cage were invited to attend a festival in Berlin and applied to ANTA for transport costs, the music panel again supported them but the dance panel again turned them down. On this occasion, as Prevots reveals, the dance panel considered Cage and Cunningham’s repertoire, which included Summerspace, Rune, Changeling, and Antic Meet, was merely sensational and the artists ‘more interested in making newspaper copy’ (ibid.: 56). ANTA did, however, support a Pacific Asian tour by Alvin Ailey in 1962, having been interested in his work since 1958 (ibid.: 93–101). Sending African American artists abroad had become a priority for the State Department in order to counteract the negative image of racist segregation in the southern US, this being something which the activities of the Civil Rights movement were drawing to international attention. Prevots reveals, however, that the dance panel interfered in Ailey’s choice of pieces to take on tour, suggesting that he cut from his company’s programme To José Clemente Orozco, a piece by his former mentor Lester Horton. Orozco was a revolutionary socialist Mexican mural painter and 114

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an admirer of the former communist leader Leon Trotsky. Prevots notes: ‘Although not explicitly anti-capitalist, Horton’s dance celebrated the poor and downtrodden Mexican peasant’ (ibid.: 97). Gilbaut argues that, as a result of State Department sponsorship, the anti-capitalist criticism of some of the foremost US painters became hidden and silenced as their works were promoted as representative of freedom, and this seems also to have been the case with dance. What was stressed in the new liberal US politics was these artists’ individualism. As Guilbaut puts it: ‘In the modern world which brutally stifles the individual, the artist [became] a rampart, an example of will against the uniformity of totalitarian society’ (1985: 162). This kind of artistic individualism, particularly where painting was concerned, had a specifically masculine quality: ‘Only the virility of an art like [Jackson] Pollock’s, its brutality, ruggedness, and individualism, could revitalise modern culture, traditionally represented by Paris, and effeminised by too much praise’ (ibid.: 161). The 1940s and 1950s was a time when most US modern dancers were highly individualistic. As Marcia Siegel puts it: ‘In this period before eclectic, ballet-based training reduced most modern dancing to stylelessness, great dancing personalities could be accepted as interpreters of particular points of view’ (1987: 237). She remembered Ailey, who retired as a performer in 1956, as a magnetic dancer (ibid.: 286). Where representations of masculinity are concerned, Ailey’s work continued the kind of rugged individualism that I identified in the last chapter within Shawn’s choreography for male dancers. Like Shawn, Ailey used an appearance of heterosexual normativity to closet his own homosexuality. Nevertheless, some of Ailey’s male roles, such as Pomare’s junkie, cited a failure to live up to such masculine ‘ideals’ as a way of presenting social, if not explicitly anti-capitalist critique. Although Ailey was never as uncompromisingly radical as Pomare, his work too deplored a situation in which those who enjoyed America’s sophisticated plenty, ignored the isolated poverty in their midst. Cunningham and Paxton, as I will show, produced works that, in many ways, staged a refusal to conform to these masculine ‘ideals’. In their different ways, they demonstrated possibilities for opting out of the rugged, virile, artistic individualism valorised within abstract expressionism, as well as rejecting the bland uniformity which, as Ehrenreich suggests, typified corporate executives in the US. Dee Reynolds has argued that, in Cunningham’s decentred approach to choreographic structure and form, dancers related to one another in ways that rejected the kinds of corporate conformism that Riesman had criticised. In Reynolds’s view, dancers in Cunningham’s work were not dependent on any other dancer as a central focus but each functioned as a separate centre with their energies very self-contained. Rather than needing to conform and create falsely intimate working relations with one another, the impersonality of these interactions resisted false intimacy.1 A comparable impersonality can be identified in 115

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Paxton’s dances during the 1960s, while Contact Improvisation, which he helped initiate in the early 1970s, was widely seen at the time as a countercultural form that rejected the values of mainstream corporate US society. I noted, in the last chapter, José Limón’s dream of the President of the US leading the nation in a solemn dance before the Dome of the Capitol (Limón 1966: 86). He may have imagined this proceeding with the stately gravity of the opening quartet of The Moor’s Pavane. Very different ideas about community and sociality were suggested in works by Ailey, Pomare, Cunningham, and Paxton and very different ways of relating to, or reacting against, the dominant gender ideologies of post-war America. ALVIN AILEY AND BLACK MASCULINITY Two pieces which Alvin Ailey took on his 1962 Pacific Asian tour have remained in the company’s repertoire. These are Blues Suite (1958), his first piece for what was then a newly formed group of African American dancers, and the signature piece he made two years later, Revelations (1960). Together, these explored Ailey’s memories of black people in Brazos Valley, Texas, where he had lived until the age of eleven. Set to classic blues songs, Blues Suite showed the highs and lows of night life in a small, poor, black town, while Revelations, set to Negro spirituals, explored the religious faith and communal spirit found in black Baptist rituals. Lynne Fauley Emery has argued that it is Ailey’s ‘blending of the black heritage with modern dance that results in his greatness’ (1988: 275). In many ways, his main achievement is that he changed US attitudes towards black dancers by showing that they could dance in as broad a range of ways as white dancers. Blues Suite and Revelations were instrumental in achieving this. On the 1962 tour, Ailey deliberately included one white woman dancer, Connie Greco, and since then his company has remained integrated, although the dancers are predominantly black. One thing that integration proves is that what makes Alvin Ailey’s work African American is not some essential, authentic quality which only black dancers can bring to their dancing, but what Brenda Dixon Gottschild (1996) calls the Africanist aesthetic informing the choreography. Joyce Aschenbrenner (1980), reviewing the way white critics reviewed black dance, has said that they (and by implication the dominant, white, male point of view) had come to expect black male dancers to be highly energetic in performance and display a supposedly innate sense of rhythm. Thomas Defrantz points out that Ailey very deliberately set out to challenge this limited view of black dancing. The range of different kinds of role, expressive quality, and technical skill that Revelations demanded, gave the black dancers who first performed it in the 1960s opportunities to demonstrate their comprehensive artistry and capabilities. ‘Ailey’s dancers’, Defrantz concludes, ‘effectively trumped derisive speculation about the possibilities of African American 116

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concert dance. They transformed complex encodings of political resistance, musical ability, and religious narrative onto their bodies to imply a historical reach of black culture, continued here by the act of concert dancing’ (2004: 15). The dancers that Ailey found to work with in the late 1950s and early 1960s had a variety of different movement backgrounds. Some, such as Ailey himself, had trained with Lester Horton in Los Angeles during the late 1940s and early 1950s, some had learnt Graham technique, some were trained in ballet, and many, such as Ailey himself, had danced in Broadway musicals. With this broad range of skill and experience at his disposal, Ailey’s early work was hybrid. Blues Suite, as Defrantz points out, ‘contains sections of early twentieth-century social dances, Horton technique, Jack Cole-inspired jazz dance, and ballet partnering’ (ibid.: xiv). In his later work, and in later versions of Revelations, this became synthesised into an extremely successful and popular style. Revelations has been performed more than any other modern dance piece, and is still in the company’s repertoire today, over 45 years after its creation. As Susan Manning has noted: ‘after 1970 a significant fraction of white critics objected to what they perceived as a decline in the quality of Revelations’ (2004: 220). This, she argued, was through an inability to overcome the sense that ‘modern dance and Broadway inhabit separate spheres’ (ibid.: 221), an opinion that they only overcame after Ailey’s death in 1989. Along with the popular styles and references in Ailey’s work went some very conventional ways of representing masculinity. Most of the choreography Ailey created for male dancers fits into the sorts of representation of masculinity that have already been discussed in the last chapter. Like Shawn, Ailey choreographed rugged, hypermasculine roles that deflected any suggestion that he or any of his male dancers might be gay. But their male dancers’ bodies were often shown off in his work in a similar way to the male display dances which Graham made in her Greek pieces. Some of the more celebratory sections in Ailey’s works contain passages for dancers that could be compared to Graham’s passages for what she called ‘celestial acrobats’; Ailey’s choreography, however, is more balletic, with high extensions and pirouettes, and it can sometimes be jazzy, with fluid and rhythmic movements of the pelvis. Ailey gradually synthesised white European- and African-derived dance and music traditions. During the 1950s, Ailey worked with many modern dance choreographers including Anna Sokolow, from whom he said he had learned ‘how to go inside one’s self for themes’ (quoted in Mazo 1978: 11). As in the roles Limón made for himself, Ailey made roles that allowed his male dancers to express their capacity for experiencing openly and deeply the emotional impact of dramatic situations. They sometimes even admit to male vulnerability in ways that are rare in US dance. Ailey started exploring this when the avant-garde were beginning to react against the emotional 117

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expressionism of an older generation of modern dance choreographers, a point to which I will return. Masculinity, in Ailey’s dances, cannot therefore be easily pinned down. The continuing popularity of Ailey’s work in general, and of Revelations in particular, I suggest, does not relate to a simple assertion of normative heterosexual masculinity but to the plurality of possibilities his works sometimes suggest. While, in their citation of popular forms, they have sometimes colluded with stereotypes regarding the black male body, they have also hinted at the discomfort and stress of being seen in such limited and damaging ways. Revelations stages a spiritual and emotional journey; from the outcast sinner’s loneliness and worthlessness, through repentance and a yearning for redemption, to baptism and joyful inclusion in a powerful community of believers. Revelations is invariably the last dance in the company’s programme and, as everyone who has seen it knows, its final rousing section ‘Rocka My Soul’ unfailingly brings the audience to their feet. If, on one level, Revelations exemplifies a Christian message, on another this journey from worthlessness to freedom can also be interpreted as release from slavery and racism. Black churches have played a central role in the buffers that African American people created to ward off the nihilism of giving in to despair in response to the experience of slavery and racism. These buffers, as Cornell West has put it, ‘equip black folk with cultural armor to beat back the demons of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lovelessness’ (1992: 40). Revelations offers hope for a brighter future. This positive, Christian message comes with conservative gender representation. As Defrantz notes: ‘The strict gender coding confirms traditional roles for men and women in the world of dance, even if those roles do allow for female leadership in some scenes, as in the waterside baptism’ (2004: 24). If the first thing that people remember about Revelations is its rousing ending, the second is, surely, the powerful male presence in the early sections as men stretch out in anguish then collapse in resignation, showing the rippling muscles of the bare upper bodies. This runs the danger of eroticising black male bodies for the pleasure of white spectators. Parts of Ailey’s earlier Blues Suite, however, not only suggest an awareness of this objectifying gaze, but, also, an unease which, to some extent, troubles and problematises it. Blues Suite drew on Ailey’s childhood memories of night life in the Honky Tonk saloons of Brazos Valley in Texas. It was therefore tinged with nostalgia for the past, as Ailey, an upcoming artist in the big city, looked back to his poor working-class origins. Joseph Mazo describes the suite’s central theme as ‘the dragging routine of a small town, with no work and no place to go’ (1978: 39). Beginning and ending with Good Morning Blues, it consists of several short vignettes, each danced to a classic blues song. Backwater Blues, the central duet, explores a tense, teasing relationship between a stereotypical black stud, whose bare torso gleams 118

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behind his open black leather waistcoat, and his lady in high heels and wearing a feather boa, who, as the piece opens, is posed half way up a ladder. When she comes down, the spectator might expect an imperceptible transition into partnered dancing; but instead the song comes to an end, and in the ensuing awkward silence the woman glares at the man and gives him the cold shoulder (Figure 5.1). Backwater Blues plays with the expectation that the couple will execute a culminating sequence of ever higher and more technically demanding lifts. This is what the stud clearly wants to happen. Because his desire coincides with that of the (assumed male) spectator, the structure of the piece invites and, indeed, almost determines that the audience gazes from a male point of view. One might almost say they become accomplices in rape, when he more or less forces her to dance with him in a duet full of showy and precarious lifts. Steve Neale’s observation (in Chapter 1) that women are a problem and a mystery certainly applies to Backwater Blues. The stud, as bearer of the audience’s gaze, clearly cannot understand what she wants, or at least

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11 Figure 5.1 Alvin Ailey and Carmen de Lavallade in Jazz Piece, which subsequently became Backwater Blues in Blues Suite.

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Photo by Sandor Acs. Courtesy of Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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why she doesn’t want him. As a man, there is no mystery about him, though. His movements and the gestures through which he expresses his self-confident manner – his swaggering walk and the dismissive shrugs with which he responds to each rejection – are open, large, unambiguous. These may resemble those of the Husbandman in Graham’s earlier Appalachian Spring, but, when the audience look at the stud, testing and daring him to prove he is not unmanly, they are also objectifying the otherness of his ‘race’ and colour. This is one way of understanding the stud’s macho behaviour. All he has of value is his body and his sexuality. Robert Staples (1982) describes black macho behaviour as the destructive passing on, by a poor black, of the negative image of himself which society succeeds in making him internalise. In this view, the only way he has of establishing his value is through projecting his negative image of himself onto others more abject than himself, in this case the black woman on the ladder, and behaving in an oppressive way towards her. By ‘putting her down’, he further reinforces the abject, oppressed status they both share as blacks. More recent approaches to black masculinity (e.g. Mercer 1994) stress the aesthetic dimensions of subcultural style. His swaggering manner of bodily display exemplifies his coolness and uses high-affect juxtapositions, qualities which Gottschild identifies as Africanist (1996: 13–19). Backwater Blues contains wonderful roles that are a gift for the right performers. But, however well or badly these are performed, the roles themselves are trapped within stereotypical conventions which reinforce the terms of their own oppression. The stud is responding, as Parker and Sedgwick put it, to the dare to prove his masculinity by asserting that he is a belatedly Darwinian being whose sexual passion knows no reason. Where a white dancer asserts that his sexual passion knows no reason, he is implying that white men have not entirely lost touch with their essential, ‘primitive’, biological nature. But where a black dancer evokes the same imagery, there is a danger that he will merely reinforce the racist stereotype of blacks as an archaic link in the evolutionary chain, who, as Bill T. Jones has observed (in Chapter 2) have a prick down to their knees. Another aspect of this negative image is represented in the misfit or loser in the final section of Blues Suite. When he is first introduced, this character is a clown-like figure. While everyone else has paired off with a partner in a dance that seems to be degenerating into a sexual romp, the misfit is on his own, and his attempts to join in are repulsed with increasing finality. By the end, sitting cut off from the rest of the dancers, he is an abject wreck: his shoulders twitch up and down like someone who is suffering a nervous breakdown. When one of the women notices this and lays a friendly arm on his shoulder, he reacts as if she has given him an electric shock, recoiling away from her in a paranoid manner. The misfit and the stud are opposite faces of the same coin. The stud asserts 120

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his male presence within the narrative and projects it to the audience, inviting identification. The performer dancing the loser’s role needs to be strong enough to give the impression of weakness and failure. The character’s inability to assert his presence within the narrative, and the performer’s ability to project this to the spectator, invites sympathy and shame. Both characters are driven, in their different ways, by the same sexual imperative to prove themselves as men. Ailey, however, shows us that, largely because of their colour and class position, the imperative is so absolute and extreme that they cannot possibly achieve anything through responding to it. Although Ailey’s work does not avoid or question stereotypes, it is in moments like these that performers can reveal the stereotypes’ underlying racist oppression. Pomare’s Blues for the Jungle presents a useful point of comparison with these two early pieces by Ailey. Where Ailey tried to find moderate middle ground, Pomare was uncompromisingly radical. Blues for the Jungle, which was filmed in 1967, started with a slave auction and then showed a prison chain gang before the scene shifted to a contemporary inner-city ghetto. Here, the dramaturgy suggested black people are still enslaved though the chains are now prostitution, domestic violence, drugs, and the Church. Whereas Revelations promised hope through religious redemption, Blues for the Jungle showed a charismatic preacher manipulating his followers so that they ignored the hopelessness and lovelessness surrounding them. In contrast to the familiar blues songs in Blues Suite, Blues for the Jungle used up-to-date, harsh, anarchic bebop. While Pomare’s ghetto-dwelling junkie showed how much further the small town loser in Blues Suite still had to fall, Blues Suite showed how far, in terms of social mobility, Ailey had progressed. The junkie’s movements were uptight and twitchy as he first smoked, then snorted, then injected his drugs, reacting to each hit with increasing intensity. Although he seemed to be staggering out of control, each sequence was precisely choreographed to fit the musical counts. Having fallen off the front of the stage to panhandle audience members, his return coincided exactly with the return of the music’s central theme. LeRoi Jones could have been describing Pomare when he wrote in 1963: The young Negro intellectuals of the fifties and sixties realize – many of them perhaps emotionally – that a society whose only strength lies in its ability to destroy itself and the rest of the world has small claim towards defining or appreciating intelligence or beauty. (1995: 232) The choreography of the junkie’s solo betrayed a rational, calculating intelligence which, taken alongside the character’s brutal insensitivity and isolation, are clearly masculine attributes. Yet the junkie’s masculinity had nothing in common with either Shawn’s classical white athletes nor 121

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Graham’s idolised Greek men, or even with Ailey’s simmering black studs. Pomare recognised the illusory nature of socially sanctioned ideals. If there was anything beautiful about his junkie, it was the quality of his anger. His total absorption and almost autistic lack of awareness of others allowed the spectator to view the social implications of the narrative in a way that recalled the contemporaneous work of the Living Theater. This, perhaps, was what made the 1967 audience at the 92nd Street Y burst into cheers. The white avant-garde dancers, to whom I now turn, also exemplified a rational, masculine intelligence in their work and also recognised the illusory nature of socially sanctioned ideals. But the underlying anger of Blues for the Jungle and Blues Suite and the ironic, apolitical indifference of the white avant-garde, seemed to be coming from different worlds. MERCE CUNNINGHAM’S ANTI-HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURES There is a canonical view of Merce Cunningham’s key role in the development of US modern dance, according to which he is responsible for purging modern dance of narrative, symbolism, and emotional expressionism. His work is, thus, seen as a reaction against that of Martha Graham, with whom he began his performing career. His use of chance procedures to make choreographic decisions (tossing coins, using the I Ching, and so on) supposedly ensures that his personal preferences have no influence on the decisions made while creating his work, thus freeing him to discover new aesthetic possibilities within abstract dance movement. As I noted in Chapter 2, this move into abstraction from representation and expression (understood in the limited sense of imitation and self-expression) is seen as a modernist one. Where gender is concerned, it could be said that Cunningham, along with Alwin Nikolai, more or less pioneered the presentation of what might be termed unisex choreography – theatre dance in which, superficially at least, differences between male and female dancers are not especially important to an appreciation of the aesthetic possibilities within abstract dance movement. The ‘official’ view is that there are no right or wrong ways of looking at Cunningham’s work: it is up to spectators to devise their own. ‘There are no symbols, relax and enjoy’ Cunningham says at the end of a short talk about his work during the 1976 film Event for Television.2 As scholars and critics move on from the ‘official’ view, some, such as Dee Reynolds, have interpreted the abstract relations between dancers, including those between male and female dancers, in his work (and in storyless, abstract dance works by ‘post-Cunningham’ choreographers) as models of social relations. In this view, the pleasure of watching Cunningham’s work comes, in part, from appreciation of the open forms and structures he has explored, and their subversive, anti-hierarchical 122

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effects. Concerns about the way dance represents issues of identity has led to a revision of modernist ideas about abstract, storyless dance. From this revisionist point of view, some scholars and critics have criticised Cunningham for failing to recognise a need to challenge normative ideas about gender, ‘race’, and sexuality. Jill Johnston (1987), reviewing Cunningham’s Roaratorio (1983), criticised its conventional use of ballet partnering. Susan Foster (2001) has argued that Cunningham’s focus on formal issues has allowed him to devise a closet with which to deflect any enquiries about his homosexuality, and she and Yutian Wong (2002) both argue that he has failed to recognise the racial inequalities embodied in modern dance. The fascination of Cunningham’s work is the way it has opened up so many new possibilities, not all of which Cunningham himself has chosen to develop. Underlying Foster and Johnston’s criticisms, I suggest, is disappointment that Cunningham had not chosen to acknowledge the potential within his work for seeing gender, sexuality, and whiteness in new ways. What then is this potential? Carolyn Brown, who was a leading member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1953 to 1972, has observed: ‘Perhaps Merce feels that his dances need have no meaning for anyone but him; certainly he has taken precautions to see that little of it is intelligible to an outsider, or even for that matter to an insider. But he does leave clues’ (1975: 25). Cunningham’s reluctance to talk about any meanings in his work has its origins in the early 1950s, when he was making a transition between making work in an intuitive way and a new approach which used chance procedures. As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, this was an especially repressive period for US homosexuals. In 1952, Cunningham wrote an essay ‘Space, time and dance’ which describes his radically open approach to abstract composition. Although this is largely concerned with formal and aesthetic issues, there are nevertheless clues in it about the kinds of meaning Cunningham found in his work. In his essay, Cunningham compares choreographic and pictorial space, observing that while ballet and modern dance choreographers use only part of available stage space, some modern painters had a more open attitude. I assume he was referring to the overall forms devised by abstract expressionist and colour field painters. He wrote: A prevalent feeling among many painters that lets them make a space in which anything can happen is a feeling that dancers can have too. Imitating the way nature makes a space and puts lots of things in it, heavy and light, little and big, all unrelated, yet each affecting all the others. (1992: 38) Like these paintings, Cunningham has often used stage space in an allover, unfocused way, as if, as he put it, there are no fixed points in space. 123

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Noting that space and time cannot be disconnected, Cunningham applied the same approach to analysing time structures in modern dance. There is a tendency, he suggested, to build up to a crisis and then let this die down. Cunningham proposed, instead, diffusing events throughout the piece, and he illustrated this by using the example of a newspaper: Since our lives both by nature [and] by the newspapers are so full of crises that one is no longer aware of it, then it is clear that life goes on regardless, and further that each thing can be and is separate from each and every other, viz: the continuity of the newspaper headlines. (Ibid.: 38–9) Like a newspaper, Cunningham’s dance pieces seem to comprise sequences of sometimes overlapping events that take place in simultaneous but fragmented and discontinuous ways. What is particularly useful about this example is the attitude it implies towards newspaper headlines. There are so many crises, Cunningham suggests, that one becomes indifferent towards them. If one asks what sorts of crisis the newspapers were reporting in the US during the early 1950s, the answer is the events provoked by Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was in 1952 that McCarthy started harassing government departments to sack any homosexual employees. It was also a year in which there was intense activity around the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, two left-wing Jewish intellectuals; convicted in 1950 of spying, they were executed in 1953. The art historian Moira Roth (1977) has connected the repressive atmosphere during the Cold War period to the development by Cage, Cunningham, Johns, and Rauschenberg of what she calls an aesthetic of indifference. She describes this as: ‘an art characterised by tones of neutrality, passivity, irony and, often, negation’ (1977: 48). She argues that it is no accident that they should have adopted, at this time, so many avant-garde strategies that had been developed by the Dadaists. Cage befriended one of the best-known Dadaists, Marcel Duchamp, in the late 1940s. Dada, she points out, was a movement ‘which had been activated by feelings of moral anger, political impotency, and nihilism engendered by the First World War’ (ibid.: 47). Some artists at the time of the McCarthy witch hunts, she suggests, found themselves similarly ‘paralysed when called upon to act on their convictions, and this paralysis frequently appeared as indifference’ (ibid.). Cage, Cunningham, Johns, and Rauschenberg, she argues, ‘consciously espoused indifference as a virtue, as the correct way to deal with an uncertain world’ (ibid.). All four artists used chance in their work which, Roth argues, was a gesture of extreme passivity: ‘a decision not to assert but rather to let happen what may . . . there are no messages, no feelings and no ideas. Only emptiness’ (ibid.: 50). 124

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Roth has pointed out that this sensibility was dandy-like in contrast to the more macho investments of self which characterised the work of the then dominant abstract expressionist painters of the New York School. While Roth has criticised Cage and fellow artists for the seemingly apolitical stance of their aesthetic sensibility, the queer historian Jonathan Katz (1998) has pointed out that the 1950s was probably the most homophobic period of US history. He, therefore, argues that these US artists’ shared aesthetic stance constituted a strategic way of resisting complicity with inimical social and political pressures. Being openly gay, he points out, was not a realistic option in the 1950s for Cage, Cunningham, Johns, or Rauschenberg. By troubling and undermining the normative, heterosexual way masculinity was represented within abstract expressionist painting and within expressive ideologies of dance and music, Katz suggests, Cage and fellow artists were far from being complicit with hegemonic norms. Roth also notes that Johns painted his first US flag in 1954 in the year following the execution of the Rosenbergs, and she questions Johns’ claim that the flag was merely inspired by a dream (1977: 51). These flag paintings superficially conformed with most of the formal characteristics of abstract expressionist painting; they were all-over, flat, and modernist. But Johns’s cool, conceptual approach contrasted with the brutal, rugged, individualistic qualities that Pollock’s paintings were believed to express. These, as I noted earlier, were normatively masculine. Roth has observed that: ‘Again and again during the 1950s, Johns took emotion laden material and ran it through a filter of indifference’ (ibid.: 52). Cunningham’s work also filtered out the emotion-laden potential within modern dance. Susan Foster suggests that the masculine rationality of Cunningham’s work ‘distinguishes it from the chaotic excavations of interiority that his female colleagues conducted’ (2001: 177). Rationality is not the most appropriate description of the often quirky and unconventional results of Cunningham’s chance procedures. There were also, of course, male dance artists, as well as female ones, who made and performed emotion-laden material, including not only José Limón but also some African American dancers. These male dancers and painters excavated their male psyches, mastering the resulting material in a virile way in order to pull it together into a conventionally coherent whole. Cunningham, by trying to remain as neutral as possible, was taking up a passive position that suggested very different ways of signifying masculinity, and this is particularly evident in the solos he made for himself. Johns destroyed all his paintings prior to 1954. According to Carolyn Brown, in 1953 Cunningham stopped giving information about any personal meanings his work might have had; he asked that information about meanings in his earlier work be taken out of an article being written by Remy Charlip (a member of his company) for the January 1954 edition of Dance Magazine (Brown et al. 1992: 111). Cunningham has said that Septet (1953) was the last piece he made using a wholly intuitive process. Katz, 125

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Orton, and Roth all imply Cunningham and Johns were hiding things about what their works meant to them at a time when, as homosexuals, they were particularly vulnerable. Understanding how they were hiding meanings elucidates the ways in which Cunningham has represented gender and sexuality in his work. Orton argues that Johns used allegorical signifying structures in his paintings, and I contend that the same is true in Cunningham’s work, including the way he signified his gender and sexuality. Orton sums up the role allegory played in late twentieth-century art: Realising that the modern world is a space wherein things and meanings disengage – that the world is a thing that designates not a single, total, universal meaning but a plurality of distinct and isolated meanings – the allegorist works to restore some semblance of connection between them whilst hanging on to and asserting the distinction between experience and the representation of experience, between signifier and referent. (1994: 126) Cunningham’s comments about newspaper headlines suggest his world view was one in which things and meanings disengage. Examination of his choreography, I suggest, shows signs of an attempt to restore connections while asserting the distinction between signifier and referent. Septet is performed to Trois morceau en forme d’un poire (‘Three pieces in the form of a pear’, 1903), a series of piano duets by Erik Satie. When Satie, a composer associated with Paris Dada, showed his fellow composer Claude Debussy sketches for the work, the latter said it lacked form. Satie’s title, as Cage pointed out, suggests that it did indeed have a form, that of a pear (Vaughan 1997: 77). Confusingly, the music consists of seven rather than three pieces, hence the title of Cunningham’s piece (which normally has a cast of six rather than seven dancers). Like Satie’s music it contains non sequiturs and discontinuities, deliberate confusions and false trails. In his 1968 book Changes, Cunningham wrote of Septet, ‘What makes a movement at one moment grave, and the same at the next, humorous?’ (1968: n.p.). It is made of many such seemingly random juxtapositions, which are, of course, like the juxtapositions of items in a newspaper. Each of its sections initially had a title: these were (in order) ‘In the Garden’, ‘In the Music Hall’, ‘In the Tea House’, ‘In the Playground’, ‘In the Morgue’, ‘In the Distance’, ‘In the End’.3 These suggest some sort of narrative, and Carolyn Brown suggests that this was indeed the case (1975: 28), although this is probably now irretrievable. A programme note from the 1950s reads: ‘The poetic ambiguity of the music and dance titles express the character of this ballet, the subject of which is Eros, and the occurrence of which is at the intersection of joy and sorrow’ (quoted in Siegel 1981: 325). One obvious moment in Septet 126

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where this idea is explored is in Cunningham’s solo in the second section, ‘In the music hall’. This was a vigorous and technically demanding solo full of ballet-derived movements that didn’t quite look right. As Marcia Siegel notes, it was ‘punctuated with very odd gestures – shoulder shakes, contractions of the upper back, a sudden fall back towards his heels and an equally quick recovery’ (ibid.: 328). Thus what might have been a powerful, manly solo was troubled and problematised. At more than one moment in this solo, he brought his hand up in front of him to hide his face, then suddenly whisked it up and away to reveal a clown-like facial expression, his mouth pursed in a big ‘O’. Hiding it once more his expression reverted to neutral. It was thus at one moment grave, and the same at the next, humorous. Cunningham was troubling the idea that emotional expression in dance is an eruption of underlying psychological pressures. In Orton’s terms, he was also asserting the distinction between experience and the representation of experience, generating affects that were disengaged from emotions. The effect of this was to try in an allegorical way to restore some connection between his dancing and emotions such as joy and sorrow, but one that was free of the psychological associations which expressive dancing had in the work of Graham and Limón. Stripped of these emotions, his performance expressed an anonymous, neutral presence. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Cunningham continued making solos for himself that were sometimes quirky and witty, sometimes disconcertingly odd. As he has commented in a much quoted remark: ‘I think dance only comes alive when it gets awkward again’ (Brown 1975: 26). Susan Foster has suggested that he sometimes appeared the odd man out in his work, ‘incidentally isolated then nonclimactically reintegrated into the group’s activities’ (2001: 178). Valda Setterfield has recalled an ‘Event’ during the early 1970s during which Cunningham shaved on stage. She says he performed it, ‘with the kind of attention to the brush and the action which was the same thing as when he was dancing. It gave one a real understanding of the fact that everything was important’ (Vaughan et al. 1992: 113). Here, as elsewhere, Cunningham did not impose his presence in an energetic, or dynamic, or strong way, or dance material which covered space in a commanding manner – the ways in which, I have argued, masculinity is conventionally signified in Western theatre dance. Instead, the quality of his attention and the clarity with which he executed his material, strongly directed the focus of his spectators. To claim attention in what Fried calls a ‘theatrical’ way conforms with norms of masculine behaviour. Setterfield, however, suggests that Cunningham attracted attention through his absolute absorption in his actions. The avant-garde nature of shaving during a dance performance, however, disrupted habitual patterns of spectatorship and challenged the spectator to become aware of his or her own activities as observer. 127

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Shaving is an ordinary, everyday male activity, suggesting the possibility that Cunningham was trying to make an allegorical reconnection between performances of masculinity in daily life and in dance. While this is unverifiable, an incident connected with Cunningham’s piece Rainforest (1968) illustrates a similarly unexpected, allegorical reference by Cunningham and Johns. In 1968 Cunningham decided to ask Andy Warhol if they could use his installation Silver Clouds (reflective mylar pillows filled with helium gas) as décor for Rainforest. Warhol agreed and when asked about costumes, suggested the dancers go naked. Cunningham was not prepared to do this, so Jasper Johns, who was at the time overseeing the sets and costumes for Cunningham’s company, decided to make a series of incisions into the dancers’ leotards and tights to reveal the naked skin underneath. The effect of the ripped costumes was one of texture which subverted the eroticism that naked skin might otherwise have generated. At the same time, they referred indirectly, for anyone who knew, to the idea of nakedness and eroticism. In Orton’s terms, Johns tried to restore some semblance of connection between the idea of the erotic – which total nakedness would convey – and the small glimpses of bare skin whose materiality was emphasised by the contrasting textures of the ripped costumes. The end result was to reveal naked skin while asserting the difference between these small tokens of it and the affects which nakedness might arouse. Since his 1980 piece Duets, made at a time when Cunningham was appearing much less in his own work, duets have become increasingly important within his choreography. Roaratorio was choreographed to a large-scale musical piece that John Cage composed in 1979. This made several references to the work of the Irish modernist novelist James Joyce and included traditional Irish drumming. While working on the choreography, Cunningham researched the dancing of Irish jigs and reels. David Vaughan notes that Cunningham used this to choreograph duets and dances ‘in which the partners change and then come back to the original couples’ (Cunningham quoted in Vaughan 1997: 223) because characters in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake are transformed into other characters. It was these duets that Jill Johnston criticised in her 1987 review. Johnston rejected the ‘official’ view that Cunningham had overturned most aspects of the nineteenth-century ballet tradition to create a radically new aesthetic. Johnston argued that, within the deep, or a priori structure of his pieces, Cunningham had not questioned traditional ways in which gender is represented, while younger choreographers (Johnston mentions David Gordon, Mark Morris, Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs) had done so. Johnston points out that Roaratorio had more ballet-derived lifts than one usually finds in a Cunningham dance: The way his men lift or carry or place or drag his women is much more like a vestigial echo of ballet than anything resembling the 128

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no-nonsense support of the ballerina for the purpose of exposing her line and ‘sex’ and sweeping her through pedestals in the air. Although Cunningham’s manipulations of women are comparatively matterof-fact, frequently like an afterthought, en passant really, they still appear to affirm, if only perfunctorily, the assumed dependency, weakness, helplessness, etc., of women. Certainly his women remain armless this way, except in the conventional decorative sense. But Cunningham would no doubt say that lifting is, simply, along with leaps, jumps, turns, etc., part of the raw material of his medium, something that bodies can do on stage, and to which he can apply his chance operations, obtaining the most interesting variations in rhythm and sequence. (1987: 105) An important part of what Johnston was saying is that she was disappointed by Cunningham, as if he had broken faith with the avant-garde through retaining rather than questioning the weak, dependent way women are traditionally represented in ballet. There are isolated cases where Cunningham has explored same sex partnering. In his 1993 piece Doubletoss, made the year after Cage’s death, was a section where, as David Vaughan describes it, ‘a number of duets [were] performed simultaneously by pairs of dancers, one in informal clothing, the other in black. Unusually for Cunningham, in this section men supported other men, and women supported other women’ (1997: 267). There is no evidence, however, that Cunningham was responding to the sorts of issue that concerned Johnston. As she suggests, Cunningham has attempted to ignore the differences between male and female dancers. Despite this neutral stance towards gender, a real blurring of masculinity and femininity rarely if ever occurs in his work. Male dancers rarely take on movement qualities and conventions that are in the range associated with feminine behaviour. Female dancers, however, get to dance material or movement qualities conventionally associated with masculinity, so that they get to be ‘normal’ rather than mysterious, problematic, and feminine. While Johnston was disappointed at Cunningham’s use of traditional balletic lifts, Moira Roth was disappointed that Cage, Cunningham, Johns, and Rauschenberg had not produced politically engaged work during the Cold War period. And Susan Foster was disappointed that Cunningham closeted his homosexuality. Yutian Wong’s (2002) criticism is that Cunningham and Cage drew on Chinese and Japanese cultural beliefs – the I Ching, Zen Buddhism – without acknowledging their privilege as white, Western, male artists. Because of what Roth called the aesthetic of indifference, Cunningham has left spectators absolutely free to become absorbed in his work in their own way. This, in effect, has ruled out the possibility of deliberately staging material that would direct them to look 129

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at gender, sexuality, or whiteness in any particular way. He has passively left spectators free rather than adopting strategies that were implicit in his work with which he could have deliberately freed them from ideologically determined ways of looking. Subsequent generations of choreographers have explored possibilities that Cunningham’s work suggested, in order to make work that creates ideological space for alternative ways of thinking and being. Many of the examples I discuss in the rest of this book do this. Cunningham’s pioneering explorations of open, non-hierarchical structures have been taken up by choreographers as a way of acknowledging differences and incorporated into dance works in inclusive ways. A cool, anonymous, neutral presence has become a means by which choreographers have deliberately subverted normative values. Many have also acknowledged the way that the modern world has pulled things and meanings apart and sought allegorical ways of reconnecting them. STEVE PAXTON AND CONTACT IMPROVISATION Steve Paxton danced in the Cunningham company between 1961 and 1964, and, in many ways, his work continued what Roth has called the aesthetics of indifference. Born in 1939, Paxton would have been in his early teens during the McCarthy witch hunts which Roth argued had such a decisive impact on Cunningham’s artistic development. Curiously, Paxton’s Section of a New Unfinished Work, a little-known solo he made in 1965, juxtaposed dancing with tape recordings of the 1954 ‘Army-McCarthy’ hearings. These were held after McCarthy had randomly fired accusations of communism towards certain Army officers. During them, Joseph Welch, chief attorney for the Army, is generally taken to have turned the tide of public opinion against McCarthy. His most famous line was: ‘Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?’ (Ewald 1984: 378). For this piece, Paxton wore a strange, thickly padded, ‘overbody’ costume of painted canvas that represented a female body. While the tape of McCarthy and Welch played, he danced, first, wearing a curly blonde wig, large white shorts and blouse, then changed into a more dowdy blue chiffon dress (Bear 1975: 27). This strange juxtaposition of material and imagery clearly did not convey any literal meanings. It suggested, however, what Fred Orton has described as an allegorist’s attempt to restore some semblance of connection in a modern world where things and meanings have disengaged (1994: 126). The same principle of juxtaposition underlies Flat (1964), the one piece of his from the early 1960s that is still being performed. In 1964 Paxton was a key member of the radical dance collective Judson Dance Theatre. 130

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In Flat, Paxton wore a suit (at the time an uncommon costume for dance) and brought on a chair at the start of the piece. He walked in a circle within a limited performance area around the chair, occasionally freezing in a pose which had been taken from a ‘score’ consisting of action photographs of athletes and sports men. After doing this for a while, he took off an item of clothing, hanging it on one of three hooks attached to his chest with surgical tape. The walking then continued for a while before another item was removed, and the piece proceeded in this way until Paxton was dressed only in his underpants (see Banes 1994). Flat purged the actions in the photo score of the kinetic excitement of the masculine athletic events to which they referred. Similarly, by revealing the male body as something to hang clothes on, Flat dismantled the erotic effects his nakedness might arouse. The slow pace, the lack of any development, climactic or otherwise, the lack of any physical tension or excitement in his everyday movements, Paxton’s dead-pan facial expressions – all of these can be seen as the antithesis of the bravura male solo. In Flat, as in many of his later solos, such as the series of improvisations he called Dancing (1973 on), Goldberg Variations (1986 on), and English Suite (1992 on) Paxton has continued to perform in ways which consistently dodge or defuse expectations of masculine display (see Burt 2002). Paxton’s own performance of his work, like Cunningham’s own personal solos, used an avant-garde aesthetic of indifference. If Cunningham, by trying not to influence the audience in any way, was attempting to undo the power relations between choreographer and spectator, then Paxton took this further through his use of non-hierarchical ways of structuring group works. Also anti-hierarchical was his use of everyday or pedestrian movements – walking, standing still, sitting down, smiling, and so on – which any able person can do. Paxton’s Satisfyin’ Lover (1967) exemplifies his egalitarianism. It is a piece for a large number of performers (anything from thirty to eighty-four) who just walk one by one, or in groups, across the width of the performance space in a prearranged sequence (for score see Banes 1980: 71–4). Jill Johnston, in a 1968 review of a performance of Paxton’s work, pointed to his interest in using an ‘incredible assortment of bodies, the any old bodies of our any old lives’. She goes on: And here they all were in this concert in the last dance, thirty-two any old wonderful people in Satisfyin Lover walking one after the other across the gymnasium in their any old clothes. The fat, the skinny, the medium, the slouched and the slumped, the straight and tall, the bowlegged and knock-kneed, the awkward, the elegant, the coarse, the delicate, the pregnant, the virginal, the you name it, by implication every postural possibility in the postural spectrum, that’s you and me in all our ordinary everyday who cares postural splendour. (1998: 154–5) 131

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Figure 5.2 Steve Paxton’s solos have consistently dodged or defused expectations of masculine display. Photo Ray Abbott, New Dance Magazine collection.

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It may be stating the obvious but the sorts of movement skill demanded by this sort of piece do not, in themselves, depend upon, or draw any particular attention to, the differences between the male and female performers. One might call it an example of unisex anti-choreography. Paxton, therefore, like Cunningham, could be said to have aimed at making choreography in which sexual difference is not important or significant. As with Flat, this piece offered the spectators a scene where dancers were doing so little and with such absorption that the spectator had little or nothing to become absorbed in, and thus became aware of his or her own act of looking. Contact improvisation, the form which Paxton was largely responsible for initiating in the 1970s, is, as Cynthia Novack (1990) has shown, imbued with and informed by non-hierarchical structures. The circumstances of its putative origin are worth noting. In the early 1970s Paxton was a member of a dance improvisation collective, The Grand Union, whose members also included Trisha Brown, David Gordon, and Yvonne Rainer who had all been members, a decade earlier, of Judson Dance Theatre. In January 1972, The Grand Union were in residence at Oberlin College, Ohio. Because women in the company had decided to teach a women-only workshop with students there, Paxton found himself working with a group of eight men in a large college gym. He taught them the structure of an improvisational solo he had made for himself; out of this developed the piece Magnesium (1972) which was videotaped at the time by Steve Christiansen. As Novack describes it: Performing on several wrestling mats, the men stagger about, crash into each other, fall, roll, and get up only to lurch around again. A lot of hand-clasping and pulling or dragging occurs, so that the dance looks like drunken wrestling at times. The performers have no orientation towards the audience, pursuing their falling with a tasklike attitude. (1990: 61) The piece ended with the men standing still for several minutes. What had started off as a rough and ready, all-male wrestling dancing had, within a decade, evolved into a form of improvised dance that had a set of sophisticated technical skills and was being practised internationally by both amateurs and professionals. In order to understand its implications for representations of masculinity, the rest of this section focuses on the way the avant-garde aesthetic of indifference affected the way men practised contact improvisation. Magnesium ended with the men standing still, while contact duets often begin with two partners standing still with their heads touching. In an interview in 1977, Paxton says he had found, in his 1960s pedestrian pieces, that standing still was not really, in its pure state, an everyday activity 133

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like walking or sitting, because ‘it’s rarely done in its pure state . . . walking and sitting are more common’ (1977: 6); so common that, Paxton goes on to say, the body’s potential is under-used by people living Western urban or suburban life styles: Watching the body for a long time, mainly in New York where I lived, and seeing the city life, seeing the many, many people sit, and watch television, and go to bed. They have two positions: they get up and walk a little bit, then they sit on their transportation to the office, where they sit all day. (1982: 13) This way of living, Paxton suggests, uses one per cent of our potential, whereas the more the body is employed, and trained, and becomes strong, ‘the better adjusted you are to what is occurring on all levels’ (ibid.). Contact, therefore, was a reaction against the stale inertia of urban life styles and, by implication, against the impersonality that David Riesman criticised within corporate America’s male executive culture. Many of the movement skills and qualities that contact improvisation employs derive from forms and practices that are generally associated with masculine rather than feminine behaviour. Paxton has been interested in the martial art Aikido, and suggests that what he learned in Aikido had unconsciously been used in developing contact. He commented that: Contact improvisation resembles Aikido quite a lot, in that they are both partnering forms and are both concerned with a very light and appropriate use of energy in fairly dangerous situations, one an act of aggression and the other an act of dance. They both rely on training or manipulating the instinctual reactions in some ways. (Ibid.: 13) As well as physical dangers and risks, there are also aesthetic ones involved in improvisation. As Paxton has observed, Cage and Cunningham’s use of chance procedures avoids aesthetic risks: ‘chance and indeterminacy allow the aesthetic pratfall wide berth’ (1972: 133). The contacter, however, risks pratfalls. Both physical and aesthetic risks, however, when taken by a male dancer, can be read as unproblematically positive masculine attributes. What is at issue, here, is not aesthetics but representation, and how the sorts of movement involved in contact dance create social meanings. Novack has argued that contact improvisation redefines women’s strength capacities and possibilities, and offers men opportunities to be physically close to both men and women without being thought to be confrontational or sexual. Contact dance makes representations that are socially expressive: women performing contact dance together, or a woman lifting a man in a contact duet might be seen as an activity which subverts and dismantles 134

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traditional ideas about women dancers. In contact dances, women can perform moves that demand a use of energy generally considered to be masculine, such as the sort of strength and energy needed to perform contact lifts. This may trouble and denaturalise certain assumptions about the performance of femininity in dance. The spectacle of a man and women or of two men dancing in contact may, sometimes, challenge a spectator to rethink masculine identities so as to include a potential for softness, non-competitiveness, responsiveness, and caring. In the 1970s and early 1980s, some male dancers used movement related to, or derived from, contact to explore issues relating to gender, including the groups Mangrove and Men Working (Burns 1980: 5–6; Novack 1990: 88, 100; Foster 2001: 183–7). Contact improvisation is a way in which men can develop a more relaxed awareness of the boundaries of their bodies, through flowing in and out of contact with another male body. When two men exhibit such a free attitude towards bodily intimacy in performance, this can trigger off homophobic fears. It is here, however, that the avant-garde aesthetic of indifference intervenes to disallow such interpretations. Veteran contacter Danny Lepkoff has said that he enjoys ‘being able to dance with men without being homosexual or even dealing with that issue at all’ (Novack 1990: 171–2). This may be fine from a social or therapeutic point of view, but ‘not dealing with that issue’ implies not thinking about sexual politics in performance. ‘Being oneself’ regardless of gender, as some contacters have suggested the form allows, may mean having no method of ensuring that brave new ways of dancing are any less oppressive, where sexual politics are concerned, than the bad old ones. Sexual politics were by this time a matter of public debate. Contact improvisation has, nevertheless, been used to create complex and sophisticated representations of masculinity. Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, whose work I discuss in the next chapter, showed that contact could become a means to convey a radical message about intersections between masculinity, sexuality, and ‘race’. Boris Charmatz and Dimitri Chamblas, whose work I discuss in Chapter 8, deliberately cited the rough, spontaneous, masculine qualities of Magnesium in their 1993 duet A bras le corps in a way that proposed new ways of thinking about the meanings generated by two men dancing together. CONCLUSION

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The experience of living in cities during the second half of the twentieth century has come up repeatedly in this chapter. Pomare’s work represented vignettes of inner-city, ghetto life while Ailey’s work recreated a nostalgic view of small-town life from the vantage point of the big city. Paxton argued the need for the physical training involved in contact improvisation by pointing out how little of the body’s potential is used in ordinary city 135

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life. Cunningham compared his choreography with the way newspapers juxtapose events that are otherwise unconnected so that the reader in effect becomes indifferent to them. This is the world view and experience of the city dweller. I have called this chapter ‘Dancing in the city’, not just because that is where all four of these choreographers lived and worked, but also because city life posed them particular ethical problems. In the 1968 address to the Association of American Dance Companies with which this chapter began, Pomare forthrightly stated: Personally as dancers I think that we should not be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust while performing Swan Lake on a gold-gilted [sic.] stage. But this is only my own approach and each of you must decide this for yourself. In these very committed times, not to be involved is an involvement, and not to chose is to have chosen. (1968: n.p.) Ailey and Pomare in their different ways were committed to making works that supported social changes which would improve the lives of African Americans. In doing so, their works drew attention to the pressures experienced by black men, and highlighted the dangers of hopelessness and despair. Moira Roth was highly critical of the aesthetics of indifference precisely because it allowed artists not to commit themselves in the way Pomare and others associated with the Black Arts Movement advocated. Her essay concludes that the aesthetics of indifference ‘advocated neutrality of feeling and denial of commitment in a period that otherwise might have produced an art of passion and commitment’ (1977: 53). But could they really have changed anything through their art at a time when the political consensus, as a whole, was being torn apart by its internal contradictions? Read as allegories, Cunningham and Paxton’s works witness the effects of these contradictions. Jonathan Katz has argued that the aesthetics of indifference offered artists a way of not giving in, or colluding with dominant norms, particularly those of gender and sexuality. One would not necessarily know from the dances discussed in this chapter which of the choreographers might have been gay. Rather than criticising some of them retrospectively for remaining in the closet, a later generation needs to understand the homophobic context which formed these choreographers’ world views. I have already mentioned the homophobia of the McCarthy period. The Black Arts Movement, as Defrantz notes, was also homophobic and not particularly interested in dance, although its ideas clearly informed the work of Ailey and Pomare (2004: 114). Cunningham would probably not have understood the nature of Johnston’s criticism of Roaratorio. Her life had been irrevocably changed by coming out as a lesbian feminist in the early 1970s (Johnston 1998: xiv–xv). The advent of Women’s and Gay Liberation, which meant 136

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so much to her, seems to have had no noticeable impact on Cunningham’s work. Nor did the Civil Rights movement. The next chapter looks at the effect that a new, critical awareness of gender, ‘race’, and sexuality had on the way choreographers who came to prominence in the 1970s approached the representation of masculinity.

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This chapter focuses on representations of masculinity in five works from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Three of these are from Europe: the German choreographer Pina Bausch’s Frühlingsopfer (‘The Rite of Spring’, 1975), her Blaubart (‘Bluebeard’, 1977), and the British choreographer Fergus Early’s solo Are You Right There Michael, Are You Right? (1982). The other two, from the US, are Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane’s duet Rotary Action (1982), and Trisha Brown’s piece Set and Reset (1983). Each of these five pieces, in different ways, exemplified a range of responses, from male and female choreographers on both sides of the Atlantic, to issues surrounding gender, ‘race’, and sexuality. These are issues that I have been considering in the previous two chapters. By the time Paxton, Lepkoff, and fellow dancers were developing contact improvisation in the 1970s, these, and the way that cultural forms mediated them, were becoming topics of sophisticated public debate of a kind that had not existed when other works discussed in Chapter 5 were being created. Kobena Mercer has pointed out that the politics of black liberation, spelt out in the Black Panther’s ten-point programme of 1966, inspired the ten-point charter of the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Gay Liberation Front’s demands in 1969 (1994: 303). The idea of liberation also underlay the avant-garde approaches to representation which these five dance pieces employed. In giving this chapter the title ‘Masculinity and Liberation’ I do not necessarily mean that these pieces showed liberated men, but that they reflected changing attitudes towards gender and, sometimes, mediated contemporaneous discussions about a potential or need for men to change their behaviour. It is clear that Bausch, Brown, Early, Jones, and Zane were aware of this new questioning about the way gender, ‘race’, and sexuality are represented in cultural forms, and knew that their audiences might also be thinking about these questions. But Frühlingsopfer and Blaubart (henceforth Sacre and Bluebeard), Set and Reset, Are You Right . . ., and Rotary Action were all created at a time when these questions were comparatively new and fresh, and had not yet begun to close down or stiffen into a potentially prescriptive set of ‘politically correct’ approaches. Political correctness was certainly 138

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one factor in Jill Johnston’s 1987 critique of Cunningham’s unreconstructed use of normative heterosexual partnering in Roaratorio (discussed in Chapter 5), and a hardening of political agendas constituted the context for the work of the gay artists discussed in the next chapter. I have deliberately used the term avant-garde to characterise this work rather than postmodern. This was, admittedly, the period when the term postmodern dance began to be used. Trisha Brown was one of the group of US choreographers whose work Sally Banes first called postmodern dance. The definition of it that Banes (1980, 1987) proposed, however, sits uneasily with most of the work discussed in this chapter. Her use of the term had little in common with the kinds of meaning which the term postmodern had for art critics such as Rosalind Krauss (1986) and Craig Owens (1992), or theorists such as Frederic Jameson (1985), Jean Baudrillard (1983), and Jean-François Lyotard (1984). She defined it in a way that drew on the high modernist theory of painting and sculpture developed in the 1950s and 1960s by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Richard Shiff has argued that Greenberg’s writings brought about a ‘drift from acknowledging self and nature as originating art to privileging the medium as the organiser of artist’s energies’ (1992: 98). For her, postmodern dance was progressively ridding itself of old-fashioned, representational, and expressive devices in order to explore the formal and aesthetic properties of ‘pure’ dance. Strictly speaking, from this formalist point of view, questions about gender and sexuality are irrelevant. This formalist approach could be applied to the work of Trisha Brown, but not to gender representation within it. It sits uneasily with Jones and Zane’s use of narrative and their references to popular culture. In Banes’s view postmodern dance was a ‘largely US phenomenon’ (1987: xxxvi), US choreographers having made their breakthrough by ‘reacting against the expressionism of modern dance which anchored movement to a literary idea or a musical form’ (1980: 15). This was something that, in her view, Pina Bausch failed to do. For Banes, Bausch’s work was ‘expressionist rather than analytical’ and seemed ‘more influenced by imagistic avantgarde theatre than by either German or US dance traditions’ (1987: xxxvi). Fergus Early has indicated that he doesn’t see his work as postmodern. As I will show, it has drawn on the ballet tradition but reframed this in ways that deliberately dismantled and deflated its elitist status in order to enable his work to express, within a British context, a broad-based, inclusive politics. Advanced choreographers during this period were, as Banes suggests, abandoning the idea that representation and expression should be the focus and purpose of theatre dance. This chapter, however, argues that this did not necessarily result in the shift towards an exclusive focus on pure abstract form. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, choreographers responded to new concerns about gender and sexuality by focusing on 139

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theatre dance’s potential for embodying meanings and generating affects. This was a shift towards the medium of embodied experience rather than one towards pure, abstract form. This chapter, therefore, identifies and discusses the new possibilities for meaning production and affective experience which these five works opened up. The choreographic context in which Brown, Jones, and Zane were making work in the early 1980s is one which developed logically from the US work discussed in the last two chapters. The relationship between Bausch and Early’s generation of European dancers and the modern dance of the first half of the twentieth century is a far more complicated and difficult one than the relationship between so-called postmodern US dancers and historical figures such as Isadora Duncan, Ruth St Denis, or Martha Graham. At the same time that Graham made her American Document (1938) and used the role she created for Erick Hawkins to signify the spirit of the US New Deal, Mary Wigman was asserting that there were essentially German qualities in her own dancing (see Manning 1993). The US dance world has not had much incentive to reflect on the rhetoric of US exceptionalism that sometimes informs discussions about its modern dance. The undeniable acquiescence by Laban and Wigman with nationalistic discourses about German national identity (see Karina and Kant 2003), made their modern dance, in the post-war period, incompatible with the new spirit of European internationalism. The realisation of the horrors of Auschwitz and the death camps inspired the European Convention of Human Rights in 1950 which in turn initiated the political process of integration that eventually became the European Union. The new internationalism, and the suspicion of nationalism that had inspired it, led to institutional support for ballet by German opera houses because it was a neutral, international form (see Partsch-Bergsohn 1993). In practice, this meant that West German ballet companies adopted an Anglo-American model while East German ones looked to Russia. Modern dance went underground in a divided Germany that found its own histories and memories traumatic. The metaphysical vision, to which dancers such as Wigman and Kreutzberg aspired in the 1920s and 1930s, subsequently lost its credibility at a time when the philosopher Theodor Adorno was asking whether, after Auschwitz, it was still possible to reconcile metaphysical speculation with experience. What can make Bausch’s pieces hard work to watch is the way they refuse to offer any transcendence. Where she has exposed her dancers and audiences to extremely painful dance material, particularly in early pieces such as her Sacre and Bluebeard, this needs to be understood in the context of the problematics of European memory in the public sphere. Similarly, memories of British Imperialism, as I will show, informed Early’s work. Early’s aim was to develop an alternative to a supposedly apolitical, but class-based and institutionalised ballet practice. Understanding this politics of history and memory is 140

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essential to interpreting the way masculinity is represented in their pieces. Although Rotary Action and Set and Reset were not informed by memory and history in this way, Brown, Jones, and Zane were, however, aware that the kinds of representation of masculinity their works presented were meaningful because of the way they opposed or contradicted the representational strategies of mainstream modern dance. The works discussed in this chapter all betray an open spirit of enquiry into the kinds of strategy that could be used to trouble and subvert existing conventions and traditions; this was at a time when artists and intellectuals were becoming aware that cultural texts mediated normative ideologies. There are two related strategies that, as I shall show, Bausch, Brown, Early, Jones, and Zane all adopted. First, all of the works discussed in this chapter, in varying ways, resisted or disrupted normative, habitual patterns of spectatorship. Through their avant-garde approach, they sought to free the spectator’s gaze, and, at the same time, required them to engage more actively in the process of interpretation. I identified this approach, in the last chapter, within work by Cunningham and Paxton. Second, an important way in which these works disrupted normative spectatorship was through staging intimacy, and, in doing so, they were all informed by new attitudes towards the dancing body. Reviewing a 1983 performance of Set and Reset in London, Michael Huxley wrote: The company’s work is so strongly founded on a concern for the body, and for dancers as people, that this message (as meaning) shines through the performance. The formal complexity which presents so many possibilities for dancers allows the dance to happen. The choreographer’s and dancers’ use of the body allows the dance to happen, and nowhere does it happen more satisfyingly than in Set and Reset. (1983: 30, emphasis in original) This libertarian concern for the body is one which links Brown’s work with contact improvisation and related forms of movement research (such as Body Mind Centring, Skinner Releasing technique, Klein technique, and approaches to dance informed by the Alexander technique). Jones and Zane were introduced to contact improvisation in the early 1970s, and their knowledge and experience of it is evident in Rotary Action. Huxley implies that this new concern for the body and its physical presence could not be separated from a concern for dancers as people, and argued that work which expressed these intertwined concerns was meaningful for this very reason. This chapter argues that the libertarian message, which Huxley identified in Set and Reset, can also be found in Bausch’s Sacre and Bluebeard, Early’s Are You Right . . ., and Jones and Zane’s Rotary Action. It, therefore, investigates correlations between new ways of staging the physical presence 141

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rather than the visual appearance of male dancing bodies and a sceptical questioning, predominantly by feminist and gay writers, of the supposedly normative nature of heterosexual masculinity. B A U S C H ’ S S A C R E: M E N A N D S H A M E Bausch’s Sacre was first performed in December 1975 as the last item in a triple bill of pieces set to music by Stravinsky. Superficially, this was the kind of programme of dances set to well-known classical music that ballet companies were presenting in subsidised opera houses across West Germany (as it then was). As Rob Burns and Wilfred van der Will have pointed out, with economic prosperity, towns and cities ‘realized that their image depended substantially on their ratings as centres of culture’ (1995: 259). Wuppertal Opera House’s early support for Pina Bausch’s controversial work needs to be seen in this context, since Bausch substantially challenged and disrupted the kinds of work being presented elsewhere. Since the Ballets Russes’s historic first production in 1913 (see Chapter 3), Stravinsky’s score Le Sacre du printemps has been used by an enormous number of ballet and modern dance choreographers. To date, Stephanie Jordan and Larraine Nicholas have catalogued over 160 versions.1 As Susan Manning (1991) has pointed out, many of these were German. She notes that, whereas, in the late 1950s and 1960s, many choreographers had been using the music of Sacre as a vehicle for new or substantially revisionist versions of its sacrificial theme, Bausch’s Sacre returned to the original story. Bausch could, therefore, count on her audience having a degree of familiarity with the music and the story of its sacrificial victim, and read her production against a well-established set of conventions. The physical exhaustion and emotional violence, which performances of her Sacre generated, made the more conventionally modernist abstraction of contemporary European ballet choreography seem redundant. The dancers performed on an empty stage whose flooring was covered with dry peat. As they became hot and sweaty with their exertions, this became stuck to their bodies and clothes. The community of uniformly dressed dancers seemed undifferentiated, the men in black trousers but bare upper bodies, the women in thin, light coloured, knee length shifts. Norbert Servos has described the way Bausch’s Sacre made spectators aware of the physical effort involved: The dancers have no need to act their growing exhaustion: it is genuine as they dance against the resistance of ankle-deep earth. The energy demanded from the dancers is not disguised, it confronts the audience directly. No smiles mask the strain, it is made audible by the dancers’ heavy breathing. The visceral sensuality which the actors create with this seemingly limitless physical exertion gives the story additional 142

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physical credibility, makes the sacrifice something one is exposed to at close quarters, a personal experience. (1984: 30) Servos stressed the physical presence of exhausted bodies rather than the visual appearance of choreographed material. It was as if existing and recognisable dance movement was no longer meaningful in itself but seemed to be a pretence, and had no legitimacy any more unless it could be revalidated through the intensity of the dancer’s actual experience. Sexual difference in Bausch’s Sacre was painfully polarised in a way that, as I suggested in Chapter 3, found a lone precedent in Nijinska’s Les Noces. Women, in both ballets, were evidently subordinate to, and in fear of, the men; in Bausch’s Sacre the men harassed them until one of them gave up and became the sacrificial victim (this role initially danced by Maris Alt). The whole community, then, witnessed her symbolic suicide. To signify her status, she put on a flimsy red dress that had been passed around by dancers for most of the piece. This fitted her so loosely that, during the final solo, it kept slipping off her shoulders to show her breasts, making her appear particularly vulnerable. Throughout the piece, all the women dancers seemed frightened and vulnerable, particularly when male dancers were near them. The male dancers, however, when not involved in executing strenuous movement sequences, seemed passive and unemotional. The women must, of course, have known from the start that one of them would become the chosen victim, while the men knew that they, themselves, were not in any danger. At the beginning, the women came on, in ones and twos, looking around warily, and briefly acknowledging one another. The men, however, arrived on stage all at once, seemingly penetrating the loosely assembled group of women and, whether intentionally or not, their physical presence making the women flinch. Sometimes, during the piece, both sexes came together as a community through the execution of common movement, often in the form of a circle dance. At other times, the men and women formed separate groups; or groups of men surrounded a single woman in a potentially threatening way. This threat was signalled by the women’s reactions rather than by the men’s manner, as the latter remained almost stoically impassive. The men seemed to have no potential within them for intimate response, either to one another, or towards a woman (which is partly what, as a man, I find so unbearable about this and similar pieces Bausch made at this time). The women’s reactions to one another suggested temporary, fragile intimacies of a kind that could be easily abandoned. Bausch’s Sacre showed a community that was falling apart. Everyone appeared to be on their own, unable to trust anyone. This must have been particularly resonant and painful in West Germany at the time it was made and first performed. As Alice Yaeger Kaplan has observed: ‘Postwar German society 143

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was caught up in a massive social project where reconstruction and forgetting were intertwined’ (1989: 167). By the late 1960s, however, a younger generation of West Germans, particularly students who held left-wing views, had become disenchanted with what they saw as the dishonesty of the older generation of parents and teachers who, as Kaplan puts it, had told them ‘to remember the Holocaust but . . . to forget fascism’ (ibid.: 164, emphasis in original). From the early 1970s until its climax in the ‘German Autumn’ of 1977, West Germany was shaken by a series of terrorist attacks by left-wing groups associated with the Red Army Faction, whose best-known members were Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff. The German government’s response to terrorist kidnappings, killings, bombings, and other outrages was to take on authoritarian emergency powers. This, as Burns and van der Will (1995) have shown, seemed to many on the left, who did not actually support terrorist violence, to confirm the Red Army Faction’s warnings about the government’s ‘fascist’ leanings.2 When Bausch’s Sacre was first performed, the emotional atmosphere of its times resonated within it. Some of what Bausch said about the way she worked on movement material with her dancers takes on a particular significance when seen in the context of this atmosphere of suspicion and hysteria. As she told Raimund Hoghe, who became her dramaturge during the 1980s (and whose own version of the Sacre I discuss in Chapter 8), she was very sensitive to non-verbal, bodily signs of suppressed emotions: Somehow we are very transparent . . . the way somebody walks or the way people carry their necks tells you something about the way they live or about the things that have happened to them. Somehow everything is visible – even when we cling to certain things. You really can see where something is suppressed. There are spots where people don’t think about controlling themselves. (Hoghe 1980: 65) This statement is particularly significant when one considers what sorts of things were happening to German people in the mid 1970s, and what they might wish to suppress. Moreover, when Bausch said that people ‘are very transparent’ this is not quite the same thing as Martha Graham’s famous, puritanical dictum that movement never lies. Whereas Graham expected her dancers to express emotional sincerity in a controlled, conventionalised way, Bausch was interested in areas where people did not think of controlling themselves. She sought, therefore, in an avantgarde way, to reconnect dance performance with the unselfconscious way individuals behave in everyday life. Bausch implied that if one respects dancers as people and is sensitive to their use of the body, this, then, will allow the dance to happen. This is what Michael Huxley said of Brown’s Set and Reset (1983: 30). By allowing spectators to see what has happened to the dancers as people, Bausch opened up the possibility for spectators 144

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to detect signs in their physical behaviour that hinted at suppression. While the women in Bausch’s Sacre tried unsuccessfully to hide their fear, the men seemed to be suppressing any sign at all of a potential for feeling. The men in Bausch’s Sacre danced with naked upper bodies. In the last three chapters I have described a number of pieces in which male dancers have been dressed in a way that revealed their naked chests and backs. (This is not as frequent an occurrence as my choice of examples might seem to suggest.) With the exception of Paxton’s Flat (in Chapter 5), all these pieces undressed male dancers in order to eroticise them for the viewing pleasure of gay male and heterosexual female spectators. One of the most popular post-war European ballets which did this was Maurice Béjart’s 1959 version of Sacre, in which there was both a male and a female sacrificial victim who engaged in a copulatory fertility rite. The powerful material Béjart created for a male corps de ballet, in particular, attracted critical acclaim. Like Béjart’s Sacre, Bausch undressed her male dancers and gave them some vigorous and powerful movements to perform. The more the men in Bausch’s Sacre sweated, however, the more peat clung to damp parts of their arms and upper bodies, making them look soiled and abject. Furthermore, Bausch framed their hypermasculine display in a way that made them appear disturbing; because the male dancers seemed so unapproachable, both male and female spectators were more likely to empathise and identify with the women and thus see the men, from their female point of view, as brutal and insensitive. The most unapproachable male role in Bausch’s Sacre was that of the priest-like figure initially performed by Jan Minarik. If Graham created a role for Erick Hawkins in American Document that symbolised the spirit of the New Deal (see Chapter 4), Bausch seems to have used Minarik in this and other pieces to signify those unacceptably authoritarian traits in mainstream German politics which worried the German left.3 The priestlike figure only really emerged half way through the piece as the female dancers, one by one, approached him uneasily in order to receive the red dress. When the victim had finally been chosen, after the women had nervously passed the dress on from one to another, Minarik lay on his back on the ground with his arms stretched up at an angle and his fingers extended. It is often the case that the more people seek to impress others, the less sure they probably are of their own importance. Thus the most powerful men can be the most impassive and inexpressive. All through the victim’s final solo, the priest-like figure lay immobile on the peaty floor as if waiting to embrace the victim who, however, never came to him. Seemingly unaware of her extreme exertions, his lack of emotional involvement or physical activity (beyond the effort of keeping his arms up) made him appear supremely powerful. My interpretation here of Bausch’s Sacre is a partial one, in that my focus on the men’s roles has, to some extent, led me to ignore the centrality of 145

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the women’s roles, and in particular that of the sacrificial victim. Although Bausch drew attention to the problematic nature of masculinity, she was unwilling to accept that her work had anything to do with feminism. She acknowledged to Hoghe in 1980 that the way she saw gender roles ‘certainly has to do with myself – with the fact of me being a woman’: But ‘Feminism’ – perhaps because it has become such a fashionable word – and I retreat into my snail shell. Perhaps also because they very often draw such a funny borderline that I don’t really like. Sometimes it sounds like ‘against each other’ instead of ‘together’. (Hoghe 1980: 73) What she said she disagreed with was the ‘single-stranded thinking’ with which some interpreted her work. This, she said, simply wasn’t right because ‘you can always watch the other way’ (ibid.). By troubling and subverting conventional expectations, Bausch opened up possibilities for watching in other ways. Mainstream, modern, European ballets had celebrated abstract ideals, Bausch’s Sacre refused any transcendence, foregrounding the physicality of dancing bodies to draw attention towards difficult and problematic experiences. This came at a time when many Germans recognised the necessity of facing up to things that had been ignored or hidden. Where Béjart’s Sacre eroticised male dancers, Bausch did the opposite. By foregrounding the intensity of the dancer’s physical experience and disrupting normative aesthetic expectations, her Sacre challenged spectators to actively consider the nature of their own responses to the way she framed the male dancers’ performances. While Bausch’s use of music conformed to the practice of other more mainstream European ballets of its period, her approach to gender representation at the time was radical. Her Sacre, is, however, not typical of her later, tanztheater pieces. Her Sacre was the last piece which she made that set movement and steps to a single, substantial piece of music; but already, in small parts of it, dancers were executing task-based sequences of movement that were disconnected from any musical rhythm or motif. Later works consist of collections of cameo-like incidents in which the behaviour of individuals is set against the behaviour of the group as a whole. The avant-garde way in which these have challenged spectators is, perhaps, more obvious. Her 1977 piece Bluebeard, whose full title in English is ‘Bluebeard – while listening to a tape recording of Béla Bartók’s Opera “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle”’, made explicit this deconstruction of the music. BAUSCH’S BLUEBEARD AND THE LANDSCAPE OF MEN’S SOULS Bausch’s Bluebeard took as its basis the European fairy tale about a king who, giving his new wife the keys to his castle, tells her that she can enter 146

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any room except one, which she, of course, enters when he is absent, only to find in it the butchered carcasses of all his previous wives. Karen Mozingo (2005) has drawn attention to the sympathetic way Bausch interpreted feminine experience in this piece. As Judit Frigyesi demonstrates, in Bartók’s version, with its libretto by his friend Béla Balázs, the castle was an allegorical symbol for Bluebeard’s soul so that, as his new wife Judith explored its chambers, she already knew what she would find in it: ‘One walks within the soul softly and with care (as Judith opens the door softly, kindly) . . . Bluebeard’s castle is the landscape of his lost life’ (1998: 200). As Bausch’s Judith walked softly, she revealed that Bluebeard’s violence and his desire to control others were the central signifiers of his masculinity. In many ways, Minarik’s role, as Bluebeard, was a logical development of the priest-like figure in Sacre, representing a masculine subjectivity that has no potential for expressing emotion other than through violence. Minarik’s Bluebeard kept control through the tape recorder, mounted on a wheeled table with wires running up to the lighting grid above the stage. He stopped and rewound the music to repeat things he found pleasurable, or to stop things that made him uncomfortable. When, on the tape, the Duke sang ‘This is my torture chamber’ Judith on stage screamed and acted out fainting. The excerpt was frantically rewound and switched on again a few times so that Bluebeard could repeatedly enjoy watching her horrific reaction. He used the tape to maintain his own limits, stopping things that make him feel uncomfortable. He was irritated when the women acted spontaneously. Their giggles and laughs, as they played in his magic garden, eventually drove him to switch off the tape and turn round sharply, as if to reprimand them if they had not stopped. Independent expressions of female sexuality were worse. As he sat by the tape recorder, Judith knelt between his knees and reached up to caress his chin and cheek. Bluebeard put his hands on top of her head and violently thrust her down onto the floor; but, of course, she tried again in endless repeats. But, earlier, Bluebeard had buried his head in an infantile way against Judith’s belly and, in response, she leaned her upper body right over him as if hiding him. He was hiding from sexually explicit behaviour. Later, Bartók’s Judith, on the tape, sang (about the seven doors) ‘open them, open them for me’. As the tape played this, women, all over the floor around Bluebeard, clambered crab-like above the men, planting their legs wide apart to show their crotches. I noted in Chapter 5 Fred Orton’s (1994: 126) account of the allegorist as someone who seeks to reconnect things and meanings that the modern world has pulled apart. Although the feelings expressed in Bartók’s opera played on tape were disconnected from the events taking place on stage, Bausch’s piece nevertheless sought to reconnect them. Following Frigyesi, it is possible to read Bausch’s Bluebeard as an almost therapeutic encounter between the king and his wife, in which Judith tried, carefully, to help Bluebeard come out of his repressed shell and become 147

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a more open and responsive man. In this way, I suggest, both these pieces by Bausch mediated contemporaneous discussions about a potential, or need, for men to change their behaviour. CHANGING MEN: ARE YOU RIGHT THERE MICHAEL, ARE YOU RIGHT? Fergus Early trained at the Royal Ballet School, and danced with the Royal Ballet from 1964 to 1969 and then with the Royal Ballet’s ‘Ballet For All’ Company from 1969 to 1971. In the 1970s he was one of the group of dancers, mostly like himself – dissidents from ballet companies, who broke away and started to create the conditions for an alternative, new dance. This included founding the X6 Dance Space in London’s Docklands and starting the magazine New Dance. The question of how to apply sexual politics to dance was a central concern of the X6 Collective and one which is evident in many articles and reviews in early issues of New Dance. It is also evident in many of Early’s works at the time, including Three Gymnopedes (1976), Sunrise (1979) based on Albrecht’s role in the ballet Giselle (1841), and, with Jacky Lansley, I Giselle (1980), an evening-length, feminist reworking of the revered nineteenth-century classic. Early was one of the group who produced the controversial Men’s Issue of New Dance in 1980.4 Shortly after this, Early created an evening-length solo show Are You Right There Michael, Are You Right? (1982) based on his father’s life. By taking popular conventions, including those of ballet, and deliberately deconstructing their class-based associations, this piece, in many ways, formed the template for the pieces Early then went on to make for Green Candle Dance Company. Founded in 1987 as a community dance company, this aimed to take dance performances to a wide range of audiences from social groups who rarely attended theatres.5 Are You Right . . . combines theatre, dance, and tape slide presentation to tell the story of his father Noel Early, who, born and brought up in Ireland, became a doctor who served in the Indian Medical Service. In the war in Korea, he broke his pelvis in five places leaving him severely disabled, and the piece concludes with his decline into alcoholism and his subsequent death from cancer. The story is told through taped reminiscences about Noel Early made by members of the family, and accompanied by back projected slides of family photographs and general pictures that establish the mise en scène as India, Ireland, or the south of England. Often, these are shown while Fergus is calmly changing from one costume into another in full view of the audience. There is one moment where the staging draws attention to the striking resemblance between Fergus and a photograph of Noel projected on screen; there are the same clothes, moustache, facial expression, and posture. Fergus himself was eight when his father died, and during most of Fergus’s life until then his father had been absent 148

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overseas. The soundtrack of family stories therefore reproduces the process through which Fergus would initially have found out about his largely absent father’s life. The father is a crucial figure in the psychological development of the male child. The boy’s (all too often absent) father is a primary figure for identification in the process of creating his own sense of gendered identity. Are You Right . . . can be seen as the acting out in public of a private, psychologically charged process of assessing his ties with the memory of his father and coming to terms with his death. Michael Huxley, in his analysis of Are You Right . . ., has given a very useful description of Early’s movement style: Despite the use of steps from different styles and periods, the overall range of movement styles is not great and they are executed within a modest spatial and dynamic range. Jumps and turns appear close to the body because their lines are never extended to the full. (1988: 166) The dance component of Are You Right . . . was in the form of short numbers interspersed with bits of acting and onstage costume changes. It is Early’s belief that dance is (or should be available to be) a valued part of everyone’s life; many of the dances in Are You Right . . . clearly referred to the sorts of social or folk dances that Noel would have done at that time in his life. They affirmed that dancing is a significant part of an individual’s life and contradicted the low status that dance and non-verbal communication have in Western society, particularly for men. Are You Right . . . amounted to a history of Noel Early’s experience of embodiment. In the first dance, Fergus used a life size, two-dimensional, wooden prop made to resemble a cut-out version of a photograph of Noel Early’s brothers and sisters all lined up in order of descending height – the photograph itself was recognisable from having previously been backprojected. The dancing was loosely based on traditional Irish step dancing, and was performed to a recording of an Irish jig. By stepping on pedals that made the wooden legs of his siblings move, he appeared to be dancing with them. Through bright, fast steps and jumps, this dance signified Noel’s youth, and the Irish culture in which he grew up, and, by showing his interaction with members of his family, the dance functioned as an expression of community and shared cultural values. Later, to the crackly strains of an old recording by Peter Dawson singing ‘Pale hand I loved beside the Shalimar’, Fergus presented an animated version of his parents’ wedding photograph, standing beside a cut-out figure of his mother in her bridal dress. Taking the words literally, Fergus choreographed, for the first verse of the song, movements for his hand and arm only. The choreography, here, developed a motif based on a yoga exercise in which the hand is rotated so that the palm faces outwards, and the arm is, then, raised up to the side. The exercise is designed to stretch 149

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the arm muscles in a particular way. In the second verse of the song, he used a motif from another yoga exercise which stretches the leg muscles. During this, Fergus held the toe of his knee-length army boot as he straightened the whole leg. Because he was wearing army uniform and a solar topee, the effect of straightening the leg in this way looked strongly militaristic and hence masculine, reminiscent of a goose step (see Figure 6.1). But, at the same time, it was based on yoga movement, ironically appropriate to the Indian mise en scène of the story and of the song. In a key section, towards the end of the piece, the disabled Noel fell on the floor and was at first unable, because of his disability, to get himself up again. Through most of the sequence, he rolled and turned himself about on the floor, with his face generally hidden from the audience. Within this movement material there were references to earlier dance sections – for example from the ‘Pale hands I loved’ dance sequence, the tight yoga stretch with the hand and the image of the leg being extended with the hand grasping the toe. On one level this suggested that Noel was checking and testing his body out, comparing what he could do in his disabled state of health with what he had been able to do in his prime. It also suggested a process of reflection on his life. Overall, it was by parodying ballet and including references to yoga, folk and social dance, and music hall traditions, that Fergus Early staged aspects of masculinity that could not have been represented within conventional ballet. Through his relatively unconventional uses of the body and of hybrid dance vocabularies and methods of theatrical staging, he challenged the spectator to reassess aspects of masculine identity and experience that are generally denied or rendered invisible in mainstream cultural forms. If Bausch and Minarik’s Bluebeard made public a need for change, Early’s piece exemplified ways of going about doing so. The extent to which Early’s anti-virtuosity contradicted conventional expectations can be gauged in a review by Nadine Meisner. ‘Part of the trouble’ for her in Early’s Are You Right . . . ‘lies in an incongruous combination of choreography and costume: it is difficult to take seriously a small, stocky man moving poetically in, for example, unflatteringly chunky army shorts and jacket, thick knee socks and sandals’ (1983: 28). Early’s physical presence detracted from the transcendent poetry she assumed anyone who had been associated with the Royal Ballet must intend to achieve. Meisner sensed Early was using ballet-derived vocabulary in a way that contradicted conventional expectations. She allowed that the piece ‘pleases by its measured, unsentimental tone, its careful structure, its thoughtful, disciplined originality’ (ibid.). But, for her, the incongruities in the way the male dancing body was presented were a problem. What did not occur to her, but is implicit in what she wrote, is the possibility that traditional ways of using ballet movement are not appropriate for expressing the sorts of idea about masculinity Early set out to explore in 150

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Figure 6.1 Fergus Early in Are You Right There Michael, Are You Right?

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this piece. It didn’t occur to her that Early might, on the level of body politics, intentionally want to make trouble, through ironically disassociating ballet-derived movement from conservative, metaphysical ideas about dance as art, and sexual difference. I have shown that Bausch made trouble in similar ways. Just as Judith walked softly within the landscape of Bluebeard’s soul, Fergus Early walked softly but publicly within a landscape of his own very personal involvement with memories of his father’s life and death. On a private level, to uncover and become aware of repressed conflicts might be therapeutic; but to do so, within a performance, can have the effect of offering this as a positive and valuable thing to do, and thus to subvert norms and demonstrate possibilities for change. JONES AND ZANE DANCING TOGETHER Moving across the Atlantic, the social and political context of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane’s work in the late 1970s and early 1980s was very different from that of Bausch or Early. There was also a generational shift. Whereas Bausch and Early had each studied at conservatoires, Jones and Zane met at a gay liberation consciousness raising group while at university (Jones, Bill T. 1995: 81). Their wide range of cultural and artistic references indicate that the curriculum they studied included critical perspectives on contemporary and avant-garde art and film. In terms of class, both had benefited from public education while Jones also benefited from the aftereffects of the Civil Rights movement: neither of their parents had had the opportunity to go to university. Jones’s family were African Americans involved in migrant farm labour. Zane’s parents were both immigrants, his father an Italian Catholic from Brazil and his mother an orthodox Lithuanian Jew. As I have shown, Early deliberately developed a hybrid approach to both movement and staging in order to reach a wide social range of audience. Jones and Zane, although performing for less diverse audiences, developed a working method, within their multi-layered, collaboratively choreographed pieces, in which contradictory and clashing material was juxtaposed in challenging ways. Their friend and collaborator, the visual artist (and later, film director) Robert Longo, has spoken of the cultural collisions in their work (in Zimmer and Quasha 1989: 86). Many in the New York art and rock music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, including Longo, Gretchen Binder, Keith Haring, and Jenny Holzer, all of whom collaborated with Jones and Zane at that time, had a taste for such collisions. Like many New York-based artists they were reconfiguring what could go together with what in order to de-hierarchise high and urban, street culture. Despite its almost carefree and insolent anger, this work used similar allegorical structures to those which Fred Orton (1994) has identified in Jasper Johns’s work. In Jones and Zane’s case, an exhaustingly 152

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rigorous and characteristically US energy gave their performances of masculinity a very different character to those in contemporaneous European work; and issues of class, ‘race’, and sexuality appeared in Jones and Zane’s work in a distinctively US way. Rotary Action (1982) was made for a dance festival in Vienna. Their previous three duets, Monkey Run Road (1979), Blauvelt Mountain (1980), and Valley Cottage (1981), had attracted attention both in New York and in Europe. Rotary Action opened and closed with a darkened stage in which the two performed a series of formalised moves and poses under tightly focused beams of light that came on and off in a way that recalled a disco. Between these set pieces, Jones and Zane each performed their own solos on a fully lit stage and came together for a fast, free duet which combined the fluid intimacy of contact improvisation with poses that allude to a wide range of sources. As Susan Foster has noted, these could suggest ‘hip-hop, ballet, clowning, pantomime, break-dancing, gymnastics, club dancing, or sporting events’ which would ‘suddenly appear alongside moves with no identifiable origin, incorporated randomly into the longer phrases of movement’ (1999: 111). Jones had taken some classes with African American dancers Percival Borde and Pearl Primus. Zane had collaborated with Johanna Boyce on a piece that explored their responses to the holocaust. He was also interested in minimalist postmodern choreography, including the work of Laura Dean and Lucinda Childs, and performed in a piece by Andy DeGroat. Rotary Action used formalist means to structure widely disparate cultural references. The opening suggested a gay appropriation of the kind of disco dancing popularised by John Travolta in the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever. This use of poses, which can also be seen in Jones’s 1983 piece Fever Swamp commissioned for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, suggested a gay awareness of being looked at. In its arch use of mimicry, it resembled what would later emerge as vogue dancing in the gay and transvestite balls which Jenny Livingstone documented in her 1990 documentary film, Paris Is Burning. Rotary Action was not, however, a piece that set out to explore or make statements about identities but, as Longo put it, to create cultural collisions. When I saw Jones and Zane perform Rotary Action during their 1983 English tour, I wrote that ‘the most impressive thing about them is the way they dance together. It is as if neither needs to know what the other is doing but knows where the other is and exactly how they will respond in any situation’ (Burt 1983: 35). They looked and were very different from one another – Jones has said that whereas he was a big black man, Zane was ‘a short, “funny-looking,” Italian-Jewish man’ (in Daly 1998: 120). Susan Foster has commented on the way that: ‘one minute they are manoeuvring, gallivanting, gesticulating as wildly as independent bodies, and the next they are dancing alongside each other in tandem. The sudden 153

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in-tuneness of the two bodies is nothing short of thrilling’ (1999: 113). This was, of course, a thrilling sense of two men being in-tune with one another. Unlike all the earlier examples I have discussed where men who were gay danced together, Jones and Zane made no attempt to pretend that they were anything other than a gay couple. Zane admitted to Elizabeth Zimmer: ‘I didn’t want to share my life with an audience, and yet I wanted to work with this person. He was drawing my life into the performance area’ (Zimmer and Quasha 1989: 56). Talking to Ann Daly in 1998, Jones confirmed that Zane had never wanted autobiographical materials in his work. Jones himself, however, had realised that: there was always an ambiguity in the search for the truth. My truth was not everyone’s truth, witnessed by the way I looked, the way they looked, the way Arnie looked. I thought that the truth was in the ambiguity. Therefore, pile on more and more logs, more and more contradictions, more and more painful references that are unresolved and cannot be resolved in dance. (Daly 1998: 119, emphasis in original) The allegorist, as Fred Orton (1994) notes, recognises the modern world as a space in which things and meanings disengage. Jones is therefore challenging the audience to read his work allegorically. Disengagements and contradictions were most evident when, towards the end of Rotary Action, the stage returned to darkness with narrow beams of light, and Jones and Zane returned to the more formal presentation of sets of poses with which the piece had begun, this time also engaging in a spoken dialogue. At one moment in this, Jones seemed to interrupt Zane to tell him: ‘You know you’re taking a lot of liberties . . . You’re creating a fantasy for us. It’s yours, not mine’ (in Zimmer and Quasha 1989: 70). Rotary Action therefore exemplified a concern for each other’s bodies, and a concern for each other as people. Rather than trying to pretend to resolve contradictions, they just let the dance itself emerge, with the thrilling in-tuneness of its contact work alongside a painful admission of personal tensions. Just as Judith in Bluebeard trod carefully in the landscape of her husband’s soul, Jones and Zane trespassed in the landscapes of each other’s lives with more sensitivity than most men at the time generally felt able to reveal in public. By doing so they created a public space in which to show otherwise unacknowledged private identities and personal truths in terms of class, ‘race’, and sexuality, and, in doing so, contributed to changing perceptions of masculine identities. REDISTRIBUTING MALE ENERGY IN SET AND RESET There was one moment in Trisha Brown’s 1983 piece Set and Reset, beautifully caught in a photograph by Jack Mitchell (see Figure 6.2), where the 154

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two men in the original cast, Stephen Petronio and Randy Warshaw, jumped powerfully into the air and Petronio caught Warshaw. Both were barefoot: all they were wearing was semi-transparent, loose, silk trousers printed with collaged imagery designed by Robert Rauschenberg.6 Warshaw had taken a running jump and Petronio had caught him by curling his hand and arm around Warshaw’s stomach, and was smoothly diverting the

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11 Figure 6.2 Stephen Petronio and Randy Warshaw in Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset.

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direction in which Warshaw’s jump was taking him. It was a very dynamic and exciting image in which both dancers were moving with a level of energy that is comparable to that of a male, bravura solo by a ballet dancer. Their bare chests and backs revealed their strong, muscular, male bodies in a way that recalls Shawn’s male dancers, or even those of Graham and Ailey. The basis for the movement in Set and Reset was somewhat different, being based within the kinds of movement research mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. What stopped this spectacular image from being a hypermasculine assertion of male dominance was the way this one, brief moment fitted into the piece as a whole. Petronio and Warshaw had both studied contact improvisation and were members of the improvisational dance company Channel Z. Improvisation has played an important role in Brown’s development since she attended a summer dance workshop in San Francisco with Anna Halprin in 1960. Although she has never actually studied contact improvisation, she had a close working relationship with Steve Paxton. She was improvising with him as early as 1963 in Lightfall and the two of them were subsequently members of the dance improvisation company Grand Union in the early 1970s around the time Paxton was developing contact improvisation (see Chapter 5). Paxton even danced in some performances of Brown’s LineUp (1977). Set and Reset was not, however, improvised but, as its name implies, its movement material was carefully structured. When Brown later divided up her choreographic output into cycles, this piece was part of the ‘unstable molecular structures’ cycle. Brown, and many of the dancers in her company in the early 1980s, had been interested in various forms of movement research. The way of moving which the dancers developed in Set and Reset exemplified a desire to improve bodily alignment through working to free inhibiting muscular tensions and thus gain a more stress-free, ‘natural’ posture. Physical clarity was valued more than visual appearance. Brown, herself, described her approach to movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s as making ‘animal dance’ in comparison with the highly intellectual, conceptual structures she had employed in choreographing pieces during the 1970s. This is what Michael Huxley was responding to when he praised the piece’s concern for the body and for dancers as people (1983). Set and Reset presented a seemingly continuous flow of lyrical dance movements that have the sort of fresh, impulsive, and spontaneous quality that is generally only found in improvised dance. There was a clear structure to the piece: dancers explored the periphery of the performance space and continually came into the middle to engage in duets and trios. There were many instances in the piece, as Henry Sayre points out, when dancers came: ‘in and out of sync with one another, forming duets and dissolving them, or of dancers following the gestures of another, “resetting” them, across the space of the stage’ (1992: 144). Dancers also defined, with their 156

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hands, arms, and legs, an imaginary wall across the middle of the stage ‘re-establishing and dis-establishing the line’. This line then reformed, in the centre of the space, and wheeled around its middle so that everyone in the auditorium could see it end on. A structure was created through the even distribution of movements all over the space: this was done in a way that was initially not centrally focused, but then, as the central line rotated, the central focus was projected to every possible viewing position in the auditorium. It was the antithesis of the balanced, symmetrical groupings found in, for example, the ballets of Petipa. Furthermore, the piece avoided any sense of development or climax through its fragmented textures and continuously surprising distributions of incidents, and through its continuous, fast, strong but free pace. The dancers in Set and Reset did not look at the audience. They appeared to be concentrating on and absorbed in the physical sensations involved in executing the choreography. But, unlike the introverted manner of Cunningham’s dancers, Brown and her dancers acknowledged each other and performed in a fresh, spontaneous manner. Laurie Anderson called the music she composed for it ‘Long time no see’ because of the smile, at a moment in the middle of the piece, that two of the dancers exchanged when they passed each other by. It was a piece the dancers evidently enjoyed performing and this, together with the visceral, sensual quality of the movement, invited spectators to become absorbed in the performance in an intimate way. Petronio and Warshaw were facing away from each other at the moment they made contact. Neither was looking actively outwards or upwards (in what Richard Dyer, in Chapter 2, called an elevated way). Petronio, in Mitchell’s photograph, is looking down while Warshaw’s gaze is horizontal. When Petronio catches Warshaw, his action seems quite unpremeditated. It is not a climactic moment; and indeed, as I have already said, there are no climaxes in the piece. In this event, as elsewhere in the piece, Brown made full use of the strength and dynamism these two male dancers possessed. Brown has said she was aware that she often choreographed so that ‘one phrase fit all genders’ (2000). Looking at a lot of dance, she had felt many times that some movement phrases looked undignified for the architecture of the male body, as, chameleon-like, they fitted into the overall style of the piece. Other sorts of movement for male dancers, in Brown’s opinion, merely reiterated certain clichéd images, from (earlier) modern dance, of muscular, male movement. Brown says that she wanted to explore beyond those images to find new choreographic possibilities. There were few lifts, as such, in Set and Reset but several instances where dancers caught others who jumped or dived into their arms. The men did, perhaps, more than their fair share of this and were themselves caught a few times. But, their powerful, physical contributions were redistributed into the texture of the piece as a whole. Like the allegorist who recognises that in 157

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the modern world things and meanings have disengaged, Brown has used an overall, decentralised structure to relocate the excitement of masculine strength and dynamism so that it reads differently. In effect, Brown destabilised the power implicit in male display by absorbing it into a collective whole. I have shown that Bausch, Brown, Early, Jones, and Zane all challenged and disrupted mainstream norms and conventions in an avant-garde way. This, I have suggested, was a direct consequence of the new approach to gender representation that had been developed in the 1970s by feminist artists and intellectuals. Where theatre dance is concerned, this focus on the means of representation resulted in a new concentration on the dancing body and its physical presence. Where feminists argued that the personal is political, I have shown that all these works, in different ways, staged intimacies that redefined the relationship between public and private. Thus, Judith trod softly in the landscape of Bluebeard’s past life. Fergus Early made public his own very personal involvement with his memories of his father’s life and death. Arnie Zane found his partner drawing his life into the performance area. In each case this was an acknowledgement of the vulnerability and insecurity of masculine subjectivity. Brown, too, recognised this through her sensitivity to what might or might not be dignified for the architecture of the male body. Just as, in Bausch’s Sacre, the dancers’ exhaustion redeemed a theatrical language that seemed in danger of losing its legitimacy, in Set and Reset, the quality of the movement material, that Brown and her dancers developed, conveyed an intimacy which was meaningful because of the clarity and intensity of the performers’ physical experience. Brown’s use of fragmented and minimalist choreographic structures redistributed the affective sensuousness and power of Petronio and Warshaw’s masculine bodies across the piece, as a whole, which, in effect, disconnected it from its normative association with masculine power and violence. There were parallels, therefore, between Brown’s use of fragmentation and minimalism and its use by Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. All five dances discussed in this chapter were therefore multi-layered, creating complex, conceptually sophisticated levels on which allegorical representations or affects were produced. This approach to radical, experimental performance is one which most of the choreographers I discuss in the rest of this book have adopted. Just as heterosexual, white masculinity was no longer being seen as an unquestioned, timeless, and universal norm, the means through which it could be represented in theatre dance had now become a recognised issue within choreography.

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7 IDENTITY POLITICS

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When David Gere interviewed Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane in June 1987, they admitted that they had actively resisted making their gay relationship part of the frame through which their work was interpreted (Gere 2004: 122–3). Gere spoke to them shortly before Zane went public with his AIDS diagnosis. In his autobiography, Jones has given a very honest account of their visits to a gay bath house in Greenwich Village where, before AIDS was known about, promiscuous sexual practices most likely resulted in spread of infection (Jones 1995: 153–8). It was in 1987 that ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was founded. Medical researchers first identified the AIDS virus in 1981 but it was, probably, not until the Hollywood film star Rock Hudson died of HIV-related illness in 1985 that the significance of the epidemic registered on public consciousness. ACT UP campaigned against the inadequate political and administrative responses to the epidemic made by US and European governments, and attacked international drug companies for discriminating against and exploiting AIDS sufferers. Zane, with Jones’s support, went public about his diagnosis at a time when the effect of the epidemic on the dance world, in particular, was devastating. Gere (2004) has analysed and documented AIDS activism through dance in the US, focusing on performances which explicitly dealt with AIDS in thematic or metaphorical ways. My aim, in this chapter, is to look at work by choreographers in Britain and the US who were openly gay and, within the context of the AIDS epidemic, used their work to assert gay identities and sensibilities. As Brett Stockdill has noted: ‘Members of ACT UP realized that to fight AIDS, they would have to fight the homophobia that undergirded the epidemic. In true queer fashion, ACT UP has not just exposed anti-queer bigotry but publicly embraced the right to be queer’ (2000: 5). From the mid 1980s until around 1995, many choreographers who were gay seem to have felt that, by creating work that explicitly explored issues of gender and sexuality, they were making a political gesture. Writing about Lesbian and Gay Pride Day in 1993, which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riot and the founding of the Gay Liberation Front, Leo Bersani wrote: 159

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It is as if AIDS, the devastating depletor of the body’s energies, had energized the survivors. Look at us: We’re still alive. We won’t be made to feel guilty, we’re having sex – lots of it – again. Look at us: we demand the rights and privileges you enjoy. (1995: 20) Bill T. Jones might have been thinking along similar lines when he gave the title Still Here to a 1994 dance piece which explored the experiences of people living with terminal diseases. Arlene Croce famously refused to review this piece, explaining her reasons in her article ‘Discussing the undiscussable’ (1994) which signalled a right-wing reaction against choreographers’ advocacy of identity politics. Although not directly referring to Croce’s article, Bersani recognised, in 1995, that ‘homophobic virulence in America has increased in direct proportion to the wider acceptance of homosexuals. The principal target of the religious right has been displaced from abortion to homosexuality’ (Bersani 1995: 15). This, I suggest, is one reason why, retrospectively, choreographers seem subsequently to have moved away from such explicit explorations of gay identities. This chapter looks at a range of different ways in which gay choreographers represented masculinities and gay sexualities during this period. Through a discussion of key works by Mark Morris and Joe Goode, it examines a camp destabilisation of masculine identities; it discusses ways in which Michael Clark’s work, including a collaboration with Stephen Petronio, exemplified a specifically gay theme of treachery and betrayal; it identifies in DV8’s work a concern with masculine failures and inadequacies; and it concludes with a critique of Matthew Bourne’s 1995 version of Swan Lake.

CLARK AND BETRAYAL Most British critical writing about Michael Clark’s work, during the 1980s and early 1990s, balanced derogatory or despairing remarks about his shock tactics with eulogies about his abilities as dancer and as creator of classical movement material. Clement Crisp, for example, dismissed most of Clark’s Mmm (1992) (short for ‘Michael’s modern masterpiece’, because part of it was danced to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring), as ‘gimmicks and what might best be known as dirty tricks’, but said of Clark himself: ‘Every gift is his, from purity of line to the most delicate and precise shaping of steps’ (1992). Alastair Macaulay gives a typical list of Clark’s dirty tricks in Because we must (1988): Clark is an anything goes anarchist. Nudity, obscenity, fancy dress, the chain saw, dancing to the National Anthem, Knees Up Mother Brown, Elvis singing ‘Silent Night’. Loud rock-music accompanying 160

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the quaint woodland scenery of La Sylphide (La La La Sylphide) . . . all of that and more, all to give you one frisson or another. (1988: 440) Previous works had included bare bottoms, dangling dildos, goose stepping, Nazi salutes and various other obscenities. In a decentred, modern world where things were detached from their normal meanings, Clark tried to reconnect them in a queered, allegorical space. In Mmm Clark’s own 68year-old mother appeared, bare breasted, to re-enact giving birth to her son with performance artist and fashion designer Leigh Bowery acting the part of the midwife. Bowery’s influence on Clark and his appearances in his works, according to Judith Mackrell ‘has made critics (including me) grind their teeth’ (1989: 14). But British critics unanimously found something special about Clark as a dancer and choreographer. Jann Parry, writing about Mmm, said: ‘He has always been beautiful, but now at 30, he has an elegiac quality that makes the angle of his head or the slow extension of a leg almost unbearably moving’ (1992: n.p.). In the context of a climate of AIDS activism, Clark’s manipulation of symbols of degradation was a defiant theatrical gesture of identification with the debased status which homophobic prejudice allotted gay men. Clark was following in the tradition of gay artists and writers like Jean Genet (1910–86) who have used shocking and degrading imagery to intentionally debase their highly valued art. Leo Bersani has argued that Genet’s ‘abhorrent glorification of Nazism and his in some ways equally abhorrent failure to take that glorification seriously expresses his fundamental project of declining to participate in any sociality at all’ (1995: 168). As with Genet, Clark used treachery and betrayal to simultaneously seduce and repel dance and ballet lovers. His own sense of absorption and that of his dancers invited spectators into an absorbed contemplation of the seductive qualities within their performance only to repel them by the nature of its subject matter. Clark trained at the Royal Ballet School where he was a star pupil of Richard Glasstone who teaches the Cecchetti tradition of ballet. What was admired in Clark’s dancing was the pure, classical quality of his ‘line’, not just a succession of beautifully presented positions but an internal understanding of a flow that links them together. It was this which the British critics invariably praised. Also appreciated were the ways in which Clark choreographed extremely difficult and demanding material for himself and his dancers that exemplified this quality. In other words, at a time when traditional ballet companies were having difficulties in creating worthwhile new repertory, Clark represented someone for whom the Cecchetti tradition of training (on which Pavlova and the artists of the Ballets Russes flourished) was still alive. Those who had grown up watching ballet were seemingly prepared to put up with anything for a sight of Clark’s pure, classical port de bras. It was this devotion that Clark deliberately betrayed. 161

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Ballet was not just degraded in Clark’s work through his use of intentionally offensive imagery. It was degraded through the use of punk rock music by The Fall resulting in a ‘breakneck force with which the dancers whip their bodies, stamp, spiral and fly’ (Mackrell 1992: 25). Furthermore, the new ways Clark found of exploring classical line themselves allegorised unacceptable behaviour. In New Puritans (1984) he used sequinned platform soled and heeled boots (designed by Bowery) to put a new twist on the idea of dancing on pointe, wearing them himself (and thus dancing as a ballerina) in a duet with Ellen van Schuylenburch. (Bowery reappropriated platform soles from the costume of Glam Rock singers in the early 1970s, many of whom were gay.) For Mmm, Clark devised a strangely contorted variation of ballet movement by flexing the pelvis so that, as Jann Parry put it, ‘the movement ripples outwards from the body’s sexual centre’ (1992: n.p.). On a mechanical level, ballet technique is based on a fixed pelvis. As Belinda Quirey observed: ‘Unless our hip girdle is held in a strong muscular grip we have not the central stability to rise and sink on our feet with ease and control’ (1976: 89). It is not just ballet but also the social dances of what Quirey calls ‘Polite Society’ which, until the advent of dancing to jazz music, have treated the chest and pelvis as one unbroken unit. Pelvic movement in the West has inevitable sexual connotations. Thus in Mmm, Clark and his male dancers (as well as the female ones) danced balletically derived movements that ‘looked wrong’ because they referred inescapably to sex. Hetrospective (1989) was perhaps the most extreme and explicit theatrical statement Clark has made about the unacceptability of his sexual and other practices. This performance was not presented in a theatre but in the upstairs premises of the Anthony D’Offay Gallery, London.1 He danced a solo in a leotard bristling with discarded syringes, and there was a bedroom scene called Bed Peace with his partner, the American dance artist Stephen Petronio. Judith Mackrell found Clark’s long embrace with Petronio briefly intriguing: ‘Its naked tonguing explorations are the frankest I have seen in the theatre and give pause for thought about sex on stage, narcissism and display. But, at about 15 minutes, the whole scene feels a tedious imposition’ (1989: 14). Nevertheless, when Clark danced ‘nude except for two giant fur muffs,’ Mackrell defied ‘anyone not to be moved by seeing that beautiful body, that play of muscles and effortless line close-up’ (ibid.). In a video dance commissioned for London Weekend Television’s South Bank Show later the same year, both Clark and Petronio danced with fur muffs. These were one long tube of fur material which both arms were inserted into up to the elbow and which the dancers held to hide their genitals. The muffs appeared again for a solo by Clark to the Velvet Underground song, ‘Venus in Furs’, as part of Mmm. These restricted movement not only because the dancer had to conceal his genitals, but also because he could not raise his arms to aid him in keeping his balance. 162

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When Clark and Petronio danced together in the video, the intention was clearly to make them appear identical, suggesting that gay desire is desire for the same. Both were naked but for the muffs, both had shaved heads, and, in the section immediately following this duet, both raised a semi-transparent, yellow vest over their head so that a photograph of the other’s face, which has been printed on it, covered their own face. This suggested ‘we are becoming each other’. Such emphasis on similarity inevitably accentuates differences. Clark and Petronio have different builds and facial features which are, in part, because the former is a Scot from Aberdeen while the latter is an Italian American from New Jersey. When they danced with the restriction of the fur muff, the differences between their dance backgrounds also became only too evident. Clark began going to ballet classes at an early age and studied it intensively as a teenager at the Royal Ballet School. Petronio says he had no movement training until at the age of eighteen he discovered contact improvisation at College and was lucky enough to work with Steve Paxton. The fur muff effectively divided the dancer’s body in two, making the pelvis the focal point of any movement. Whether the dancer was folding over and sinking back in the pelvis or extending the leg, the spectator’s attention was always directed back to the pelvis to see what effect the movement had, and whether the penis would inadvertently slip into view. When Clark danced, his movements were initiated in the feet. He pointed his leg and phrased his movements with beats of his foot. Petronio initiated movement with an impulse in one part of the body – a leg, a shoulder, or the pelvis – and followed it through to other body parts, the momentum of each impulse establishing the duration and phrasing of movements. Through working with Paxton and then with Trisha Brown, Petronio had developed a luscious movement style that is grounded in knowledge of the internal motivation of movement (see Chapter 6). In retrospect, dancing with Clark may have helped him develop the more architectural approach that characterised his choreography during the 1990s. Similarly, Clark values the lusciousness of internally motivated movement. Critics praised his dancing, not just for his gift for making beautiful shapes with his limbs, but for his ability to keep that sense of beauty through the transitions between the shapes so that the transitions become as important as the shapes they disclose. Clark’s ballet training has marked his dancing, giving him a particular knowledge of the body. No matter how he may have tried to get away from it, his classical sense of line (which ultimately distinguished his dancing from that of Petronio) has always asserted itself. Ballet is a discourse of power which subjects the dancing body and inscribes meanings on it. The ballet vocabulary is not a set of neutral physical postures and movements, but a language with a history and traditions. As I noted in Chapter 2, from the courts of the kings of France it inherits aristocratic and regal conventions 163

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of polite bodily presentation, and, from the Romantic period, it derives its indelible association with heterosexual courtship. Traditional ballet’s inescapable heterosexuality is the joke behind the Trockadero ballet companies’ various camp subversions. Clark’s career, from his highly mythologised act of dropping out of the Royal Ballet School to his temporary retirement and rehabilitation from drug addiction after the shock of Bowery’s untimely death in December 1994, was a series of attempts to escape the fact that his much valued, classical sense of line is that of a prince – and a normative, heterosexual one at that. Throughout the 1980s, the dildos, the nazi salutes, and all the ingenious obscenities devised for him by Bowery degraded and betrayed a tradition that reinforced a value system which oppressed and abjected gay sexualities. The fur muff was perhaps the most ingenious of these in the way it eroticised the male body in an unmistakably queer manner, simultaneously seducing and repelling the spectator. Whether or not Clark’s fur muff was made of real or artificial fur, it carried with it the association of animality. In popular speech, to screw like animals is to engage in sex acts for purely physical reasons devoid of social or emotional attachment. Real animal fur, when warmed by the human body, gives off a musky, sexy aroma redolent and suggestive of pubic hair which in this case the muff both concealed and touched. It drew attention to physical experiences that spectators could not see. Clark and Petronio were not only feeling the luxuriant touch of fur on their penises and testicles but were probably also cupping them in their hands (like Adam in a Renaissance painting) so as to keep them out of sight as they moved. The fur, as well as touching their genitals, also caressed the sides of their trunk from their lower ribs to their buttocks and pelvises, which were visually framed by their fur-clad lower arms. By connecting this expanse of naked skin to the genitals, the muff extended the body’s erotogenic surface, suggesting new areas of sensitivity and new possibilities for pleasure. The muff increased the sexual zone and multiplied the possibilities of physical sensation, drawing attention towards the naked buttocks and anus – forbidden sites of queer sexual practices. At a time when ACT UP were encouraging high-profile gay artists such as Clark and Petronio to embrace publicly the right to be queer, Hetrospective did so in a manner most calculated to offend, and, in doing so, extended the range of ways in which masculinities and sexualities could be represented in dance performance. MORRIS AND THE INSTABILITY OF SEX AND GENDER The same ambiguous relationship between traditionally valued choreographic and dancing skills and parodic manipulations of style can be detected in the work of another young gay dance superstar of the 1980s, Mark Morris. In Arlene Croce’s opinion, ‘Morris turns the transsexual chic 164

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and the frivolous passions of his generation into pretexts for dances . . . he doesn’t try to be more than a good choreographer and a completely sincere theatre artist’ (1987: 157). The mainstream critics, who praised Morris, did so, principally, by stressing his abilities in the areas of musicality and mime, thus enlisting him within an ahistorical tradition of ‘great’ choreographers. In doing so, they took at face value his borrowings from the traditions of European high culture and its canonical figures – Virgil, Purcell, Vivaldi, Blake, Handel, Milton, and so on. What these critics tried hard to ignore was the way Morris played around with signifiers of gender and sexuality that were socially contentious and on the margins of acceptability. His Dogtown (1983), like Clark and Petronio’s Hetrospective, was a piece that explicitly suggested anal sex. In this, a succession of brief and impersonal interactions and couplings were cleverly choreographed to follow, note by note, some bizarrely flat pop songs by Yoko Ono. It was performed by a mixed company of men and women, and, in its off-beat way, suggested non-hierarchical relations. During the section danced to the title song ‘Dogtown’, a tall woman repeatedly lifted a medium sized man, spun round with him in her arms, and then vigorously threw him towards the ground. In most of the pieces male and female dancers did exactly the same moves, and who mounted whom was not determined by heterosexual norms. They occasionally rose up like a dog on its hind legs to mime a canine howl at a howl-like moment in the music. Dancers wore rubber gloves and performed dog-like crawling movement which caused them to provocatively waggle their bottoms. In response to this invitation other dogs/dancers lifted a leg and mounted them in an unmistakable but unerotic suggestion of anal penetration. Dogtown invited spectators to become absorbed in contemplating the clever way the choreography fitted with the structure of the music while enjoying the piece’s humour. Croce enjoyed its skilful play of signifiers. She didn’t speculate on what these might signify, but praised Morris’ choreographic skills in crafting them: ‘The dogginess of it all is a continual, shadowy implication in movement as finely drawn and cunningly interlocked as the patterns on an ancient Greek jar’ (1987: 159). To be fair, it all depends what Croce meant by ‘dogginess’. But the Greek Urn she had in mind was surely the one which inspired Keats to write that ‘a thing of beauty is a joy for ever’. But joy is surely not the most appropriate way to describe one’s response to a dance piece that was disturbing in its allusion to unnatural and unacceptable sexual acts. Dogtown presented a parody of the more unsympathetic heterosexual view of gay men – they’re like dogs, animals, less than human, not like ‘us’. Such parody is pretty despairing. Dogtown was almost an expression of complete revulsion with sex, as a whole, regardless of sexuality: ‘I don’t have a lot of time for sex,’ Morris told Tobias Schneebaum of the gay magazine Christopher Street. 165

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Sex, he said, is ‘hormones, probably like rutting . . . It’s like a mandrill’s genitals turning red. People go into heat, and that’s wonderful, but it’s not love’ (quoted in Acocella 1993: 94). Dogtown surely referred to the atmosphere of gay sexual liberation that prevailed in gay bath houses in the late 1970s and early 1980s to which I’ve already referred. ‘I won’t live that long’ Morris told an interviewer, and, when asked why, replied ‘AIDS. I wasn’t celibate all the time I lived in New York’ (ibid.: 115). Morris’s 1989 ballet Dido and Aeneas was probably his most subversive treatment of gender roles. Set to Henry Purcell’s 1689 oratorio, it narrates Aeneas’s brief stay in Carthage and love affair with Queen Dido before he proceeds to Italy, leaving the heartbroken Dido, who commits suicide. In Purcell’s work, Dido’s fate was brought about through a malign intervention by the Sorceress. Morris himself played the role of both Dido and Sorceress.2 With the exception of Aeneas, initially danced by Guillermo Resto, both male and female cast members, including Morris, were dressed in plain black dresses (which could stand in for generalised ancient attire). Aeneas wore a black kilt showing off his bare chest, in effect drawing attention to his performance of masculinity as if putting it in quotation marks. The rest of the men and women in the cast, in their gender-neutral costumes, alternated between male and female roles as attendants in Dido’s court, sailors, and witches in the Sorceress’s cave. Morris’s Dido and Aeneas made many references to nineteenth- and twentieth-century theatre dance. Gay Morris (1996) has commented on quotations from Nijinsky’s L’Après midi d’un faune, both in the frieze-like gestures of Aeneas’s sailors and in the scene where the Sorceress, like the Faune, masturbated. Carol Martin (1999) has linked Dido’s opening solo, sitting on a bench, to Graham’s Lamentation, and parts of the Sorceress’s role to Wigman’s Witch Dance. She also suggests that the Sorceress is Dido’s evil alter ego, just as, in Swan Lake, the same ballerina often performs both the role of the perfect Odette and that of the impure, tempting Odile. Dido’s betrothal scene, where Aeneas helped her run up along the benches, cited choreography for the song ‘I am sixteen going on seventeen’ in the film The Sound of Music. The Sorceress, Martin suggests, cited Morticia in the Gothic TV-show The Addams Family, and Cruella de Ville in the Disney cartoon 101 Dalmatians. She also notes quotations throughout the piece from classical Indian dance. Through indiscriminate blurring of high and popular culture, and between Western and Asian cultures, Morris’s Dido and Aeneas imagined a utopian, allegorical space in which to explore serious artistic themes. This utopia was one in which the spectator identified with Morris’s rendition of the Sorceress’s sexual jealousy and with Dido’s desire and then her feelings of sexual rejection. The strength of this identification was such that his homosexuality was not an issue. In many Asian court dance or theatre traditions, men can perform female roles and women can perform male ones. Morris’s performance of the two 166

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female roles in some ways claims a similar conventionalised space. In the West, however, female impersonation carries comic, grotesque connotations which some feminists have argued are misogynist (see Phelan 1993: 101). Many writers have argued that Morris’s performance was not a drag act, despite the grotesquery of his performance as the Sorceress. One should perhaps, therefore, ask to what extent Morris’s utopia is one which recognises the unequal power relations between men and women, or between US artists and the Asians whose cultural traditions they appropriate. Both Gay Morris and Joan Acocella have identified both blue-collar masculine sensibilities and a feminine, sinuous flexibility and emotionality in Morris’s performance of the two female roles. For Acocella, this ‘violation of sexual identity depersonalizes the portrait, just as masks presumably did in Attic tragedy’ (1993: 101). In her view, this permitted Morris to transcend the contingencies of gender, and represent universal truths about love and desire. Gay Morris, however, has argued that he revealed those aspects of the instability of sex and gender that Judith Butler has theorised: ‘Most spectacularly in his taking on of two female roles, Morris breaks up the supposed coherence of gender, sexuality, and desire, demonstrating that “none of these dimensions of significant corporeality express or reflect one another” ’ (Morris 1996: 149 quoting Butler 1990a: 13). As I pointed out in the first two chapters, Judith Butler’s argument is that one cannot refuse to perform the gender that is ascribed to one, but this does not have to be performed faithfully. Morris’s performance of femininity, I argued, was not used seriously, but, to use J.L. Austin’s phrase, in ways parasitic upon its normal use (1962: 23). It exceeded the literal meanings of masculinity and femininity as discrete and separate social and psychological constructions. In doing so, at a time of widespread gay activism, Morris declared his opposition to norms of masculine behaviour. Morris’s own statements suggest that he, himself, did not intend his Dido and Aeneas should undermine the idea of coherent subjectivity in the way Butler has described. He told Tobias Schneebaum that one can ask a woman in rehearsal to act like a 65-year-old man but that a straight man would be too embarrassed to act like a 13-year-old girl. ‘Women’, he concluded, ‘have a richer and more varied emotional life than men’ (Acocella 1993: 92). This is a much more conservative position than that of the other choreographers considered in this chapter. It is this which many dance critics have valued in his work, but the irony is that, in doing so, they invariably ignore or remain silent about his incontrovertible queerness. GOODE, GHOSTS, VIOLENCE, AND THE POLITICS OF CAMP Superficially, Joe Goode’s performance in his solo 29 Effeminate Gestures and Morris’s performance as Dido and the Sorceress had in common their 167

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use of camp, and their ironic combinations of signifiers of blue-collar, masculine behaviour with effeminacy. When compared with Goode’s commitment to gay politics, however, Morris’s apolitical stance becomes apparent. Initially choreographed in 1987, 29 Effeminate Gestures remained in his company’s repertoire over a long period; Goode was still performing it in the early 2000s. Lasting eleven minutes, it consisted of a choreographed sequence of twenty-nine gestures repeated five times in different variations which, as the title suggests, signified effeminate male behaviour. The label ‘effeminate’ has often been used against gay men in a derogatory and injurious way to suggest their failure to behave like proper men. Michael Scott, reviewing Goode’s piece in 1991 in Vancouver, remarked: ‘The content, for anyone who has ever felt society’s disapproval, is deeply moving’ (Scott 1991: n.p.). The solo referred to the kinds of gesture that a drag queen might perform. One could, perhaps, call them camp; however, their use in the piece was not primarily entertaining but, as Scott suggests, created a sense of community between performer and spectators through its evocation of shared memories and histories of a kind that are normally denied. By doing so, it enacted a powerful argument that gay identities are no less viable that straight ones. The title’s use of the word ‘effeminate’ therefore signalled a political stance. Goode’s deliberate reappropriation, within this solo, of these kinds of gesture and their associations was equivalent to the contemporary reappropriation of the term queer. At a time of widespread gay activism, the solo’s reappropriation could be read as a political act within the context of what Judith Butler has called an ‘increasing politicisation of theatricality for queers’ (1993: 233). However, to say that Goode’s piece did no more than communicate a gay, political message would be reductive, and would not account for the enduring success that its long run implies. I shall argue that the piece’s fascination lay in the tensions it created between the material it brought together. There was a tension in the piece between dance, spoken or sung words, and gestures; there was also a tension between Goode’s performative declaration, by dancing these effeminate gestures, that he is a gay man, and his use of many signs of normative heterosexual masculine. 29 Effeminate Gestures started in the dark as Goode, unseen on stage, muttered a droning chorus of ‘He’s a good guy’, the adjective good being a homonym of his own name. As the lights came up, the audience saw that he was wearing a blue boiler suit and a protective face mask on his head. He switched on an electric chainsaw and proceeded to cut into a cheap, rather kitsch, gilt chair. Leaving the saw running on the now trashed chair, and stripping his boiler suit off his upper body, he walked up stage to announce the piece’s title, shouting it above the chainsaw’s piercing whine, and then proceeded to take up each of a series of twenty-nine gestures. This was the first time the series was seen, but they would be repeated four more times in different forms. Goode himself said they had 168

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an ‘extreme, lavish, grander-than-thou, queenly quality’ (quoted in Shank 1994: 73). David Gere, in an excellent analysis of the piece to which my own discussion is indebted, provides admirable descriptions of the sequence. Here are four of these: ‘He lowers his gaze and places his hands dramatically on the chest, as if to feel the shape of his breasts’. ‘The hands sweep up in a flicking gesture to frame the face, which is tilted towards the light, a Renaissance virgin captured at the instant of the annunciation: rapture’. ‘The head tips back slightly, lips smiling coyly; the arm previously thrust in the air is now broken at the wrist, fingers fluttering in a perky 1940s wave’. ‘The hand pulls back to cover the mouth, which is distended now in an attitude of mock horror, the body and head dropped forward in fear and revulsion’. (2001: 353, 354, 357, 363) Gere suggests that this last gesture evoked a stereotype of a fearful, effeminate, gay man, illustrating it with a description of a scene from the mainstream Hollywood movie The Rock (1996). In this Sean Connery, who plays the role of a dangerous convict, is having his hair cut by an effeminate hairdresser. Suddenly Connery makes a bolt for freedom ‘nearly murdering a man by throwing him off a balcony’ (ibid.) and runs for the lift. When the lift door closes he finds himself in with the now terrified, cowering hairdresser, who eventually moans: ‘OK, I don’t want to know nothing. I never saw you throw that gentleman off the balcony. All I care about is, are you happy with your haircut?’ (ibid.). Goode’s performance cited such stereotypical gay roles and framed them in a way that was both critical and camp. A video, which Joe Goode Performance Group gave me, documents a live performance in San Francisco in 1992. Occasionally during it, a member of the audience laughed in recognition or appreciation. Generally, however, the audience seemed to be watching quite soberly. Campness is notoriously difficult to define or characterise. It is a metropolitan, gay, subcultural style that assumes a common appreciation of the value of artifice and subversion, of surface rather than depth. Richard Dyer sums up the defensive value of such subcultural solidarity when he says: ‘It’s being so camp as keeps us going’ (1992: 135). The serious response of Goode’s gay- and queer-friendly audience suggested that they recognised the camp quality of the gestures as a marker of an acknowledged, politicised, gay identity. Switching off the chainsaw, Goode repeated the set of gestures more or less identically, accompanying each with a spoken commentary – ‘If you talk too much . . . if you feel too much . . .’ without ever completing the sentence. By failing to match an ‘if’ with a ‘then’, Goode seemed to be telling his audience, who he addressed directly in a second person narrative, that he knew they knew the consequences of such transgressions. For one 169

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gesture, he didn’t even name the offence. He started by saying ‘If you . . .’ and then in silence fluttered his fingers while glancing coyly over his shoulder at the audience, completing the part-verbal part-gestural phrase by saying ‘too much’. It was as if words here were inadequate. The third time the complete sequence was repeated, Goode accompanied the gestures with vocal sounds – explosions, gun fire, sirens – that seemed like those of a small boy playing with toy soldiers or a toy gun. Taken together, these verbal and non-verbal commentaries, in effect, proved how much dance movement can convey that cannot be put into words. But, at the same time, dance is invariably hard to see and is not particularly good at conveying precise information or specific narrative content: the phrase ‘dancing all over the place’ suggests evasion. Goode clearly wanted to convey very specific information in this solo, and this, I suggest, is why the initial sequence of twenty-nine gestures was repeated three times in a row without choreographic variation. It was only when Goode was sure that the sequence was established in the spectators’ minds that he began to develop it in two more variations. He pulled up his yellow T-shirt to bare his torso, catching it on his head and twisting it into a headdress. His appearance now recalled Nureyev’s swash-buckling pirate solo from La Corsaire or perhaps Nijinsky’s Golden Slave from Schéhérazade – the improvised turban exotically framing his desirable male body. To an upbeat, Latin inflected drumming track he performed a bravura solo that still incorporated many of the twenty-nine gestures now incongruously combined with vigorous break-dance or Aikido rolls and wheels on the floor, and slicing arm movements. It was a solo whose energy and confident expansiveness, and whose martial arts references, might otherwise be considered unproblematically masculine. The solo and music ended. Goode shrugged off the T-shirt headdress and started to sing, unaccompanied, a queered version of a line from the song ‘Sunrise Sunset’ from the musical 1969 Fiddler on the Roof, ‘Is this the little boy I carried’ while running, one last time, through the sequence of effeminate gestures. David Gere has pointed out that some of Goode’s installations and performances in the early 1990s seemed to be haunted, in a Gothic way, by ghostly figures which Gere links to the traumatic loss, from AIDS-related illnesses, of so many gay men, and male dancers in particular, in metropolitan gay communities such as those in New York and San Francisco (Gere 2004: 206–27). Goode’s song functioned as a melancholy lament. As he sang, a power drill was lowered from the lighting grid. Goode turned it on and aimed it at the audience as if it were a revolver, and then, worryingly, pointed it towards his own mouth. Kneeling, he turned it further so that the drill was pointing at his shoulder with the side of the motor housing facing his cheek. He folded his upper body forwards, as if hugging the drill, pressing his face against its housing. As the lights faded, his foghorn voice was still competing with the drill’s grating whine. 170

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Gere’s reading of this piece largely concentrates on the way Goode’s twenty-nine gestures interrogated and challenged stereotypes of gay behaviour, and he argues that Goode used camp as a political marker with which to performatively declare a strongly affirmative gay identity. It is essential to recognise and underwrite the importance of gay dance works. What interests me about Goode’s performance is the effect on normative gender discourses of its contradictory, allegorical overlaying of different meanings. It overloaded an already overdetermined economy of signs with tensions, contradictions, and troubling absences. Goode’s twenty-nine gestures signified a gay identity, but his mechanic’s blue overalls and familiarity with tools suggested blue-collar status,3 a ‘good guy’ who is perhaps a potentially violent one. The noise, when the tools were on, was violent, and the relief when they were switched off palpable: violence is an attribute of ‘proper’ masculinity. Goode also showed off a solidly muscular and desirable body to create a homoerotic charge through evoking the ghosts of former, desirable male dancers that belied the abject state associated with effeminacy. And, if camp is an elaboration of surface that denies the possibility of depth, and is a glittering, unstoppably excessive display of unfixable signs, then the clash of camp subversion with melancholia and mourning was particularly disturbing. Spectators saw the same body performing in all these seemingly incompatible ways, and became aware of other ghostly presences – seductively homoerotic dancers, the lost boy. There is a significant difference, here, between Goode’s performance and Morris’s as Dido and the Sorceress. Whereas Morris wanted spectators to find and identify with a coherent, universal subjectivity within his performance, Goode used his sense of the audience’s response to make it as difficult as possible to read a coherent subjectivity into his performative presence and the ghosts he evoked. His performance demanded that they engage actively in the process of interpretation. It is around the question of the stability and instability of the masculine body that performer and spectator therefore interacted. What was at stake in these interactions, during both Dido and Aeneas and 29 Effeminate Gestures, was the limit of normative, masculine identity. By mixing and confusing effeminate gestures with the actions of a good guy, 29 Effeminate Gestures allowed Goode, as performer, to trouble and subvert the homosexual/heterosexual binary. There would be nothing good about good guys if there weren’t effeminate queens to define the limit beyond which guys become no good. As I noted in the first chapter, homosexuals are essential to the continuation of heterosexuality; as Leo Bersani has put it, homosexuals are ‘the internally excluded difference that cements heterosexual identity’ (1995: 36). Morris’s Dido and Aeneas suggested a cross-cultural, classless utopia in which spectators could find a coherent queer subjectivity that was not permissible in the straight world offstage. 29 Effeminate Gestures was more 171

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confrontational and disruptive. In Goode’s performance, a spectator who attempted to find a coherent subjectivity within material that was discontinuous, necessarily tried to fit its fragmentary parts together inside the boundaries of the same body. Through trying to make the spectator’s task as difficult as possible, Goode forced his audience to recognise the fragility of the limit dividing straight from gay. Without this boundary, differences between straight and gay collapse, sucking the meanings out of signs and making them available for resignification. To try and say what the final, disturbing image of Goode singing while cradling the electric drill meant would be futile. But the anger and violence within this image – its affective power – rather than confirming normative masculinity, seemed, instead, directed against the very constraints that defined and normalised it. By erasing the limit for himself and his audience at this particular historical juncture and within the privileged time space of a theatre, Goode destroyed the means through which gay behaviour can be marked as different. Dido and Aeneas and 29 Effeminate Gestures both, therefore, showed what it would be like if normative constraints on gender and sexuality didn’t exist. Whereas Dido and Aeneas did so by appealing to supposedly universal aesthetic values and inviting the spectator to identify with Morris’s compelling performance in a conventional way, 29 Effeminate Gestures destabilised known possibilities. Morris offered solace to those who wanted to go on believing in the possibility of conventional artistic greatness hoping that, by doing so, his own homosexuality would thereby be accepted. Goode offered his audience an opportunity to find new ways of interpreting gender and sexuality, showing them that it doesn’t have to be like this. DV8 AND LONELY MEN While neither 29 Effeminate Gestures nor DV8’s Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men directly addressed the issue of AIDS, both were clearly produced when that was one of the most urgent issues facing gay men. When Dead Dreams . . . was first performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in October 1988, it came at a time when gay men were under considerable public pressure on three fronts: from the threat of AIDS infection, from hostile press coverage of the epidemic, and from a rightwing backlash against the increasingly visible gay community (or communities). In Britain, this took the form of Clause 28 of the 1988 Local Government Bill which made it illegal for the local authorities of towns and cities to intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality. At a time when there was concern among gay people and social progressives about a resurgence of deeply rooted and age old prejudices against homosexuality, DV8 presented an uncompromising exploration of controversial ideas. While gay men were, 172

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of necessity, examining and adjusting their sexual practices in order to avoid infection, Dead Dreams . . . focused not on a killer disease but on the extreme case of a homosexual who was a mass murderer. Although Dead Dreams . . . wasn’t ‘about’ the life of the serial killer Dennis Nilsen, it was devised through improvisations that explored the dancers’ reactions to reading Brian Masters’s book, Killing for Company, about Nilsen. In many ways, Dead Dreams . . . suggested the same need for men to change that I identified, in the last chapter, in works by Bausch and Early. Like My Sex, Our Dance, which I discussed in Chapter 2, Dead Dreams . . . presented the loneliness and hollowness that results when gay or straight men are unable to form meaningful relationships. It used the presentation of intense, disturbing situations as a way in which to explore this. Early in the piece, Douglas Wright engaged in a series of sado-masochist actions with Russell Maliphant. The latter was blindfolded; at first, his wrists were bound and he was undressed and teasingly caressed and then slapped; then he was made to lean against the wall in a vulnerable position and submit to being slapped and pulled off balance by tugs on the elastic waistband of his underpants. Here and elsewhere, whose fantasy was being acted out was not always straightforwardly apparent. In one of the central encounters in Dead Dreams . . . , Maliphant faced Charnock and slowly reached out to touch and then embrace him. Charnock remained passive and withdrew himself. Maliphant then repeatedly reached out to touch him but, each time, Charnock recoiled, sometimes hitting back, until Maliphant eventually caught him and held him tight. Charnock, then, again withdrew himself until he was holding Maliphant’s wrists and drew him towards a ladder. This he climbed up a little way, and then let himself fall so that he was caught by Maliphant; in catching him they both fell to the ground. Charnock, then, got away from him as quickly as he could and climbed up again, this time a little higher, and jumped again. Charnock says the inspiration for this section was the idea of asking ‘how much do you love me? Do you love me this much? or this much?’ as he gradually went further and further up until, finally, Maliphant walked away, and Charnock almost crashed to the ground on his own. At first, it appeared that Charnock was being unwillingly approached by Maliphant; but as the section developed, it became apparent that Charnock was forcing Maliphant to go through this ‘session’ to feed his own fears of being held and constrained, together with his submissive fantasy of being betrayed. Part of the theatrical power of this section derived from the fact that the situation was, to some extent, a ‘true’ one for Charnock. A powerful performer, he invited the audience to identify with his emotional experiences. The discomfort that the audience was, thus, made to feel, in this and similar scenes, was further exacerbated by the way voyeurism was used in the piece. In some sections, either Newson or Charnock were shown actively watching intimate scenes performed by other dancers. When 173

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Charnock watched the action between Wright and Maliphant described above, his response was so extreme that he had to go on all fours with his face contorted, as if in a silent scream. The presence of a watcher within a performance can have the effect of making individual spectators shift their point of view, and make them aware that they, too, are outside the action and watching it. This denaturalised the conventional role of the spectator’s gaze. In Dead Dreams . . ., this challenged the audience to recognise that they were looking at men who were looking at other men in a way motivated by sexual tastes conventionally judged to be deviant. This prompted the audience to consider whether or not they accepted that the behaviour presented in the piece was totally alien to them. By subverting normal ways of looking at dance, it thus questioned and problematised the criteria behind the distinction between what is and is not considered acceptable masculine behaviour. The most disturbing images were at the end of the piece. Reproduced in Master’s book Killing For Company is a notebook titled ‘Monochrome Man, sad sketches’ which Nilsen, while he was on remand in Brixton prison in 1983, filled with drawings and writing about his crimes. It includes a drawing of Nilsen, dressed in a suit, looking down at a dead male body, clothed in underpants and socks, laid out on a mattress. He kept the bodies of some of his victims for several months under the floorboards of his flat and sometimes got them up, washed them in the bath, and acted out ordinary, everyday activities with them. Each of the four dancers took it in turns to play the Nilsen figure, looking at and manipulating the prone body of one or more dancers, recalling Nilsen’s psychotic rituals. Charnock, in the role of victim and dressed only in underpants, crawled out of the bath, up to, and along, the theatre’s lighting grid, and then down a rope from which Maliphant was hanging upside down. He crawled over Maliphant’s prone body and then flopped around in hideous spasms on the floor, before finally lying still at Newson’s feet. Dead Dreams . . . was one of the few pieces, at the time, brave enough to confront the spectator with theatrical images of death. In doing so, it offered no easy solution to the problem of male loneliness, but challenged its audience to think. John Percival, in The Times, said Dead Dreams . . . showed a ‘bleak, angry, almost hopeless homosexual world’ (1988) and that ‘to use the word gay in this context would be ludicrous’. Nadine Meisner said the four characters in the piece are ‘drained of normal emotional colour, their urges twisted into fetishism, sadism and self-loathing’ (1989: 19). From a dominant, heterosexual point of view, this is not an unacceptable picture of homosexuality. The gay press in Britain ignored the piece until a Sunday newspaper attacked a flagship television arts programme for broadcasting a film version of it. Reviewing this, Jonathan Sanders, television critic of Gay Times, took a similar line to the mainstream press, describing it as a ‘despondent piece 174

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11 Figure 7.1 Russell Maliphant and Nigel Charnock in DV8’s Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men.

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in which the performers applied their amazing energy and technical skill to an exploration of bathroom necrophilia’ (1990: 60). One suspects dance work that provided anything other than a safely closeted spectacle of homoeroticism generally slipped below their radar. Another gay journalist, Keith Brazil, in The Pink Paper argued that it was important for serious, gay artists to ‘show gay love and gay sex in all its complexity’ and not ‘censor ourselves into only showing lightweight, positive images’ (1990: 1). Nigel Charnock recalled that, after the first performances of Dead Dreams . . ., the company had expected the audience to be largely made up of gay men; they were, therefore, surprised when they got feedback from straight men who said that they could identify with some of the situations in the piece. Newson, however, told William Pierce of Square Peg magazine about some very negative, homophobic responses to the piece (Pierce 1988: n.p.). He argued, later, that the piece was not exclusively aimed at gay audiences: I don’t think it matters whether the men are gay or straight. A gay man is still a man and has those same emotional blockages. For all sorts of reasons, most men want to protect themselves. I wonder why so many men – gay or straight— have problems relating to people. (Quoted in Constanti 1989: 6) It was not until 1995 that Newson worked again with an all-male cast of dancers when he made the piece Enter Achilles. In doing so, he returned to this idea about the problems that both gay and straight men have in relating to people, but this time focusing on straight male bonding. Enter Achilles showed a crowd of eight young executives, in shirts and ties, loosening up over a few pints in an English pub. Their gestures and mannerisms were brilliantly reproduced, and turned into unison, choreographed sequences. Despite their easy camaraderie as they engaged in horseplay and, like footballers, put a comradely arms around another’s shoulder, they clearly didn’t really know one another and seemed to have no real friends. They, thus, spilt or stole each other’s beer and shouted sexist abuse to members of the audience. While it, almost, seemed a harmless release of excess energy, their performances of masculinity had an uncomfortable edge. Gradually, a distinction emerged that, while some were bullies, others were unsure and vulnerable. The piece opened with the least hardened executive alone in a transparent stage box, as if in his bedroom, handling a plastic inflatable sex doll, animating it like a puppet. At the end of the piece, the sex doll emerged as the victim, brought in by one of the bullies and viciously violated with a broken beer glass, leaving it a sad, deflated ghost. Before that, however, the men’s uneasy camaraderie was disrupted by the arrival, at the pub, of a man whose behaviour was less rowdy and conformist, and whose way of moving was sensuous and threatening to the compulsory hetero176

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sexual normativity imposed and policed by the bullies. His arrival provoked some of the performance’s most violent male horseplay in which the more vulnerable men had to be very nimble, or patient, or quick thinking to avoid becoming victims. Eventually the inflatable doll was produced and, to increasingly desperate protests from its owner, violated and punctured. The piece ended with the stage floor, strewn with broken glass and spilt beer, tipping up towards the audience as if to underline the instability of the masculine identities that had been performed on it. Enter Achilles invited spectators both to recognise the situation, and to identify with the more sympathetic characters, only to literally pull the floor up from under their feet. In an article in February 1996, Newson complained, with some justice, about dance critics who had assumed that the stranger whose arrival disrupted and threatened the other men’s behaviour must be gay. What, I suggest, is significant, is what this demonstrates about the way things had changed since 1988 when Charnock had assumed that the core audience for Dead Dreams . . . would be gay men. The time when it was politically imperative to assert gay identities and sensibilities had passed. Thus Mark Morris told Gay Morris in January 1994 that he was less directly concerned with gender issues than he had been when he made Dido and Aeneas and his version of The Nutcracker, The Hard Nut; he no longer felt pressed, he told her, to make overt gender statements as he once did (Morris 1996: 157). As Peggy Phelan noted: ‘There is real power in remaining unmarked; and there are serious limitations to visual representation as a political goal’ (1993: 6). These limitations became particularly clear, I suggest, when gay lifestyles became a convenient target for neo-conservative politicians who manipulated widespread homophobia to consolidate their political constituency. The brief engagement with gay identity politics, which I have examined in this chapter, had the effect of generating awareness about the politics of representation, though, as I have pointed out, gay choreographers did not always recognise the need to apply this politics to representations of femininity or of non-Western identities. It also opened up new kinds of theatrical qualities, and a more open range of ways of representing masculinity. These have been explored by the experimental dance artists whose work I discuss in the next chapter. Since the late 1980s, choreographers, in general, have found it possible to explore the theatrical effect of far more sensual and intimate qualities than they had felt able to use previously. This has created new possibilities for dancers to make connections with spectators and allowed far more open ways of exploring gender and sexuality. I conclude the present chapter, however, with one of the most popular and commercially successful dance pieces of the 1990s, Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, which, I suggest, exploited the fact that gay dance artists no longer felt compelled to make overt statements about 177

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gay identities and sensibilities to make a work that in many ways undid all the advances which other gay artists had made in the previous decade. PLAYING DOWN SEXUALITY IN SWAN LAKE Bourne’s starting point for his reworking of Swan Lake was to cast men as swans, both in the corps de ballet, and in the dual role of Odette and Odile, which became the Swan and the Stranger. For these roles, Bourne cast a star from the Royal Ballet, Adam Cooper, which turned the ballet’s central pas de deux into a male–male duet. As he told Alistair Macaulay, Bourne was particularly keen for his production not to be thought of as a gay Swan Lake: ‘Because our production was so big and so much of a gamble (financially), I probably played down [the sexual issues] to some extent’ (Macaulay 1999: 194). His Prince was a sad, confused young man with an unsympathetic mother. He appeared too sensitive and naive to cope with the pressures of public court life and intrigue, but, at a moment when he was close to committing suicide, he discovered the swans on a lakeside in a park. According to Bourne: ‘The Swan is free, in my version, and he’s beautiful. Everyone’s interested in him. The Prince projects on to him’ (ibid.: 195). Although Bourne, himself, as a gay man, saw the relationship between Swan and Prince as a gay one, he said it could be seen as, somehow, more universal. This is the line which most of the critics have taken. As with Morris’s work, they have preferred to ignore the gay aspects of the work, yet I suspect that almost all of the huge number of people who have seen the ballet either in live performance (it is still on tour at the time of writing this in spring 2006) or on DVD have recognised the homoeroticism of the swans. Bourne acknowledges that he knew of the Swedish choreographer Mats Ek’s 1992 version of Swan Lake which, also, had a male corps de ballet (ibid.: 206). Whereas Ek’s male swans were threatening and aggressive, Bourne’s were undeniably attractive in a sensual, manly way. Susan Foster has noted their similarity to Shawn’s closeted male dancers: ‘Like Shawn’s male dancers, they seldom touch, yet their athleticism is imbued with a sensual grace that Shawn could not have dared to construct’ (2001: 191–2). The British gay press, who had almost completely ignored DV8’s Dead Dreams . . . because it didn’t fit their conception of dance as a form of safely eroticised entertainment, gave considerable coverage to Bourne’s Swan Lake. Foster argues that the production, in effect, provided queer culture for those consumers able to afford the ticket prices. ‘Virtuoso soloists, the swans are a consumer’s delight, yet they also absolve us of our consumer guilt because they are performing the important cultural labor of explaining a gay sensibility’ (ibid.: 197). This is at a cost, however, as Foster goes on to point out that: ‘Not only does Swan Lake erase racial and ethnic differences but it erases women altogether’ (ibid.). 178

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Martin Hargreaves argues that feminine absence is crucial to the way Bourne’s Swan Lake tried to deny its homosexuality. Bourne, he points out, asserted in many interviews his dislike of campness, and reiterated how important it had been to ensure his corps of swans looked masculine. But, as Hargreaves points out, the male corps and the male Swan only read as masculine if spectators know that this is a revised version of a ballet in which they were feminine: If Bourne’s Swan is not Odette, who is femininity par excellence, then he is masculine. She is present in order for an audience to read difference in Bourne’s piece but absent so that Cooper is not identified with her which would trouble his masculinity and bring out the spectres of feyness and camp. (2000: 236, emphasis in the original) Hargreaves points out that there are various moments in the ballet when Bourne shows the Prince trying unsuccessfully to identify with the Swan, using the traditions and conventions of the gaze and, thus, inviting audience members to identify with him. In the ‘white’ lakeside scene, he ‘tries to become the Swan – he mimics his movements as a way of performatively becoming his masculine ideal’ (ibid.: 237). In their duet together, Hargreaves points out, the homosexuality which Bourne was at such pains to deny, nevertheless surfaces: ‘When the two men duet there is a mutual nuzzling, tender lifts and weight exchanges with moments when they seem about to kiss’ (ibid.).4 Ultimately, Bourne’s Swan Lake reinforced a negative, disempowering conception of homosexuality that, in effect, reinforced dominant gender norms. The Prince is institutionalised after suffering a nervous breakdown and dies in a nightmare when the swans turn on him and on Swan. Susan Foster explains: Deviant, like the Prince, [Swan] is bashed by his own. And this is how the closet in Bourne’s Swan Lake operates. Both the causal relationship between homosexuality and inadequate mothering that the dance depicts and the attack on Swan by his fellow swans issue from a framework of heteronormative assumptions about gay life. (2001: 198) Bourne’s Swan Lake has demonstrated that these heteronormative assumptions are there, waiting to reassert themselves, whenever choreographers uncritically set up conventional audience–performer relations that depend upon conventional modes of narrative identification. Even when Morris tried to disrupt gender norms in Dido and Aeneas, his theatrical presentation of ‘universal’ characters permitted recuperation of his performance within conventional aesthetic standards that, inevitably, marginalised his sexuality. 179

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DV8, Clark, Petronio, and Goode, however, created space in which to imagine possible alternatives by attacking and subverting conventional modes of narrative identification. By denaturalising supposedly universal truths, they challenged the spectator to actively engage in finding new ways of interpreting their dance performances.

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A tall, attractive woman with blonde hair, dressed up for a party, was standing, nervously waiting, on stage. Out, from the wing, came an even taller, handsome man who, like the woman, looked sheepish. With an embarrassed laugh, the perfect couple started to kiss, then, shortly, exited together. As they left, three identically dressed pairs of dancers came on stage, one after the other from the same side, in a long, horizontal line: a male–female, male–male, and female–female couple. Like the first pair, all started kissing, but this time in a unison, choreographed sequence. Their actions and gestures had been carefully recreated. The dancers began by making eye contact. Each tilted their head the opposite way to their partner, then, slowly, brought their mouths together while their arms enfolded one another. Each couple was performing exactly the same movements at the same time. Each turned in space while mouth to mouth, and each caressed the same part of their partner’s shoulders in perfect unison. The style appeared naturalistic; they seemed to be acting out just how they might actually behave with their chosen partner in private. But, the fact that their actions were mirrored across the stage put this behaviour, as it were, in inverted commas. This section, from the British choreographer Lea Anderson’s 1992 piece Birthday, performatively proposed that heterosexuality is not a universal norm. The situation in which a passive female is the recipient of male advances was shown to be only one of a range of options that were all, in this piece at least, equally valid and equivalent to one another. This chapter brings together a number of recent dance pieces which, like Anderson’s Birthday, have challenged hierarchies and signalled an extreme scepticism towards notions of universality. Whereas the dance pieces discussed in Chapter 7 almost all highlighted the fact that their choreographers and some of their dancers were gay-identified men, Anderson’s piece left a strange uncertainty about the individual identities and sexual orientations of her dancers. Through uncannily precise unison, all the dancers became more like each other by becoming less like themselves. They were contributing to a movement sequence that made 181

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a point, and conformity allowed them to escape from having to reveal too much about themselves. They were not, therefore, expressing some essence in the way that modern dancers in the 1930s and 1940s believed they were doing through their dancing. One way in which Birthday announced its anti-hierarchical tendencies was by rejecting the idea that dancing expresses a transcendental essence. The dancers did not claim to present any more than was actually there and could be demonstrated in a public way. The piece did not, therefore, reflect any universal truth about the nature of subjectivity. This is not to argue, in a postmodern way, that Anderson’s work demonstrated the death of the subject. All I am suggesting is that the dancers’ performances provided no evidence about them as individuals, but, through this lack of particularity, merely indicated their impersonal, neutral presence. This chapter looks at a piece from the 1990s by Bill T. Jones, whose earlier work I discussed in Chapter 6, and then discusses recent pieces by Anderson, Jonathan Burrows, Boris Charmatz, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Raimund Hoghe, and John Jasperse. These choreographers are all active at the time of writing. The problem of how to create material for male dancers has emerged in these artists’ work, sometimes by default, as an issue that has needed to be addressed in some way, even if only to defuse or neutralise it, so as to allow new kinds of relations to emerge, both between dancers themselves on stage, and between dancers and spectators. The kissing section from Anderson’s Birthday exemplifies a key characteristic which all the pieces I discuss in this chapter have in common. By imagining the possibility of displacing white, heterosexual masculinity from its normally dominant position, they propose ways of rethinking the sorts of relations that men can develop, either with women, or with other men. Each piece, in different ways, imagines and stages non-hierarchical, intersubjective relationships. Structured on the basis of radical equality, these are ambiguously both subjective and hence private but also intersubjective and hence public. Instead of indicating difference through showing dominant and subordinate partners tied together through ideologically determined power relations, these dances imagine contexts in which equality is shared across diversity. They, therefore, create, for those involved, unfamiliar, fluid positions in relation to one another that permit a freedom from the constraints of normative masculine behaviour. This fluidity can, nevertheless, generate anxieties for men, in particular, because it undermines the idea that masculinity is rational, distanced, and protected with impenetrable boundaries. Whereas hierarchies depend upon categorising individuals according to their identities, the intersubjective relations created within these dances trouble notions of fixed identities, either through blurring differences, or by presenting impersonal, neutral presences that leave questions about identity open and ambiguous.1 182

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Identity was a key issue in Chapter 7. For choreographers who identified as gay, the gay liberation movement in the 1970s, and the need to maintain a sense of community among gay men during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, resulted in many works with a focus on gay male sexuality. Artists and critics often spoke, in the 1970s and 1980s, of the need to take into consideration issues of gender, ‘race’, and class, subsequently adding other components of identities to make lists that sometimes ended with ‘etc.’. What this ‘etc.’ suggested is that there is always another marginalised identity one may have forgotten or which may not yet have come to notice. Specific named identities have gradually ceased to be significant in themselves, a more general need for inclusiveness arising instead. If specifically identitarian concerns, in themselves, were becoming less significant, this was not because problems and difficulties concerning identities had been solved or had disappeared. As Bill T. Jones told Ann Daly: ‘In the nineties, black rage is not allowed anymore, because supposedly we all have moved on past it’ (1998: 122–3). This is the problem of recuperation: the means through which dancers have explored issues concerning identities have become increasingly over exposed, and, to some extent, no longer have the potential to generate useful meanings within current social and artistic contexts. As a result of these shifts, the strategies which choreographers adopted in the works discussed in Chapters 6 and 7 have, in many ways, lost their currency during the last few years. Many dancers and choreographers active in the 1990s and 2000s have a substantial knowledge of dance, theory, and the history of avant-garde and experimental performance. They have, therefore, been able to learn from the ways in which masculinities have been represented in the past, and have avoided some of the problems and pitfalls that previous generations of dance artists have faced. It is from this informed position that they have developed already existing, anti-hierarchical approaches towards choreography and performance in ways that resist processes of recuperation. The pieces discussed in this chapter have done this in two ways. They have manipulated conventional codes and conventions, in subtle and knowing ways, in order to displace white, heterosexual masculinity from its normally dominant position. Some works have also directed the spectator’s attention towards the intimate, visceral aspects of their performance and thus drawn it away from the dancer’s ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ – to borrow a term from Laura Mulvey (1975). By doing so, as I will show, these dances have staged imaginary possibilities for new ways of understanding relations. Individuals always have a need for others. They cannot choose to relate to others since they are always-already related. Gender ideologies, however, impede and constrain the extent to which subjects are able to foster and develop intersubjectivities. These dances, I propose, remind spectators that it is always possible for individuals to find alternative ways of joining together, 183

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not as subjects marked by their place within a hierarchy, but as equal and diverse agents capable of creating more equitable socialities. DISPLACING MASCULINITY Although the opening and closing sections of Bill T. Jones’s Ballad (1996) involved several dancers in a processional movement sequence, the main body of the piece was a long solo by Jones alone on the stage. During this, he danced to, and with, a historic recording of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914–53) reading his 1946 poem ‘The ballad of the long-legged bait’ (Thomas 1952: 149–57). Fifty-four stanzas long, this story of a fishing voyage is overlaid with complex, personal symbolism in a characteristically modernist way. It was not, therefore, an easy poem to listen to, particularly when one’s attention was split between poem and dancing. While the torrent of Thomas’s words, recited in his distinctive and beautiful voice, flowed through the auditorium, Jones remained relatively static, towards the back of the stage, silhouetted in a thin, horizontal channel of light against a cyclorama, executing a series of extremely fragmented movements and gestures. Although Jones very gradually progressed from one side of the stage to the other and back again during the solo, the focus of his movements was largely in his upper body. Disconnected isolations shifted attention unexpectedly from one part of his body to another. His dancing related, on different levels, to Thomas’s poem. Sometimes, it responded to the rhythms and patterns of the spoken words as sounds or music, producing unusual movement qualities. At other times, Jones seemed to translate words into gestures, at one moment making isolated, lateral, crab-like movements in his chest to the lines: ‘For the crab-backed dead on the seabed rose/And scuttled over her eyes’ (ibid.: 153). Later he made a fist with his hand and gave it little, emphatic shakes to the lines: ‘His fathers cling to the hand of the girl/And the dead hand leads the past,/Leads them as children and as air’ (ibid.: 155). But the dance maintained its own, individual momentum. Rather than conveying some overarching poetic essence, it seemed to be drawing attention to isolated words or rhythms. Jones’s presence was absorbed and meditative, his movements appearing to arise from subtle, internally motivated shifts of weight, or from isolated muscular actions. The resulting, fragmented movements disturbed and troubled the otherwise automatic association of powerful, expressive dancing with notions of masculine mastery, rationality, and control. Their fragmentation, together with the abstruse quality of the poem, also meant that the audience were inhibited from becoming absorbed. They, thus, remained detached observers of Jones’s personal meditation on Thomas’s poem which they witnessed, but could not wholly enter into. 184

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By presenting fragmented material that troubled normative, habitual patterns of spectatorship, Ballad deliberately did not allow spectators either to identify with the dancer or to become absorbed in the dance. Instead, it challenged them to develop their own interpretations. As Jones told Ann Daly: ‘I distance you so that you and I have to work to come back together, because I believe that this is a metaphor for what all human intercourse is really about. Falling apart and fighting back together’ (Daly 1998: 123). I argued in Chapter 6 that, in the early 1980s, Jones’s strategy was allegorical, piling on contradictions that could not be resolved through dance. In 1996, by placing his African American body alongside a British poetic voice, Ballad prompted the spectator to abandon preconceptions about black identities and the poetic canon. The anarchic gestures of the 1980s had become more focused and nuanced, effecting a subtle, allegorical displacement in which gender and sexuality and, perhaps, skin colour were no longer central to the audience’s interpretations. The intensity and apparent depth of the danced response to the poem, together with the blurring of poetry, music, and dancing, indicated an intersubjective relation that came into being between Jones and Thomas during the moment of live performance, one which bridged continents, artistic practices, ethnicities, and historical periods. It made one consider both the poet and the dancer in a new way, leaving questions about identities open and ambiguous. It is significant that this intimate intersubjectivity involved two men, since men are supposed to be rational, distanced, impenetrable, and not, therefore, readily available for intersubjective relations with others. As I noted in the first chapter, there is no clear division between homosociality and homosexuality. In order for men to work powerfully together in the interests of preserving male power, the kinds of relationship they are supposed to make with other men are ones that exclude, in advance, the possibility of sexual intimacy; but because the line between appropriate and inappropriate relationships is blurred and ambiguous, almost any intimacy is potentially problematic. The kind of intersubjectivity that comes into being during a performance of Ballad suggests ways of rethinking masculine subjectivities beyond the narrowly defined and anxiously policed constraints of normative gender ideologies. WOMEN CHOREOGRAPHERS, MALE DANCERS

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The Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and the British choreographer Lea Anderson have also made works which, in sometimes affectionate but sometimes critical ways, have the effect of imagining men outside these narrowly defined and policed constraints. De Keersmaeker develops her work from concepts, often devised with a dramaturg, that permit her to approach and combine music, décor, dance, and dramatic material in fresh and unusual ways. Anderson, with whose work I began 185

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this chapter, creates works that blur the boundaries between experimental performance and the more subversive aspects of mass entertainment. Like Jones, both, therefore, draw on the resources of conventional theatre dance – including live music, costumes, set, and lighting – but use them in inventive and sometimes subversive ways to explore feminine perceptions of the male dancing body. In doing so, their works, too, displace masculinity from its place as the unquestioned, universal norm against which all other differences are measured. In its early years, de Keersmaeker’s company Rosas consisted only of female dancers. She first worked with a male dancer in 1987 when she made the duet Mikrokosmos which was subsequently recorded as the first part of a dance film, Hoppla! (1989, directed by Wolfgang Kolb). The film was made on location in the library of the University of Antwerp, designed in the late 1930s by the Belgian modernist architect Henri Van De Velde. The music, Mikrokosmos: seven pieces for two pianos by Béla Bartók, was also written in the 1930s. De Keersmaeker’s choreography seemed to be a personal, allegorical meditation on historical modernism, just as Jones’s Ballad interrogated Dylan Thomas’s modernist poem. It also inverted the conventions of the pas de deux by drawing attention to the visual appearance and actions of the male dancer while emphasising the female dancer’s agency. The piece began, in silence, as a male and a female performer – JeanLuc Ducourt and Johanne Saumier – seemed to compete for the spectator’s (or camera’s) attention by standing in front of one another and gazing passively forwards, only to be manhandled out of the way and turned around by their partner. They appeared to be self obsessed, largely insensitive to one another, and unfazed by the other’s behaviour. This silently repeated sequence gradually increased in speed until Saumier suddenly jumped up into Ducourt’s arms, precipitating an embrace and cueing the two pianists, who were watching all the time from the background, to begin to play. These simple actions of manhandling, turning, and embracing were then used, along with simple walking steps, during the rest of the piece. This material was cleverly set to the complex, irregular rhythms of Bartók’s dissonant, folk-derived music. Ducourt and Saumier appeared slightly mismatched. Ducourt was big, solid, and slightly balding (though deft and nimble when the choreography required this), while Saumier was rather small and moved in a way that suggested a young, flirtatious, capricious woman who was slightly nervous and unsure of herself. Ducourt acted as if he didn’t think he himself was being looked at. His baggy pullover gave the impression of slightly bowed shoulders, while his trousers muffled the liveliness which he was occasionally allowed to exhibit. He seemed almost to mark out a lot of the slower movement, but, in the faster sections, his mobility and flexibility belied the carefully constructed, stolid awkwardness of his role. In one 186

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part, he followed behind Saumier, repeatedly pushing her at off-beat accents in the music, but, in a later section, she advanced challengingly on him forcing him, bit by bit, to retreat. Their atypical appearance and behaviour had the effect of denaturalising and destabilising the normative, heterosexual connotations underlying heterosexual duets. The way in which de Keersmaeker has played with the conventions surrounding the spectator’s gaze is disruptive. I proposed in Chapter 2 that the male dancer’s role, in a duet, is to focus attention upon their female partner, and thus avoid the full glare of the spectator’s gaze. In Hoppla! the way the camera framed Ducourt, however, emphasised, in Mulvey terms, his ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’. At the beginning of the second musical piece, the camera stayed on him as he waited for his cue, and one gradually became aware that, just as Anton Dolin (1969) suggests, he was watching his partner already dancing off camera. He was unaware that he himself was being looked at. The constructed appearance of his awkwardness, here as elsewhere in the piece, had the effect of drawing attention to him without catching him up in that remorseless glare of attention which I have suggested, following Parker and Sedgwick, dares the male dancer to prove himself. De Keersmaeker disrupted expectations of a conventional climax. It was through embraces, such as the one at the end of the opening, silent section, rather than through more conventional, climactic lifts, that any hint of mutual feelings within the couple’s relationship was signified. When Ducourt lifted his partner in the middle of a hectic dance sequence, he took her weight into his body in an unspectacular manner, momentarily uniting their momentums. Thus Mikrokosmos refused to build up gradually to one climactic moment but was fragmented, diffusing several little, unexpected ‘high spots’ throughout the piece. Saumier herself was in control of these. It was she who initiated the embraces, and, in the lifts, there was no sense of the male partner showing off a female body to the audience. The way Ducourt was displayed addressed feminine desire. Thus Mikrokosmos problematised and destabilised the heterosexual male gaze while addressing aspects of feminine desire. The male dancer was made visible and the subject of an investigative gaze, one that corresponded to an alternative, feminine pleasure. By inverting normative structures of male dominance and female subordination, Mikrokosmos showed a couple exploring unfamiliar, uncertain, new possibilities offered by the fluid positions they found themselves occupying in relation to one another. One scene in Achterland (stage production 1990, film 1994) explored other aspects of male ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’. In this, the pianist Rolf Hind, sitting at a grand piano at the back of the stage, was very obviously watching the dancer Vincent Dunoyer. Seemingly unconcerned by Hind’s disapproving gaze, Dunoyer performed a series of short sequences that involved a lot of fluid, pelvic movement. These had a soft, absurd, and humorous 187

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quality. Each time Dunoyer finished one, he turned to look at Hind as if to say: what do you think? Hind, however, stared back blankly, refusing to respond directly to Dunoyer, until he eventually made a slight sneer. The scene, as a whole, showed the constraints on male–male relations and the power of the male gaze to shame rule-breakers, but it also demonstrated the possibility of refusing to be cowed by it. Dunoyer subversively got away with infringements because his irrepressibly humorous energy made him seem more sympathetic than Hind. Dunoyer, who has since gone on to perform very interesting work of his own, created another absurdly uninhibited performance in de Keersmaeker’s 1992 piece Mozart Concert Arias: Un Moto di Gioia. This was a large-scale production with thirteen dancers, an orchestra, three sopranos, and a solo pianist, and had an elaborate set of parquet flooring. It was commissioned by the Avignon Festival for the open air courtyard of the Palais des Papes. De Keersmaeker made the piece using several of Mozart’s concert arias together with orchestral interludes and solo piano pieces. Dramaturgically, it was based around a particular aria sung towards the end, ‘Ch’io mi scordi di te?’ (‘Could I forget thee?’ K.505). Mozart wrote this for a farewell concert by the English soprano Nancy Storace who was leaving Vienna. She had created many roles in Mozart’s operas, including Susanna in his Marriage of Figaro. Taken from Idomeneo, the aria tells of a woman’s promise, on parting, to remain faithful and never forget her lover. Unusually, it is not only accompanied by an orchestra but also has a virtuoso piano part initially played by Mozart himself. Piano and voice each embroider the same melodic line in counterpoint with one another, so that it is almost, in effect, a ten-minute concerto for voice and piano. The idea of one half of a pair remaining faithful and continuing dancing in the absence of the other is one which, as Jurgen Persijn and Ana Torfs’s 1993 documentary Mozart Materiaal reveals, informs much of the piece’s choreography. It was, therefore, about an intersubjectivity that persists through absence. ‘Un moto di gioia’ (‘A feeling of joy’, K.579) is another, much shorter aria which Mozart wrote for the soprano who subsequently took over the role of Susanna. It was performed right at the start of de Keersmaeker’s production and repeated two more times during it. While a soprano sang the aria, Dunoyer, dressed in eighteenth-century breaches and lace shirt, interacted with, and danced around, her. The aria has a very beautiful melody, part of which has phrases of short, quick notes that sound almost like laughter. Dancer and singer interacted spontaneously as if they had not rehearsed together and the singer didn’t know exactly what the dancer was going to do. It was as if she was trying not to let him put her off, since each time she came on to sing it, his interactions became more playful. As he danced around her, he rested his arm across her shoulders to make little jumps. At the end of their first appearance, he swept her off her feet 188

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as she sang her last note so that it turned into a shriek. On their next appearance, he gently kicked the music out of her hands. The last time, wearing a leopard-skin fabric dress, he leapt into her arms at the end so that she had to catch him. As in Achterland, Dunoyer performed an amiably subversive role, interacting dramatically in both with a musician. In the Mozart piece, his absurdly seductive behaviour, in some ways, seemed a deliberate, though sanctioned, rebellion against the serious, organisational discipline that is inevitably involved in mounting such a complex and expensive production. Like a court jester, he was allowed to do what others could not, and criticise authority, his frivolous relationship with the soprano mocking the more serious ones acted out elsewhere in the piece. Intriguingly, though, power and authority, in this case, were in female hands – the singers on stage, and the choreographer offstage. Dunoyer, however, brought about a shift from their point of view to his own. The result seems to have been a performative space in which Dunoyer could, in a charmingly subversive way, blur the boundaries between dancing and singing, and break through the constraints on masculine behaviour to develop an unfamiliar, fluid kind of intersubjective relationship to the evident pleasure of the singer, and also of many spectators. Rather than expressing any particular identity, in relation to class, gender, or sexuality, Dunoyer seemed to behave in an ambiguous way that evaded any kind of identification. Lea Anderson has explored similar concerns to de Keersmaeker. Like her Belgian contemporary, Anderson began making work in the early 1980s for a female company, The Cholmondeleys, later beginning to work with an all-male company she called The Featherstonehaughs, sometimes combining the two in works such as Birthday. In the men’s early programmes – Featherstonehaughs, The Show (1989) and The Featherstonehaughs’ Big Feature (1991) – Anderson deliberately used the conventions of rock bands rather than those of dance performances. The stage was, therefore, set up with a microphone on a stand at one side which each dancer used to introduce himself (first names only) and give the title of the next dance. Both programmes consisted of a series of about a dozen short dances, in a cabaret or revue format. The dancers stayed on stage throughout the evening; between numbers, or when they were not performing in a piece, they rested at each side of the performing area drinking bottled spring water. The Featherstonehaughs’ appearance was very cool and sharp – identical, cheap, dark suits, Doc Marten shoes, short and stylish haircuts. Carl Smith (who was an untrained dancer) sang a Frank Sinatra song while the others danced – in the first show ‘Strangers in the night’ and in the second show ‘Come fly with me’. Both songs were ground out in a very confidently bad manner, awful enough to be delightful. Many of their dances developed ideas inspired by male performances in Hollywood films, music hall, comedy acts, and other imagery from mass culture. One feature of The 189

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Featherstonehaughs’ style was an expansively clumsy or literally pedestrian way of moving. Sophie Constanti called this their ‘buoyant, tripping pedestrianism and off-balance stumbling’ (1990: n.p.). These early Featherstonehaughs’ stage shows carefully fostered the appearance of a bunch of cool young men. But, once this had been established within the show, Anderson went on to find ways of showing The Featherstonehaughs doing things which didn’t quite fit in with, or strained the credibility of, their comradely appearance: ‘Just get everyone all buddy buddy, get everyone all nice and relaxed, you know – the Featherstonehaughs, all nice and accessible – and then just start to make them uncomfortable’ (Anderson 1991). Jeux Sans Frontière (1991) demonstrates how she did this. It explored the way men interact with other men, and presented physical contact between them which, from the dominant homosocial, heterosexual point of view, was problematic. It started with the three dancers wearing cloth caps and sitting on a park bench, recreating a 1930 photograph by Hans Staub of three unemployed Swiss men. It began with little bursts of activity sandwiched between neutral pauses. All three stretched out their arms in a shape like a fan, then returned to neutral. They each stuck up an arm with fingers wriggling. The two on the outside piled their legs onto the lap of the person sitting in the middle, then everyone shifted round like a game of musical chairs and one sat on another’s lap. More dancers joined, and while three in front threw their caps on the ground, the dancers behind repeatedly retrieved these and put them back on their heads. The mood, having shifted from surrealistic to comic, went on to become increasingly dark and melancholy. Two dancers sat on the bench at the back, seemingly unaware of, or ignoring, the remaining two couples in front of them. Side by side, each of the two couples performed identical, supported duets that involved very heavy lifting, holding, and catching movements. The Featherstonehaughs not only did not disguise the effort involved in lifting partners, but made the result look like manual labour. It had the clumsiness of men lifting an awkward load: too much initial attack resulting in a jerky flow of movement. What was also strange about these final duets was the way dancers never looked at their partner or appeared to be co-operating with them. All through the piece as a whole, the men acted in an isolated and uncooperative way, like children, petulantly and selfishly. Put together with the fact that, despite close physical contact, the men ignored each other, what might ordinarily appear ‘normal’ male behaviour was made to look decidedly odd. It suggested a kind of intimacy that is problematic because the line separating appropriate from inappropriate relationships is blurred and ambiguous. As with Bausch and Early’s works that I discussed in Chapter 6, Anderson was using ‘normal’ male behaviour in such a way 190

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as to make the audience feel uncomfortable. She was knowingly presenting actions that may be approved in certain contexts but censured in others. Because of their use of unison, the absurdity of The Featherstonehaughs’ behaviour seemed somehow curiously anonymous. What the dancers all, therefore, appeared to be ignoring was the emergence of an intersubjectivity between them, despite the fact that they were apparently ignoring one another and being ignored by the couple behind. Like the kissing section in Birthday, the piece said nothing about what the dancers themselves might actually have been like as people offstage. Through appearing to be like one another being like ‘ordinary’ men, they became free of having to declare anything about themselves. Their carefully stylised performances were, in effect, a kind of camouflage through which they were able to evade any kind of identification. By performing in this impersonal, neutral manner, they were therefore able to hint at the possibility of masculine experience beyond the narrowly defined and anxiously policed constraints of normative gender ideologies. Anderson’s more recent work has taken further this subversively neutral, distanced way of performing. Smithereens (1999) included sections of movement material that created intersubjective relations between dancers whose identities were subversively camouflaged, and duets which, like Mikrokosmos, inverted the conventions of the pas de deux. Like Birthday, Smithereens was created with both The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs and took, as its starting point, early German modern dance and dancing in popular German cabaret performances during the Weimar period. Central to the piece’s impact were sumptuous, extraordinarily inventive costumes by Sandy Powell, a designer who began working with Anderson in the 1980s and continued collaborating while working for leading Hollywood directors.2 Smithereens was made up of choreographic cameos, duets, and men’s and women’s group pieces. These ‘acts’ were interspersed with chorus lines. In a seemingly infinite line, dancers continuously came in from the wings on one side, exited at the other, then ran round the back to rejoin it again. A curtain at the back of the set hung half a metre above the stage, so that the audience could see the dancers’ legs as they ran round. The performance, as a whole, was highly fragmented and full of false starts. In the first few minutes in particular, there were a number of awkward pauses for shifts of podiums or musical instruments, and dancers costumed for later ‘acts’ seemingly wandered accidentally on stage. Dancers in two duets ironically failed to achieve the ideals of partnering that Anton Dolin (1969) advocated. One was developed from photographs and descriptions of the Weimar German dancer and cabaret artist Valeska Gert. Teresa Barker, whose costume included a spectacular, glowing, fibroptic skirt, was literally hauled on stage by Luca Silvestrini, who was sprucely dressed in white shirt and tail coat. Barker appeared half asleep 191

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or drugged, her limbs awkward and heavy, and her manner towards Silvestrini surly and unco-operative as he cajoled her to go through her paces. Silvestrini had to resort first to clapping out the time and then to mounting the podium behind her to prod her into performing. In an ingenious sequence, Barker rested on him with her arm over his shoulders to perform a perfunctory jump, then tightened her hold on his neck, deftly pulling him off balance, and, with a minimal shrug, releasing him to fall flat on his face. Flouncing off the podium, she resumed her air of somnolent indifference as she drifted disdainfully offstage. By doing so much less than Silvestrini, Barker inverted the way conventions of the pas de deux by directing the audience’s attention towards her more active, male partner. In a highly artificial duet, Anna Pons Carrera and Eddie Nixon attempted to generate an erotic quality that was undermined by their ‘bad’ acting. In this, Nixon wore what looked like an Old Testament prophet’s loin cloth while Carrera wore a soft, red, silk corset below her ribs leaving her breasts and shoulders naked, recalling a painting of the 1920s cabaret artist Anita Berber. The two seemed to be continually touching themselves and each other while progressing through a series of stilted, choreographed poses that intertwined their bodies. In one pose, they pushed their pelvises together as they arched their upper bodies away from each other, their faces contorted in simulated pleasure. As well as running their hands across each other’s skin, they also flicked their tongues as if licking each other, and Carrera even appeared to lick her own armpit. All these supposedly intimate, sensual experiences were accompanied by excessive grimaces or parodically ecstatic facial expressions. In both duets, there was a knowing quality about the dancers’ good ‘bad’ acting. I suggested in Chapter 4 that José Limón had the ability, while dancing, to reach out to spectators, inviting them to feel, along with him, the full, emotional impact of the dramatic situations in his pieces and yet be able to stand aloof and ‘know’ that was what was happening. The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs, in scenes such as these, have the ability to be fully immersed in their execution of the precise details of Anderson’s choreography but at the same time invite an ironic complicity between performers and spectators that they all know what they are doing is good ‘bad’ acting. In Smithereens there was also complicity around shared recognition of the way normative gender ideologies were being subverted. This complicity was, in effect, an intersubjective relation. In more than one ‘act’, male dancers performed material which was developed from photographs of female dancers. At the start of one, men in formal evening dress were menaced and dominated by female dancers with long, talon-like nails and large rabbit ears.3 They then proceeded to dance a sequence of jumps that was inspired by photographs of the German modern dancer Gret Palucca, who was famous for her elevation. Another ‘act’ took as its starting point a 1926 photograph by Rudolf Koppitz of 192

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three women in black supporting, in front of them, a naked woman. Their voluminous, long, black dresses and capes formed a dark, pyramidal screen that framed the naked model as she reclined in a pose that recalls Michaelangelo’s slaves. In Smithereens, three men in black supported a fourth who was naked except for a loin cloth (Figure 8.1). With their help, he executed a series of expansive stretches and extensions that had the quality of a baroque saint in ecstasy. The supporting men were dressed in black with cotton skull caps, trousers, and unusual, thin tops with a horizontal slit revealing a thin white strip of naked skin, including their nipples. Whereas the naked man’s tortured gaze was projected towards the audience, the supporters looked down or away from the audience, pointedly remaining anonymous. These acts were interspersed with chorus lines that, as I’ve already noted, seemed infinite. The first line wore identical masks and black velvet leotards and tights based on dance costumes by Oscar Schlemmer. The second time a line appeared, it inverted this, the dancers facing the back of the stage wearing their masks on the back of their heads. Costumes for each successive appearance of a chorus line revealed an unexpected, new

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Figure 8.1 Eddie Nixon with Greig Cooke and Luca Silvestrini in scene from Lea Anderson’s Smithereens inspired by a photograph by Rudolf Koppitz.

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twist on the previous one. In one, dancers wore surrealist red lips of shiny, padded material under black stocking masks and blonde wigs. In another, long straight wigs of red tinsel sprouted from the knot at the top of the stocking mask and the dancers’ leotards left one arm bare. Each ran their hand up through the tinsel on a regular downbeat in the musical accompaniment. In yet another line, all wore plastic breasts which seemed to erupt from a slit in the chest of their leotard. The unison dance movement for chorus lines included a repeated, pronounced sideways wiggle of the pelvis on the musical beat. This carried sexual connotations, drawing attention to the dancers’ buttocks and hence posing the question whether they were male or female. Because the dancers were masked and each had a large number of different variations of leotards and tights for the various infinity lines, they had put them all on before the show, gradually taking them off as the piece progressed. This had the effect of blurring the outlines of the buttocks, thus making the dancers’ genders harder to determine. The identical masks and costumes, the unison movement, and the seemingly endless line of interchangeable dancers suggested an absence of individual identity. Both the ‘acts’ and chorus lines used mimicry and inauthenticity to celebrate the useless and wasteful pleasures of artifice. These drew on sources that ought to have induced an emotional reaction but failed to do so, leaving a disturbing absence. Its imitation was like the mimicry of those tropical insects that camouflage themselves to blend in with their environment. As Roger Caillois (1984) has pointed out, the insects’ elaborate visual adaptation serves no useful function since predators find them by smell. What is disturbing about such mimicry is, therefore, its purposelessness – its ruinous and dangerous waste of natural resources in the interest of pleasure. The dancers’ mimicry was impressive but, nevertheless, disturbingly useless and wasteful. It amounted to an unconvincing loss of self in a failed attempt to become other. Smithereens’s grotesque inversions affirmed a spirit of subversion and dissent which was shared, through ironic complicity, between dancers and audience. The dancers’ increasingly androgynous appearance, seemingly in transit between gender identities, obviated any requirement to performatively repeat patterns of either dominance or submission. Through camouflaging themselves to blend in with their environment, they, thus, escaped any censure they might otherwise have attracted for lack of conformity to ideologies of normative behaviour while publicly revealing possibilities for subversive, intersubjective relations. REFIGURING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERFORMER AND SPECTATOR The works by Anderson, Jones, and de Keersmaeker, that I have discussed so far, were all ones in which characterisation, costumes, use of text, and 194

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other kinds of dramatic convention were used to create particular representations of masculinity. John Jasperse’s recent work, which is abstract, exemplifies ways in which dance works, that do not use these kinds of convention, can also displace heterosexual masculinity from its normally dominant position. Jasperse’s work in the 2000s has alternated between pieces such as California (2003) that are choreographed for proscenium stages – often in response to commissions from major theatres – and more experimental works, such as just two dancers (2003) and Prone (2005), that explore unconventional ways of using performance spaces in order to disrupt normal relations between dancers and spectators. Jasperse is one of the few recent US choreographers whose work draws on the conceptual questioning of performance conventions that European choreographers such as Xavier Le Roy and Jérôme Bel have engaged in. Having worked for six years with Jennifer Monson, his work also draws on research into new possibilities for movement that use improvisation as a tool to explore physiological imagery. This was a way of working that, as I noted in Chapters 5 and 6, Brown, Paxton, and others initiated in the 1970s. Although Jasperse’s work sometimes exhibits fluid, improvisational movement qualities, this is often undercut in inventively disjointed ways. Dancers sometimes move in physical contact with one another in ways that can be surprisingly self-defeating, or they can collapse in slow motion by a circuitous route towards the floor, finally meeting it in a series of meaty thuds. Passages of his work can sometimes proceed at breakneck speed, only to give way to slow, meditative sections of intensely focused, tiny movements. Jasperse sometimes makes startling conceptual decisions. Many of his pieces involve objects and structures whose properties and usage have a distinctive effect both on the choreography and on the way dancers perform. The stage for California was dominated by a large, complex, suspended surface, made of white, translucent, polycarbonate panels, that looked like a huge sheet of intricately folded paper. Designed by the architect Ammar Eleouini, it could rise or fall, and rotated laterally, and dancers appeared to turn it by directing large, portable, industrial electric blowers towards it, carrying these on stage with their power leads trailing behind. Half way through the piece, the dancers unexpectedly tore into the surface, turning it into two, kite-like structures. The matter-of-fact way in which dancers manipulated the surface and operated the blowers matched the neutral, anonymous way in which dancers interacted with, and handled, each other. This was especially evident in California’s duets. Eleanor Hullihan and Steven Fetherhuff called one of these ‘the yanking duet’ because their partnering involved yanking each other around. As Hullihan explained to Kathryn Shattuck: ‘It’s about maintaining elastic connections. We stay connected the whole time, and the connections make us use a lot of force’ (Shattuck 2004: 10). Fetherhuff 195

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added: ‘Each person has a sort of agenda to move some place. But because of the connection, it’s like a chain reaction, pulling us back and forth. You never get to accomplish your goal’ (ibid.). The fact that neither of them accomplished their goal meant that what developed between them, with its forceful physicality, was independent of them as individuals but could not have happened without them. Like the men in Anderson’s Jeux Sans Frontière, a non-hierarchical, intersubjective relation seemed to evolve between Hullihan and Fetherhuff, despite the fact that they were apparently oblivious of one another’s intentions. A later duet, in which Jasperse and Hullihan stayed continually in contact, created a very different quality. Jasperse remained completely relaxed and passive throughout, and their choreography exploited the fact that he is very tall, while she is much shorter than him. It began with Hullihan undressing Jasperse who was wearing a jump-suit, fastened with a zip that ran vertically down the front, under the bottom, and up the back. This split into two halves from which Jasperse emerged, vulnerably wearing only thin, warm coloured shorts and singlet. Economically helping him to his feet, Hullihan squeezed a flap of loose skin around his stomach, placed her fingertips on his Adam’s apple, and then, as he leaned forward, she touched her lips against his forehead. These very evocative, intimate actions were carried out in a neutral way. As he leaned passively forwards, she slowly took the weight of his much longer body, settling them both, gradually and inventively towards the floor. Although they then began to move more actively and energetically in contact with one another, there were still moments of evocative intimacy; Hullihan, at one moment, reached her hand up inside his singlet to place her palm against his spine. This duet cleverly inverted conventions: a female dancer revealed a male dancer’s body to the audience, and controlled him through earthbound movement rather than gravity-defying lifts. Dancers in both duets seemed coolly detached, despite the sometimes intimate ways in which they interacted with, and handled, each other. Compared with Cunningham’s work, Jasperse pieces exemplify an avant-garde aesthetic of indifference (see Chapter 5), though one which deliberately troubles and dismantles the traditions and conventions of partnering. There is a passivity about the way Jasperse, and most of the male dancers he chooses for his company, perform which contrasts with the kind of robust, manly performances of masculinity that typifies modern dance. Unlike Shawn and his male dancers (see Chapter 4), Jasperse makes no attempt to pretend that he is heterosexual, and unlike Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake (see Chapter 7), he and his male dancers do not try to disprove the old but persistent idea that male dancers are unmanly. The women that Jasperse chooses to work with often seem to project a boyish robustness and pushiness. Through casting these types of men and women together, Jasperse creates a sense of ambiguity around gender. 196

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Such ambiguity, as I noted in Anderson’s work, can create a subversive freedom. I showed in Chapter 7, that, in 29 Effeminate Gestures, Joe Goode owned up to his ability to behave in an effeminate way in order to affirm a sense of belonging to a strong and supportive gay community. If there is, perhaps, a trace of effeminacy in the way some of the male dancers sometimes perform Jasperse’s choreography, it makes nothing out of it. If, however, Jasperse does not try to deny the possibility that some male dancers may be gay, this is only in order to get this out of the way so that the dancers and audience can immerse themselves in the evolving aesthetic qualities of his pieces. Jasperse’s experimental works, in particular, immerse and envelop spectators. just two dancers was a site specific work for Dance Theater Workshop in New York. No dancing took place on stage, the performance being confined to the auditorium. Platforms were installed over some of the rows of seating in the auditorium so that dancers could dance immediately in front of or just behind seated members of the audience.4 Spectators were each given a small hand mirror with which they could watch events happening behind them. However much or little they used these, each spectator had to make a decision about them. Rather than just lapsing into habitual, passive ways of watching, they were forced to recognise their own agency as spectators. Prone took this reconsideration of the relation between performer and spectator further. The number of spectators was limited to forty-eight, half of whom lay on rows of mattresses, arranged in parallel lines across the performance space, while the other half watched from seating at the edge; for the second half, they exchanged places. In terms of movement content, Prone explored very similar kinds of duet and unison material to California. There were comparable variations of speed, intensity, and focus, and dancers manipulated objects in a coolly neutral manner. Where spectators in just two dancers were given hand mirrors, spectators lying on the mattresses could look up towards the ceiling and watch some of the action reflected in large plastic mirrors hanging from the lighting grid. My own experience of reclining in the middle of the space, watching movement happening all around and above me, was unlike anything I had experienced before. When events took place at a distance, I often found myself using peripheral vision, or looking up at the hanging mirrors. When events took place close to me, I became aware of dancer’s concentration, or their exhaustion as they panted out of breath, as I have never experienced it from an auditorium. Their physical presence became more important than their appearance. There were a few moments when dancers made eye contact with me, and I realised that I was seeing details of the performance that no one else could make out. When I was taken back to a seat against the wall for the second half, I initially experienced a great sense of disappointment after what had been 197

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an intense and pleasurable experience. I soon realised, however, that very similar events were going on in the second half to those I had experienced while lying down, and that it was possible to detect qualities which I had not previously noticed. No one spectator in Prone had the same experience as anyone else. The realisation that there are always other ways of looking at things is one which leads to an appreciation of difference. Prone offered spectators intimate, intersubjective connections with the dancers. While displacing masculinity does not, in itself, create these non-hierarchical relations, Jasperse’s work shows it is a necessary precondition for their emergence. THREE MALE–MALE DUETS I have shown that Anderson, Jasperse, Jones, and de Keersmaeker all produce works that, in different ways, trouble normative, habitual ways of looking at dance so that the spectator has to engage in a conscious, active process of interpretation. The interpretations that spectators make are ones in which masculinity has been displaced from its normative, universal position, creating possibilities for male dancers to develop intersubjective relations. All of these choreographers, however, have brought this about while working with the conventional resources of theatre dance – with trained dancers, with sets, costumes, conventional theatrical lighting, and music (often live). The works by Burrows and Fargion, Charmatz and Chamblas, and Hoghe with De Brabandere, to which I now turn, are all male–male duets. These actively attempt to create new kinds of performer– spectator relations through questioning and radically rethinking different aspects of the resources that theatre dance normally exploits. As Burrows has explained: The extraordinary generation of French choreographers, and especially Jérôme Bel and Xavier Le Roy . . . changed everything, suddenly making performances where everything was consequent and nothing could be justified by calling it poetry, which can often end up in dance as a kind of ‘empty poetics’. They are doing this by working with an incredible rigour and clarity of thinking about the thing that’s happening on stage. (Quoted in Perazzo 2005: 7) Thus Charmatz, like Jasperse, has experimented with alternative ways of arranging the physical space of the theatre so that dancers and spectators are brought into closer proximity to one another in sometimes disconcerting ways. Burrows and Hoghe have explored new, alternative relationships between dance and music through the use of gestures and actions whose informality and lack of technical virtuosity challenges conventional expectations of dance performance. The intimacy of the material and of 198

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the relationships between dancers draw the spectator into the performance. All three dance artists have, therefore, produced works that, in their different ways, bring performers and spectators into new kinds of intersubjective relation. By doing so, such experimental approaches offer spectators new ways of perceiving, and thinking about, the male dancing body. Though not always by design, these three choreographers, and others working in similar, experimental ways, have avoided replicating certain kinds of hierarchical systems to suggest liberating alternatives. In A bras le corps (1993), a collaboratively choreographed duet by the two French dancers Boris Charmatz and Dimitri Chamblas, the audience sat on benches facing inwards around a small, square performance area, and the two dancers, dressed in white T-shirts and loose trousers, sat with the audience while not performing. In some ways, the piece recalled the early years of contact improvisation. The setting not only recalled a contact jam, but the way dancers moved looked like rough, inexperienced contact improvisation – falling and rolling on the floor, awkward, heavy holds and lifts, and other kinds of slightly clumsy physical contact. Charmatz has said they had decided to explore physical images of the mass and solidity of the dancing body, which he points out is different from the idea of weight (Charmatz and Launay 2002: 42–3). While Charmatz and Chamblas’s performance sometimes looked ungainly, it recalled the roughness one sees in the video of Magnesium and of early contact improvisation.5 When people look back at these, now, with benefit of hindsight, they already know what contact improvisation would become, but, at the time, Paxton and partners were looking for something new and unknown. Charmatz and Chamblas were also seeking something new, but did so by deliberately referencing the informal staging and ways of moving of an older generation. They were, therefore, actively re-examining, rather than rejecting, the possibilities handed down to them by older dancers. As well as this contact-related material, the two men also executed bravura, ballet-derived jumps and turns. The audience were sitting too close to see these balletic moves properly. When the action took place close to, or on, one of the benches, it became very hard for most of the audience to see, and almost uncomfortably intimate for those around whom the dancers were performing. Everyone, whatever their location, was aware of the dancers’ effort and perspiration. The two dancers appeared mysteriously anonymous and mercurial figures. The dance did not seem like a duet, just two dancers involved in activities that necessitated physical contact as they worked together in a comradely manner. At the time of writing, A bras le corps is still being performed. In 1993, when they made the piece, Charmatz was nineteen and Chamblas was seventeen. It was as if, with the awkward, impulsive, irrepressible energy of teenagers, they had too much energy and needed to burn it off. As 199

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such, they resembled Vincent Dunoyer, who often uses his irrepressible, mercurial energy in a similarly subversive way. Compared with Dunoyer’s seductive manner, however, Charmatz and Chamblas projected anonymous, neutral presences. Had they wanted to use their excessive energy to impress audiences with their male prowess, they would have been able to do so more effectively if they had danced in a way that was more visible, and if they had performed their tours de force more cleanly and clearly. Their excess of energy appeared wasteful. The unconventional staging of the rough, energetic dance movements in A bras le corps directed the spectator’s attention in two significant ways. First, by restricting the number of seats and crowding everyone into a packed, intimate performance space, it was impossible to watch the performance without being aware of other audience members who were either in one’s way or were watching from the opposite side of the space from oneself. Second, by ensuring that the spectators were less able, at different moments and for differing reasons, to see the dance, it encouraged them to tune in to, and sense, the performers’ presence through other forms of embodied perception. By minimising their ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, Charmatz and Chamblas were, thus, creating a discursive space in which the signifiers of their masculinity were partly disconnected from the means through which these normally operate. The anonymous neutrality and ambiguous openness of the mercurial relationship between these two men created an enveloping and welcoming ambience in which the audience could find themselves included in unexpectedly fluid intersubjective relations. If A bras le corps presented two men whose anonymously neutral presences seemed secondary to their expression of youthful energy, Both Sitting Duet (2002) staged the opposite, featuring two older artists whose performance exemplified interdependence and friendship. It was a piece which Jonathan Burrows made and performed with Matteo Fargion, a composer and not a trained dancer, who has been creating music for Burrows’s work for several years. Burrows is a British choreographer who largely works in continental Europe, where his work is more widely known than it is in Britain. Since Burrows and Fargion wanted to create and perform on equal terms, they decided that they would dance while sitting down. The movement material they devised for the piece mostly consisted of serial repetitions of simple, everyday actions and gestures that included: reaching down to touch the floor; brushing a palm across the denim jeans covering a thigh; clapping; counting on their fingers; and making a circle by touching the tip of one finger against the tip of the thumb. Some combinations, however, were quite complex and there were occasional flourishes. The result was an abstract piece that seemed to start almost before the audience were ready for it, and finished abruptly in a ‘non-ending’ that lacked any conventional hints at resolution or conclusion. This makes it sound dry 200

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and minimalist, which in some ways it was; but on another level, as I will explain, it was also ironic and witty. Somewhat to Burrows and Fargion’s surprise, it proved so popular that the two of them spent three years touring it around the world and are still performing it at the time of writing. Although Both Sitting Duet was performed in silence, apart from the sounds the dancers themselves made, the material for it was developed from a late piece of music for piano and violin, For John Cage (1982) by the US composer Morton Feldman (1926–87). One dancer’s material followed the piano part, the other followed the violin. Feldman, who first met Cage around 1950, composed the music for Cunningham’s Summerspace (1958). Because the score of For John Cage is so complicated, Burrows and Fargion each developed their own, written, movement scores. In performance, each had a notebook containing his score, open on the floor at his feet, and, from time to time, one of them leaned forwards to turn a page.6 As musicologist Steven Johnson has observed, Feldman disliked ‘intellectual systems and compositional rhetoric’ and had a ‘preference for abstract gestures set in flat “all-over” planes of time’ (2001: 649). Feldman adopted the term ‘all-over’ which art critics had coined to describe the way abstract expressionist and colour-field painters in the 1950s and 1960s created dissolving or dispersed compositions. Rejecting traditional, hierarchical, centrally focused compositions, these all-over paintings placed equal emphasis on paint marks wherever they were on the canvas. Cunningham, as I noted in Chapter 5, connected this idea with his own choreographic practice when he observed that there were no fixed points in space. Like most of Burrows’s works, Both Sitting Duet also had a flattened, all-over quality with no development or climax, and static, but unpredictably changing sequences of actions and gestures. As Burrows told Danielle Perazzo, it is ‘a piece that is moving forward all the time and remaining where it is’ (Perazzo 2005: 5). While Burrows and Fargion shared the same movement vocabulary, there was little actual unison. Instead, they often seemed to be executing the same actions slightly out of sequence with one another, or seemed to pass cues back and forth between them, or they would perform the same gesture four times together and then one would wait while the other repeated it one more time. Within the overall sameness of their material, these small variations created a subtle counterpoint between the two dancers. Feldman once explained that he used repetition as a deliberate device to disorient the listener’s memory. He, thus, kept changing the number of times a particular chord was repeated so that there was no discernible pattern (2000: 137).7 Burrows told Valerie Briginshaw that, when musicians perform Feldman’s score, they are always counting beats for when to come in. He and Fargion, however, had started off by simplifying these, only to find ‘the reason he’d written it that way, and we had to find our own technique to break the rigidity of the repetitions and breathe life 201

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into them again’ (quoted in Briginshaw 2005: 23). Feldman’s uneven, unpredictable repetitions disorient the listener, making it difficult to get a sense of the piece’s formal organisation. They direct attention, instead, to its length and sense of scale. As Johnson points out, Feldman was more interested in ‘enveloping environments, in which listeners experience music from “inside” a composition’ (2001: 651). Both Sitting Duet was also somewhat like that. Because it was difficult to get a sense of its overall shape, the spectator focused instead on affects generated through patterns and rhythms which varied in terms of speed, energy, and focus. Valerie Briginshaw has written at length about the use of repetition in Both Sitting Duet. Repetition, she argues, makes one aware not only of the sameness of the thing repeated but also the inescapable difference between each individual repetition and the thing it repeats. In Both Sitting Duet, she argues, repetition actually makes the spectator aware of both sameness and differences, not only between repeated events but also between the two male performers. They are like one another as men, but the more they seem to be performing the same material in the same way, the more the differences between them become apparent. As Briginshaw points out, ‘potentially problematic, iconic images of white, middle-aged, straight males, traditionally associated with the dominant subject position, are repeated differently and transformed through the minutiae of differences that matter in the performance’ (2005: 25). If Both Sitting Duet was made of movement material that was unconventional, and used repetition in a defamiliarising way, it, therefore, posed the performers the problem of finding new ways of bringing to the audience’s attention the particular qualities on which it depended. While on one level, therefore, it was an abstract work, it also became an investigation of performance as such. As Burrows told Perazzo, this level came from ‘ideas about the performance and about the relationship between the people on stage and with the audience. And this other level, in a way, became the subject of the piece’ (quoted in Perazzo 2005: 4). Burrows had an extremely dead-pan facial expression, while Fargion gave more away, looking continually surprised. People first began to chuckle because the material was so unusual and hence ‘funny’, grown men so seriously executing such peculiar things. We laughed at sudden changes, and at the introduction of surprising new material. And there were some extremely funny moments. At one moment both performers stood up and placed their feet very deliberately so that they pivoted round through 360 degrees, craning their necks so as to keep on reading their notebooks. People also chuckled, after so much focused, silent concentration, when they both sang in fast high pitch bursts that sound like ‘ee..oo..ee..oo..’, and again, a little later, when they stood up and robustly stamped. At one performance I attended, one of the lanterns lighting the stage made occasional cracking sounds, early in the piece, as it heated up, adding 202

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another, unpredictable rhythm to an already complicated pattern of choreographed events. Rather than being put off, the dancers began to smile when the lantern continued cracking, and then one of them turned his head to look at it, all without interrupting the flow of movements. The enveloping ambience of the piece was hospitable and open enough to include whatever else was happening around it. A lot of the irony and wit in the piece came from an appreciation of the open relationships across different layers of meaning that the piece generated. Jennifer Dunning in the New York Times noted that ‘the men worked with an engaging air of complicity’ (2004: n.p.), while Deborah Jowitt in the Village Voice enjoyed their delicious ‘blend of everyday behaviour and ingenious lunacy’ (2004: n.p.). It is in this way that the dancers’ gender, almost by accident, became significant within the piece. Many reviewers commented on their age and gender. Thus Jowitt began by asking: ‘two middle-aged men sitting on chairs for 98 percent of 45 silent minutes, moving their arms, heads, and torsos – how fascinating can that be?’ only to answer herself ‘Very very’ (ibid.). Somehow their age and gender, together with the easy intimacy that was established through their interdependency, was endearing. Intimacy emerged within the counterpoint between their respective movements. Burrows told Lydia Polzer that he had always assumed counterpoint was about the tension between two parts, but Fargion had suggested to him that ‘Counterpoint assumes a love between the parts’ (quoted in Polzer 2004: 17). Burrows has believed it therefore: ‘gave the whole thing a gentleness and a kind of love in it which the audience feels’ (ibid.). This warmth infused their execution and helped bring the audience together to laugh at witty events. Within this intimacy, that in part is enabled by the piece’s subtle, generous counterpoint, spectators no longer saw the dancers’ masculinity as part of the universal hierarchy of gender. The openness of the piece’s structure means that the audience can feel included within the evident warmth of Burrows and Fargion’s relationship, particularly when spectators can share, through laughter, their appreciation of ingenious lunacy (and chance events such as the lantern’s cracking noises). Briginshaw argues that ‘the relationship between Burrows and Fargion is such that they inhabit each other’s perceptual worlds’ (2005: 25). They had chosen to work from a piece of music that exemplified qualities both were interested in, and devised a way of performing that allowed them both a degree of equality and that, in effect, bridged dance and music. Their non-hierarchical, intersubjective relation disrupted ideas about masculine rationality, distance, and detachment. By demonstrating alternative ways in which men can relate to other men, Both Sitting Duet made it possible for spectators themselves to feel included in the warm, enveloping ambience it was generating. 203

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Raimund Hoghe’s Sacre, The Rite of Spring (2004) is the fifth piece I have discussed which uses this famous music. As Nijinsky, Roehrich, and Stravinsky initially conceived the ballet, a tribe, desperate for winter to end, try every magic ritual they know in order to make spring come. When all else fails, they resort to sacrificing a virgin, who has to dance herself to death. In Roman law, someone chosen for sacrifice, as Giorgio Agamben has noted, is declared sacred and stripped of all human rights and privileges (1998: 71). Part of what is so disturbing about Nijinsky and Bausch’s Sacres (discussed in Chapters 3 and 5) is that the Chosen One’s ugly and increasingly asymmetrical, final solo hints at her realisation that the rest of her tribe have cut themselves off from her. If the condition of being human is one of needing others, then being excluded from the possibility of relating to others was in effect being stripped of humanity. In Hoghe’s Sacre, he, and perhaps his fellow dancer Lorenzo De Brabandere, though this is not entirely clear, already seemed to have been chosen and to have accepted this without either surprise or dismay. What the piece suggested, however, was a freedom to explore alternative ways of relating together, as men, outside the hierarchical and repressive framework of normative gender ideologies. The two dancers, somehow, also seem sacred. In Hoghe’s case, at least, this is because of his extraordinary stage presence. He is a very small man whose appearance, as he puts it, does not ‘correspond to conventional ideals of beauty’ (quoted in Johnson 2005: 37). His spine has grown with a lateral curve so that one shoulder is higher than the other. I imagine he must be someone who has always known people looking at him because of his ‘special body’ as he calls it. Perhaps being on stage doesn’t hold the same fears as it would for others because, through his pieces, he has found a way of projecting a presence that allows him to take control of the way we, in the audience, look at him looking back at us. His presence and his carefully constructed performances create an intimacy in which the audience find themselves drawn into the possibility of intersubjective relationships that challenge received ideas about gender, disability, and sexuality. Sacre, The Rite of Spring began and ended with brief extracts from an interview in which Stravinsky reminisced about his most celebrated piece. In between these, while a recording of The Rite of Spring was played loudly enough to make the audience feel the physical impact of each of its primitive booms and crashes, Hoghe and De Brabandere, neither of whom are trained dancers, performed slow, simple, tasks that gradually built up a ritualistic intensity. The music of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is widely known, a part of cultural memory. It was something, therefore, that dancers and audience already had in common. The music has been used so often by choreographers, as I have noted in previous chapters, that most people who regularly attend dance performances will probably have seen at least one version. What was exceptional about Hoghe’s Sacre was the subtle 204

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way it related to the music. While the movement did not attempt to follow its driving pace or complex, irregular rhythms, the performance was actually more strenuous than it looked. Dancers often seemed out of breath – unusual perhaps in Hoghe’s work, which can sometimes be slow enough to make audiences fidget. Not only were movement tasks cleverly fitted into the different sections of the score, but they often matched them in idiosyncratic ways. At one point, Hoghe trod jerkily along a line towards the audience with little shivering steps as if unable to resist the frenetic tension building in the music. Accompanying an abrupt, primitivist fanfare, De Brabandere made a short diagonal, full tilt run ending in an abrupt halt after which he calmly walked to the back of the stage and threw himself into another diagonal run when the fanfare repeated. Most of the movement tasks, however, were low key. In one, both men faced each other and slowly raised their arms forwards and upwards recalling the start of the yoga exercise ‘Salute to the Sun’. The piece began with them lying on the lino at right angles to one another, De Brabandere’s ankles lying over Hoghe’s; slowly, with a rising, lyrical phrase in the music, Hoghe raised his lower legs a little way above the ground, lifting De Brabandere’s as he did so, before slowly lowering them again. First one then the other stood up, walked two different sides of a rectangle, and lay down again in the same configuration before going through the task again. At another moment, both lay in a line facing the ground with their heads touching; while De Brabandere pushed his body up with his arms, Hoghe propelled himself forwards with his toes to creep a little way under him, then reversed back again. Hoghe then lifted himself up and De Brabandere pushed himself forwards under Hoghe using his arms. The piece’s title, in French and English, emphasises the idea of ritual. People who dedicate their lives to religious observance go through the same actions – lighting a candle, or bowing – every day so that not only are the motor actions habitual but so is the emptying out of self necessary to dedicate the action to a god. Hoghe and De Brabandere, who I have already suggested had a sacred quality, seemed to be emptying themselves in a comparable way as they performed their unaffected movement tasks. At the end of the piece, we listened to Stravinsky’s voice reminiscing about returning in the 1960s to the room in the little Swiss village where he wrote Sacre, adding something to the effect that the piece had had a life of its own and had written itself; he the composer had been the vessel through which the music had passed. Throughout their piece, it was as if Hoghe and De Brabandere were vessels through which Sacre passed, as they sensed the way their individual or unison movements were dovetailing together and the resonance these were creating as they matched up with the music. Sitting in the second row of the audience, I felt like a witness to their sensitivity towards these complimentary, resonating affects. 205

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While most of Sacre, The Rite of Spring consisted of abstract movement, the choreography of the last section, when the Chosen One usually dances herself to death, was overtly symbolic, involving the use of the kinds of simple, inexpensive object Hoghe has used in most of his pieces. A square of red paper was brought on, unfolded, and carefully laid flat on the front left hand side of the stage (a spectre of the red dress in Bausch’s Sacre?). Then De Brabandere brought a clear rectangular bowl of water and placed it centrally at the front of the stage. The two men kneeled either side, facing one another, and one by one bowed forwards to dip their face in the water. Then De Brabandere flicked water in Hoghe’s face. The piece ended when each lay down either side of the bowl and placed a hand in the water. There is an unavoidable frisson in seeing two men moving together and touching in an intimate way, particularly when one of them has a special body. Hoghe is the size and weight of a young adolescent but his delicate, lined face suggests age, knowledge, and experience. Although most of the movements that he and De Brabandere performed were the same, often in mirrored symmetry, there was a sense of the two of them present in their differences in the space; and, although both adopted a neutral, almost impersonal manner, nevertheless Hoghe had a much stronger presence. I, therefore, found myself looking at De Brabandere as if through Hoghe’s eyes, particularly when Hoghe touched him. To be clear, I saw nothing queer or homoerotic in the piece. While Charmatz and Chamblas appeared as comrades, and Burrows and Fargion seemed to be close friends, there was an uncomfortable, perhaps less socially acceptable intimacy within Hoghe and De Brabandere’s onstage relationship. But De Brabandere, in T-shirt and trainers, seemed beautiful because he was framed by the power of the older man’s presence, and because De Brabandere himself seemed unaware of this framing.8 The effect was comparable to the way, in Death in Venice, that the spectator sees Tadzio through von Aschenbach’s eyes, or that Peter Schlessinger is framed in David Hockney’s early paintings. Hoghe, too, in his own way, has his own particular beauty which derives from his own unselfconscious vulnerability and self awareness. At the beginning of this chapter, I called the two dancers in Anderson’s Birthday the perfect couple because their conventional good looks and their apparent heterosexuality conformed to social norms (although the piece went on to problematise these). It feels odd to find myself writing that De Brabandere is beautiful. This is not just because it would be more usual to use the word ‘handsome’, but also because the enveloping ambience of Hoghe’s Sacre constructs his to-be-looked-at-ness by involving spectators in ways that contradict, and are apparently unaffected by, social norms. In other words, during the performance of Hoghe’s Sacre, spectators and dancers shared a non-hierarchical, intersubjective relation in which no one was judged by their differences but these were appreciated in their own 206

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particular terms. Questions about male gender and sexuality were left open and ambiguous, and, as I noted earlier, it is not clear whether Hoghe was the Chosen One or whether they both were. If, by the end of the piece, performers and spectators, alike, had therefore all become sacred outsiders, then the piece succeeded in suggesting possibilities for rethinking masculinities within a more equitable and inclusive sociality. MORE TROUBLE

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Two competing ideas about the trouble with the male dancer have shadowed each other through this book, one anxious, the other subversive. Underlying both is the fact that, for the last century and a half, dancing on stage has not been the most reliable way of creating clear, unequivocal representations of masculinity. The anxious model is one in which male dancers find themselves objects of suspicion for often imaginary infringements of dominant norms of masculine behaviour. The subversive model is one that exploits this situation in order to make trouble. In some of the works I have discussed, the physicality of male dancing bodies has generated troubling presences that have challenged normative gender ideologies. Thus, in Nijinska’s Les Noces and Bausch’s Sacre the presence of male dancers has made female dancers flinch. Pomare’s junkie also made audiences flinch but only then to make them applaud as well. In the ‘Puritan Episode’ of Graham’s American Document, the female soloist found the presence of her male partner arousing, while Clark and Petronio’s Hetrospective used the erotic potential of their queer male dancing bodies in a deliberately shocking way. In many of these cases, physical presence was more significant than visual appearance. At issue in most of the work I have discussed in this book, however, has been questions about how dance performance positions spectators as they look at the spectacle of male dancing bodies. I have used the distinction that the art historian Michael Fried made between ‘theatricality’ and absorption to distinguish between some of the different ways in which dance pieces and dancers’ performances have positioned spectators. Limón claimed his audience’s attention in a ‘theatrical’ way that made spectators want to feel the emotional intensity which he seemed to be feeling. He did this, however, while closeting his sexuality. So did Ailey in ‘Backwater Blues’. Börlin attempted to do something similar in L’Homme et son désir but the behaviour he was performing seemed inappropriately over-emotional within the context of its time, and led one critic to out him as a homosexual. Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men and Hoghe’s Sacre positioned spectators in ways that encouraged them to see other male dancers, or dance events, from the point of view that Charnock and Newson, or Hoghe represented in these pieces, even though these points of view deviated from the norm. Some ‘theatrical’ pieces, then, 207

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reinforce normative gender ideologies, some fail to do so, while others trouble and challenge them. The same is true of dance work which exemplifies absorption. Shawn’s work staged a stoically contained absorption that allowed him and his male dancers to perform an unequivocally masculine range of vigorous and dynamic movements which reinforced white, muscular, Christian norms of masculine behaviour. Their absorption derived, in part, from their detachment and distance from one another; by appearing not to engage in any relation with one another, they carefully avoided the danger that their dancing together might suggest an inappropriate relationship. Absorption in Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset allowed male dancers to move with a characteristically vigorous energy and affective strength that seemed detached from normative associations of masculine power and violence; the piece’s use of non-hierarchical choreographic structures redistributed these affects, making them available for new kinds of significations. Something similar to this takes place in Charmatz and Chamblas’s piece A bras le corps. Masculinity has not seemed such an important issue within the dances examined in this last chapter as it was in the works discussed in previous ones. While it is probably too soon to tell, one might surmise from this that male dancers are no longer the source of anxiety that they have been in the recent past. There are, perhaps, other more pressing issues that claim people’s attention today. So, while this book has focused on danced representations of masculinity, the theoretical approaches that it has developed and applied offer ways of understanding gender and sexuality as components within a broader continuum of experience. They are, thus, part of the wider project of understanding how intimately theatre dance is linked to the society which produces and consumes it.

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INTRODUCTION 1 I do not mean that there may not be inspiring ballet performances, but only that I have never seen any. Never having lived in or near London, I have not been in a position to see those ballet performances which the London ballet critics value.

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1 THE TROUBLE WITH THE MALE DANCER . . . 1 ‘Le dèsagrément d’une danseuse, c’est qu’elle nous amène quelquefois un danseur!’ Plate 17 of 56 Album comique published in Paris by Falconer, 1860. 2 LOOKING AT THE MALE

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1 For applications of Fried’s ideas in theatre studies, see Auslander 1997, Féral 1982, Pontbriand 1982. This chapter’s argument about absorption and theatricality is also informed by Maaike Bleeker’s discussion of the visuality of theatre in her PhD thesis (2002).

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1 It was not, of course, the supported adagio on its own that was new to western European audiences at the time but the far greater formal and technical complexity which Petipa had developed in St Petersburg. For this performance, the Blue Bird pas de deux was renamed L’Oiseau de feu, and was variously retitled in later programmes. In 1921 Diaghilev nearly bankrupted himself when he presented his full length version of The Sleeping Princess (Sleeping Beauty) in London. The Blue Bird pas de deux was not the only classical extract on the programme: see Garafola 1989: Appendix C. 2 For example, see Nijinska’s account of Fokine choreographing the role of Papillon in Le Carnaval (1910) (Nijinska 1981: 284–9). Nijinsky himself heard Stravinsky play the music for Petrouchka some time before Fokine did, which suggests that he was very largely responsible for the creation of that role (Buckle 1975: 180). 3 While the Ballets Russes appeared in opera houses, they also, when in need of money, appeared in music halls, and in the American tours in vaudeville theatres. Nijinsky performed in a music hall in London when he formed his own company in 1914.

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4 Lady Juliet, in Richard Buckle’s words, established a kind of record in having seen Nijinsky dance Le Spectre de la rose in three cities in the first nine months of its existence (1975: 259). 5 Chadd and Gage ascribe the passage to Vogue in 1911 or 1912 but give no reference. Vogue was not published in the UK until 1916. The quotation may therefore refer to the interest of New Yorkers not Londoners. 6 Of course Rambert was writing over half a century later and might well have been thinking of Cocteau’s drawing when she wrote this. Richard Buckle suggests that the drawing depicts an occasion when Nijinksy and Karsavina repeated the whole of Faune a second time (Rambert 1972: 57; Buckle 1975: 259). 7 See Dyer 1990: 17–20 for further information on late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century ideas about the third sex. 8 Nevertheless, when Narcisse was performed in New York in 1916, the reviews specifically mention Nijinsky’s ‘effeminacy’, though this may have been a reflection of the extraordinary impression left by Mordkin (Buckle 1975: 434). 9 In 1912 it was planned for the Ballets Russes to appear at the Narodny Dom Theatre in St Petersburg. Diaghilev had even signed contracts but the season had to be cancelled when the theatre unfortunately burnt down (see Buckle 1975: 262). For details of Diaghilev’s dismissal from the Imperial Theatres in 1901 and Nijinsky’s dismissal in 1911 see Buckle 1979: 60–3 and 1975: 191–3. 10 Though during most of his life Stravinsky denied liking Nijinsky’s choreography for Sacre, he reaffirmed his original opinion in 1967 when a piano score he had marked for Nijinsky during rehearsals was rediscovered. For Stravinsky’s retraction see Stravinsky (1969) Appendix 3. He had given the score to Misia Sert after the first night of the ballet. She had subsequently given it to Diaghilev, who had given it to Anton Dolin. Robert Craft points out that, while the first performance of the ballet must have been a painful experience for Stravinsky, when Sacre was performed in a concert in Paris in 1914, the result was a triumph. It is understandable, therefore, for Stravinsky to have suppressed the memory of the ballet. At the end of his life, however, he said that Nijinsky’s was the best ballet version he had seen (Craft 1976: 37; Dolin 1985: 133–4). 11 For more on connections between the poètes maudites and homosexual identity see Stamboulian and Marks 1979. 12 But it was extremely difficult to perform because of the way the body is always presented in profile, and, as Lydia Sokolova put it, because of the ingenious way it fitted with the music (1960: 40). 13 For an overview of differing critical reactions to Archer and Hodson’s reconstruction see Siegel 2002. 4 AMERICAN MEN 1 For example Shawn’s solos Twenty-Third Psalm (1917) and O Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1931), a study of St Francis; Graham’s El Penitente (1940) and Herodiade (1934); and Limón’s The Traitor (1954) and Missa Brevis (1958). 2 For his extensive writing and lecturing on men and dance, see Shawn 1916, 1933, 1936, 1946, 1966. 3 See Ruyter 1979; Kendall 1979; Jowitt 1988: 78–81; Siegel 1987; and Shawn 1968, his own book on Delsarte. 4 In the Greek myth, the boar was the god Ares in disguise, jealous that his wife Aphrodite prefered this beautiful mortal to himself. See Graves 1960: 69–70. 5 Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were tried and executed for armed robbery and murder. A lack of fairness in their original trial was widely believed to

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be caused by hostility to them because of their left-wing sympathies. Subsequent retrials and appeals made them a cause célèbre for the left. The Scottsboro boys, nine black teenagers accused of raping two white girls on flimsy evidence and again tried in an inadequate way, were also taken up by the left. Given this chronology, Shawn might well have actually thought of the Husbandman when he was writing, but it is also likely that Graham and/or Hawkins may have had Shawn and his work at the back of her mind when she was choreographing the piece. The two films are: Appalachian Spring a film by Peter Glushanok for WQEDTV, 1959; and Dance in America TV film Martha Graham Dance Company, directed by Merrill Brockway 1976 with Yuriko Kimura as The Bride and David Hatch Walker as The Revivalist. In 1950 and 1951 The José Limón Dance Company visited Mexico by invitation from the painter Miguel Covarrubias, who was head of dance at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City. In 1954 the US State Department in collaboration with ANTA sent them on a tour of South America and again in 1960. In 1957 they went on a European tour, again arranged by the State Department. See Koner 1989: 191–236, especially the section where Koner and Limón decide to visit Spain after consultation with ‘embassy officials’ (227). See also Prevots 1998. Originally the dancers’ roles were called, ‘The Moor’s Wife’, ‘The Moor’s Friend’ and ‘His Friend’s Wife’; this was presumably to distance it from the revered original, but for convenience and clarity the roles here are referred to as Desdemona, Iago, and Emilia. Pavanes were stately court dances during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The composer and dance writer Louis Horst taught a series of composition classes on ‘Pre-classical forms’ for modern dance artists, and the Pavane was one of the forms examined. There is no evidence that Limón ever went to these, although Lucas Hoving did. Hoving says that Limón picked and chose from the various pre-classical forms what he wanted to make the ‘emotional texture’ for particular scenes (Mindlin 1992: 17). The dynamics of Limón’s interpretation, however, are baroque, as, of course, is the music. 5 DANCING IN THE CITY

1 I am grateful to Dee Reynolds for letting me read the manuscript of her forthcoming book Rhythmic Subjects: Uses of Energy in the Dances of Mary Wigman, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham. 2 Cunningham is actually recalling an anecdote from an introductory talk before performances by the Cunningham Company which John Cage gave to college audiences in the mid 1950s. (Cage 1961: 94–5). 3 These are not the titles Satie gave to the piano pieces, which are Manière de commencement, Prolongation du même, I, II, III, En plus, Redite. See Orledge 1990: 55–6 for discussion of the music.

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1 See online http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/stravinsky/ (accessed April 2006). 2 Rob Burns and Wilfred van der Will cite, for example, the 1972 Decree on Extremists banning from public employment anyone who was even suspected of disloyalty to the Government (1995: 279–80).

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3 For example, in Café Muller (1978), Minarik’s role at one point was to interfere in the way Dominique Mercy and Malou Airaudo were kissing, teaching them repeatedly to embrace in a far more awkward and tiring way until they repeated his corrections on their own (see Burt 2006). In Nelken (Carnations, 1982), which has a much lighter emotional atmosphere than Sacre, Minarik stops dancers on stage and demands to see their passport. 4 New Dance, 14, Spring 1980. This provoked caustic comments by women and gay men in the letters pages of the following Women’s Issue of New Dance, 15, Summer 1980. 5 There are parallels with Eleo Pomare’s Dancemobile Project in New York during the late 1960s and early 1970s which I discussed in Chapter 5. 6 They wore no underwear. Petronio has recalled the pleasurable sensation of his penis hanging free and brushing lightly against the silk as he danced (Burt 2003: 34). 7 IDENTITY POLITICS 1 14–24 October 1989. The next exhibition in the gallery was of Jasper Johns’ Dancers on a Plane series. D’Offay also deals in Beuys, Gilbert & George, Clemente, Schnabel, Baselitz, and so on – the best-sellers of the 1980s. Beuys did at least one performance here. 2 He continued dancing these roles until 2000. The piece was not performed again until 2006 when it was revived with a woman, Amber Darragh, as Dido and a man, Bradon McDonald, as the Sorceress. 3 Much of the politicised, queer community, including gay members of Goode’s 1992 audience in San Francisco, are middle class. 4 Hargreaves also analysed the haunted quality of Bourne’s piece in terms of melancholy gender identification. Following Judith Butler’s argument in The Psychic Life of Power (1997), Hargreaves suggested that the duet between the Prince and Swan remains haunted by what it must deny, the ungrievable, melancholy disavowal of homosexual attachments that Butler argues haunt all heterosexual masculinities (Hargreaves 2000: 239). 8 POST MEN 1 My discussion of intersubjectivity is informed by Bal 1999 and Butler 2004. 2 Sandy Powell won an Oscar for her costumes for the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love. Among the directors she has worked with are Derek Jarman, Sally Potter, Mike Figgis, Todd Hayes, and Martin Scorsese. 3 Powell was designing costumes for Scorsese’s Gangs of New York at the time, one of the gangs being the Dead Rabbits. 4 DTW has a mission to identify, present, and support independent contemporary artists. Jasperse told Joyce Morgenroth that he was partly responding to the fact that the theatre, in carrying out a substantial renovation programme, had installed concrete, raked seating. This created an inflexible configuration that, he observed, excluded some recent innovative approaches to performance, and showed a lack of imagination about how dance might develop during the theatre’s projected lifetime (quoted in Morgenroth 2004: 195–6). 5 These early performances of contact improvisation can be seen on Steve Paxton’s video Fall After Newton published by Videoda, 1987. 6 The scores consisted of individual sections, each with a descriptive subtitle: lasso, twist, brush, and so on. Fargion, as a composer, used musical time signatures

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and notes (but no staves). Burrows had written down a number for each count and added words or scribbles. His score was thus much longer than Fargion’s and he had to turn the pages more often. 7 Feldman has written about finding inspiration for his interest in patterns by looking at the woven patterns in Anatolian rugs and at Jasper Johns’s crosshatched paintings (2000: 139) which, as Johnson points out ‘feature a sly balance of hidden regulation and mundane repetition’ (2001: 651). 8 Hoghe tells me he thinks that De Brabandere is aware of the framing, and has no problem with it (even as a straight man) (personal communication 26 June 2006).

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11 29 Effeminate Gestures (ch. Goode 1987) 167–72, 197

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A bras le corps (ch. Charmatz and Chamblas 1993) 199–200, 208 absorption and ‘theatricality’ 33–5, 44–5, 66, 84, 94, 122, 127, 133, 161, 207–8 Achterland (ch. Keersmaeker 1990) 187–9 Acocella, Joan 7, 62, 76, 166–7 ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) 159–60, 164 Adagio Pathétique (aka Death of Adonis ch. Shawn 1923) 93–4 Adair, Christy 1–2, 4, 28, 54 aesthetic of indifference 113, 124–5, 131, 135; see also Roth; Katz African American dancers 33, 52–3, 89–90, 153, 185 Agathon (Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde) 76, 83 Agon (ch. Balanchine 1957) 46 AIDS 159–60, 170, 183 aikido 134, 170 Ailey, Alvin (1931–89) 3, 53, 111–22, 135, 153, 207 Albright, Ann Cooper 54 Alderson, Evan 54 allegory 126–7, 130, 147, 152, 154 Althusser, Louis (1918–90) 39 American Document (ch. Graham 1938) 98, 106, 140, 145, 207 American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) 114 Anderson, Lea 181–2, 185, 189–94, 194, 198

Apollon Musagète (ch. Balanchine 1928) 43–6 Appalachian Spring (ch. Graham 1944) 98, 100–3, 120, 211 L’Après midi d’un faune (ch. Nijinsky 1912) 63, 68, 74–8, 81, 166, 210 Are You Right There Michael, Are You Right? (ch. Early 1982) 138–42, 148–52 Asaf’yev, Boris 80 Ashton, Frederick (1904–88) 4 Austin, J.L (1911–60) 38–41, 96, 167 avant-garde 5, 112, 127, 131, 138–9, 183 Backwater Blues see Blues Suite Baden-Powell, Lord (1857–1941) 20–1, 88 Bakst, Leon (1866–1924) 59, 63, 74 Bal, Mieke 36, 38, 212 Balanchine, George (1904–83) 35, 43–6 Balázs, Béla (1884–1949) 147 Ballad (ch. Jones 1996) 184–5 Ballets Russes 3, 5, 42, 45, 58–84 Ballets Suédois 82 Banes, Sally 35, 131, 139 Barbier, George 69 baroque 106, 109 Bartók, Béla (1881–1945) 146–7, 186–7 Batson, Charles 82–3 Battersby, Christine 17–18, 51, 68 Bausch, Pina 81, 89, 138–48, 152, 158, 173, 190 Beardsley, Aubrey (1872–98) 62

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Beaumont, Charels Edouard de (1812–88) 9–11, 13–14, Because We Must (ch. Clark 1988) 160–1 Benois, Alexandre (1870–1960) 59, 68, 71 Berger, John 14, 24, 31 Bersani, Leo 16, 23, 159–61, 171 Birthday (ch. Anderson 1992) 181–2, 189, 191, 206 Black Arts Movement 7, 136 blackface 33, 66 Blaubart see Bluebeard Blood Wedding (dir. Saura, ch. Gades 1981) 48, 50 Bluebeard (ch. Bausch 1977) 138–42, 146–8, 152, 154, 158 Blues for the Jungle (ch. Pomare 1966) 111–2; see also Junkie Blues Suite (ch. Ailey 1958) 116–22, 207 body 6; hard muscular male body, 18, 22, 33, 45, 84, 86, 94; modern male body 13, 15; nineteenth-century ideas about 16 Bolm, Adolf (1888–1951) 67, 91 Bordo, Susan 88 Börlin, Jean (1893–1930) 60, 82, 94, 207; Le Petit Bleu on B’s homosexuality 82–3, 84. Both Sitting Duet (ch. Burrows and Fargion 2002) 200–3, 212–3 boundaries 15; between homosexuality and heterosexuality 23, 27, 171; protecting the male body 50 Bourne, Matthew 29, 56, 160, 177–80, 212 Bowery, Leigh 161–2, 164 Boyce, Johanna 52 Brabandere, Lorenzo de 204–7, 213 Bratton, J.S. 19, 25 Briginshaw, Valerie 28, 201–3 Brinson, Peter (1920–95) 24, 44 Bristow, Joseph 22 Brown, Carolyn 123, 125 Brown, Trisha 133, 138–42, 154–8, 163, 195 Buckle, Richard 62, 64, 68–9, 73, 210 Burke, Edmund 18 Burroughs, Edgar Rice (1875–1950) 20–1, 88 Burrows, Jonathan 182, 198, 213

Butler, Judith 16, 30, 39–41, 167–8, 212 Cage, John (1912–92) 113–14, 124–5, 129, 134, 211 California (ch. Jasperse 2003) 195–7 Case, Sue-Ellen 32 Caves of the Heart (ch. Graham 1946) 103 Cecchetti, Enrico (1850–1928) 66, 161 Chaconne (ch. Limón 1942) 98, 105, 192 Chamblas, Dimitri 135, 182, 198–200, 206, 208 Chanel, Coco (1883–1971) 61 Chapman, John 25 Charlip, Remy 125 Charmatz, Boris 135, 182, 198–200, 206, 208 Charnock, Nigel 48–51, 173–7, 207 Childs, Lucinda 128, 153 Christianity 15, 21, 85–6, 94, 104, 109, 111–2, 208; African American 118, 121; Catholic 86, 106; Methodist 85; ‘muscular’ Christianity 87, 102, 208; Puritan 85–6, 99 Clark, Michael 160–4, 165, 180, 207 Claudel, Paul (1868–1955) 82–3 Cocteau, Jean (1889–1963) 61, 63–5, 72 Cohen, Marshall 36 Cold War 85, 113, 123, 129 Colour Harmony (ch. Humphrey 1928) 97 contact improvisation 116, 133–5, 156, 163 Cooper, Emmanuel 69 Copeland, Roger 35 Coppélia (ch. Saint-Léon 1870) 24 Covarrubias, Miguel (1904–57) 106, 211 Coward, Rosalind 12 Crisp, Clement 44, 160 Croce, Arlene 160, 164–5 Culberg, Birgit (1908–99) 46 Cunningham, Merce 3, 6, 51, 98, 111–12, 114, 115, 122–30, 134, 135, 139, 141, 196, 201, 211 Cutting the Sugar Cane (ch. Shawn 1933) 92 Dagger Dance (ch. Shawn 1913) 92 Daly, Ann 35, 42, 52, 55, 183, 185

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Dance Heritage Coalition 35 Dance Slav (ch. Shawn 1913) 92 Danzas Mexicanas (ch. Limón 1939) 107 Danze de la Muerta (ch. Limón 1938) 107 Davidoff, Leonore 17 Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (ch. Newson 1988) 172–6, 207 Debussy, Claude (1862–1918) 73, 76, 126 decadence 19–20, 27, 61, 69. Decombe, François (1787–1865) 25 Defrantz, Thomas 116–18 degeneracy 19–20, 26, 61 Delsarte, Francois (1811–71) 92, 94 Dempster, Elizabeth 54 Denby, Edwin (1903–83) 44, 101 Denishawn 87, 94, 97 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004) 38–9 Descartes, René 17–18 Diaghilev, Serge (1872–1929) 11, 38, 58–84, 210; and homosexuality 71, 83 Dido and Aeneas (ch. Morris 1989) 40, 166–7, 171, 177, 179, 212 Dieu bleu, Le (ch. Fokine 1912) 59, 64–6 Diversion of Angels (ch. Graham 1948) 103 Dogtown (ch. Morris 1983) 165–6 Dolan, Jill 32, 42 Dolin, Anton (1904–83) 42–5, 63–4, 187, 191, 210 Doubletoss (ch. Cunningham 1993) 129 Douglas, Mary 15 Duncan, Isadora (1877–1927) 2, 54, 87, 140 Dunoyer, Vincent 187–9, 200 DV8 Physical Theatre 48–51, 172–8, 180 Dyer, Richard 33, 45, 53, 71, 88, 92–3, 157, 169 Early, Fergus 138–42, 148–52, 158, 173 Edwards, Misia (later Sert 1872–1950) 63, 84, 210 effeminacy 11–12, 18, 20, 26, 29, 41, 63, 70, 79, 83, 92, 108, 110, 167–72, 197, 210 Ehrenreich, Barbara 113 Ellis, Havelock 96–7 El Penitente (ch. Graham 1940) 100

Elssler, Fanny (1810–84) 25 Enter Achilles (ch. Newson 1995) 176–8 Event for Television (ch. Cunningham 1976) 122 Every Soul is a Circus (ch. Graham 1939) 100 Fanon, Frantz (1925–61) 33, 52 Felman, Shoshana 40 feminism 2, 7, 13, 31–3, 38, 54, 44, 60, 136, 142, 146, 148, 158, 167 Firebird, The (ch. Fokine 1910) 72–3 Flat (Paxton 1964) 55, 130–1, 133, 145 Flugel, J.C. 12 Fokine, Michel (1880–1942) 59, 66, 68–71, 73, 209 Foster, Susan 34, 37, 40, 95–6, 123, 125, 127, 129, 135, 153, 178–9 Foucault, Michel (1926–84) 16, 62 Foulkes, Julia 96 Four Temperaments, The (ch. Balanchine, 1946) 35, 46 Franko, Mark 95, 100 Fried, Michael 33–5, 45, 66, 127, 139, 207, 209; see also absorption and ‘theatricality’ Frigyesi, Judit 147 Frühlingsopfer see Sacre du printemps, Le Fuller, Loie (1862–1928) 87 Gallagher, Catherine 19 Gamman, Lorraine 14 Garafola, Lynn 12, 27, 59, 61, 64, 66, 81 Gautier, Théophile (1811–72) 25–7, 38 Gay Liberation Movement 7, 136, 138 gender ideologies 8, 13, 31–2, 34–5, 38, 39, 47, 48, 50, 54, 56, 60, 63, 71, 90, 116, 183, 185, 191, 192, 204, 207–8; nineteenth-century 6, 13, 17, 21, 58, 61, 87 Genet, Jean (1910–86) 109, 161 Gere, David 159, 169–71 Gilbaut, Serge 85 Goldberg, Marianne 54 Goode, Joe 160, 167–72, 180, 197 Gordon, David 55, 128, 133 Gottschild, Brenda Dixon 33, 35–6, 116, 120 Graff, Ellen 95

229

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Graham, Martha (1894–1991) 2, 4, 47, 85, 87, 92, 97–104, 111, 120, 122, 127, 140, 144 Grand Union, The 133, 156 Greek civilisation 15, 17; and homosexuality 70 Guest, Ivor 61 Guilbaut, Serge 114–15 Hall, Catherine 17 Hall, Stuart 37, 63 Hanna, Judith Lynn 4, 11, 28, 90 Hard Nut, The (ch. Morris 1991) 177 Hargreaves, Martin 56, 179, 212 Haskell, Arnold (1903–80) 29, 84 Hawkins, Erick (1909–94) 4, 98–104, 140, 145 heterosexuality xi, 6–7, 11, 15, 21, 23, 28, 32–3, 41, 43, 47, 53, 63, 84, 85–6, 90, 104, 112, 115–16, 125, 142, 145, 158, 164–5, 168, 171, 174, 181–3, 187, 190, 195, 196, 206, 212 Hetrospective (ch. Clark and Petronio 1989) 162–4, 165, 207 Hoch, Paul 17 Hodson, Millicent 78, 210 Hoghe, Raimund 144, 182, 198, 204–7, 213 L’Homme et son désir (ch. Börlin 1921) 82, 94, 207 homoeroticism 6, 48, 69, 107, 109–10, 171, 176, 178, 206 homophobia 21–4, 28–9, 43, 48, 82, 84, 85, 113, 125, 135–6, 159–61, 177 homosexuality 11, 20, 22–3, 28–9, 60–3, 110, 172; closet 115, 178; and the Cold War 113–14, 123; third sex 69–70; see also aesthetic of indifference; Ailey; Börlin; Diaghilev; Ellis; Greek civilisation; Jones; Shawn; Zane Hoving, Lucas 107–10 Humphrey, Doris (1895–1958) 2–4, 97, 105 Huxley, Michael 141, 144, 156 hypermasculinity 117, 145, 156 Invocation of the Thunderbird (ch. Shawn 1918) 92 Jackson, Graham 28–9 Janin, Jules (1807–74) 25–8, 38

Jasperse, John 182, 195–8, 212 Jeux (ch. Nijinsky 1913) 79 Jeux Sans Frontière (ch. Anderson 1991) 190, 196 Johns, Jasper 113, 124–5, 129, 213 Johnston, Jill 104, 107, 123, 128–9, 131, 136, 139 Jones, Bill T. 52–3, 120, 135, 138–42, 158, 159, 182–5, 194, 198 Jones, LeRoi 121 Jordan, Stephanie 35, 50, 54, 142 Jowitt, Deborah 100–1, 203 Judson Dance Theatre 112, 130 Julien, Isaac 52–3 Junkie (ch. Pomare 1966) 111–12, 115, 121–2, 207 just two dancers (ch. Jasperse 2003) 195, 197 Kaplan, Alice Yaeger 143–4 Karlinsky, Simon 72–3, 80 Karsavina, Tamara (1885–1978) 66–7, 210 Katz, Jonathan 125, 135 Keersmaeker, Anne Theresa de 51, 89, 182, 185–9, 194, 198 Kimmel, Michael S. 20, 61, 88 Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936) 20 Kirstein, Lincoln 102, 104 Kochno, Boris 83 Koner, Pauline 4, 108, 110, 211 Koppelson, Kevin 63 Koritz, Amy 60, 69 Kreutzberg, Harald (1902–68) 4, 140 Kriegsman, Sali Ann 104 Laban, Rudolf (1879–1958) 2, 108, 140 Labor Symphony (ch. Shawn 1934) 95–6 Lamentations (ch. Graham 1930) 97 Lament for Ignatio Sánchez Mejías (ch. Humphrey 1947) 107 Leoussi, Eleni 49, 175 Lepecki, André 56 Lepkoff, Danny 135, 138 Lester Horton (1906–53) 114, 117 Levin, David Michael 36 Lieven, Prince Peter 68 Lifar, Serge (1905–86) 43 Limón, José (1908–72) 4, 48, 85, 90, 98, 105–10, 111, 192, 207, 211; ‘The Virile Dance’ 105–6, 111–12, 117, 125, 127

230

INDEX

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1

11

11

1

11

11

11

Lloyd, David 92 Lloyd, Margaret 102, 104 Lombroso, Cesare (1835–1909) 19 Macaulay, Alistair 160–1, 178 McCarthy, Joseph (1908–57) 113, 124, 130, 136 Mackrell, Judith 50, 161–2 Macmillan, Kenneth (1929–92) 46 McRobbie, Angela 33, 37 Magnesium (ch. Paxton 1972) 133–4, 199 Malinche, La (ch. Limón 1949) 107 Mallarmé, Stephane (1842–98) 76 Manchester, P.W. 11 Mangrove 135 Manning, Susan 53–4, 89, 98, 107, 113, 117, 142 Marks, Marcia 112 Marshment, Margaret 14 Martin, Carol 52, 166 Mather, Cotton (1663–1728) 85, 99 Mazo, Joseph 103, 118 Mechanised Labor (ch. Shawn 1934) 95–6 Meisner, Nadine 150, 174 Men Working 135 Mercer, Kobena 52–3, 120, 138 Michaelangelo 18, 44–5 Mikrokosmos (ch. Keersmaeker 1987) 186–7, 191 Milhaud, Darius (1892–1974) 82 Minarik, Jan 145, 147, 150, 212 Miss Julie (ch. Cullberg 1950) 46 Mitchell, Jack 154–6, 158 Mmm (ch. Clark 1988) 160–2 modern dance 3; in Germany 6, 139; US modern dance 48, 85–110, 139 modernism 44, 72–6 modernist ballet 63, 80, 84 modernist fragmentation 44, 84, 112, 158, 185 Monument for a Dead Boy (ch. Von Dantzig 1965) 47, 50 Moore, Susanne 61 Moor’s Pavane, The (ch. Limón 1949) 107–10, 111, 116 Mordkin, Mikhail (1880–1944) 4, 58, 91 Morgan, Barbara 90, 100 Morris, Gay 40, 166–7 Morris, Mark 6, 40, 89, 128, 160, 164–7, 179–80

movement research 141 Mozart Concert Arias (ch. Keersmaeker 1992) 188–9 Mozingo, Karen 147 Mulvey, Laura 31–2, 43, 42, 46–8, 183, 187 Mumaw, Barton 90, 94–5 Murphy, Ann 107 My Sex, Our Dance (ch. Newson 1987) 48–51 Narcisse (ch. Fokine 1911) 59, 64, 68, 70, 76, 210 Neale, Steve 14, 18, 32, 45–6, 60, 119 Negro Spirituals (ch. Shawn 1933) 92 New Dance 141, 148 New Puritans (ch. Clark 1984) 162 Newson, Lloyd 48–51, 172–8, 207 Night Journey (ch. Graham 1947) 47 Nijinska, Bronislava (1891–1972) 3, 59, 62, 64, 67, 70, 73, 75, 209 Nijinsky, Vaslav (1889–1950) 3, 7, 11, 58–79, 204, 209–10; as Golden Slave in Schéhérazade 67, 69–71, 170; and homosexuality 71 Nikitina, Alice (1909–78) 43 Nikolai, Alwin 122 Noces, Les (ch. Nijinska 1923) 63, 79–81, 83, 143, 207 Nochlin, Linda 61 Novack, Cynthia (Cynthia Jeanne Cohen Bull) 133–5 Nutcracker, The (ch. Petipa/Ivanov 1892) 24 orientalism 70–1, 129 Orton, Fred 113, 126–7, 130, 147, 152, 154 Panofsky, Erwin (1892–1968) 106 Paris Opéra 9, 80 Parker, Alan 41, 90, 120 pas de deux 42, 58, 186, 191, 209 Pavlova, Anna (1881–1931) 4, 64, 69, 91, 161 Paxton, Steve 1, 51, 55, 111, 115, 128, 130–7, 138, 141, 156, 163, 195, 199, 212 performativity 38–41; gender performance 16–17, queer 41, 50; see also Austin; Butler Perrot, Jules (1810–92) 26–7

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INDEX

Petronio, Stephen 155–8, 162–4, 165, 180, 207 Petrouchka (ch. Fokine 1911) 66–7, 209 Phelan, Peggy 14, 53, 55, 167, 177 Poesio, Gianandrea 24 Pollack, Barbara 106 Pollock, Griselda 38 Pollock, Jackson (1912–56) 115 Polonaise (ch. Shawn 1933) 94–5, 110 Polovtsian Dances in Prince Igor (ch. Fokine 1909) 58, 91 Pomare, Eleo 111–12, 115, 121–2, 135–6, 207 postmodern dance 139 Prévost, Hyppolyte 25 Prevots, Naima 85, 114–15, 211 Prickett, Stacey 95 Primitive Mysteries (ch. Graham 1931) 98 Prone (ch. Jasperse 2005) 195, 197–8 Proust, Marcel (1871–1922) 61, 70 Punch and Judy (ch. Graham 1941) 100 Quirey, Belinda 87 Rainer, Yvonne 54, 133 Rainforest (ch. Cunningham 1968) 128 Rambert, Marie (1888–1982) 3, 63–4, 75, 210 Rauschenberg, Robert 113, 124–5, 129, 155 Red Army Faction 144 Reisman, David 113, 115, 134 Revelations (ch. Ailey 1960) 53, 116–22 Reynolds, Dee 115, 122, 211 Rivière, Jacques (1886–1925) 71, 73, 75, 83 Roaratorio (ch. Cunningham 1983) 123, 128–9, 136 Robbins, Jerome (1918–98) 35 Robeson, Paul (1898–1976) 53 Roerich, Nikolas (1874–1947) 71, 78, 204 Romantic ballet 12, 25–8 Romantic genius 18, 51, 68 Romanticism 18–19 Romeo and Juliet (ch. Nijinska 1926) 84 Roosevelt, F.D. (1882–1945) 99–100 Roosevelt, Theodore (1858–1919) 20, 88

Rorty, Richard 17 Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius 124–5 Ross, Bertram 102–3 Rotary Action (ch. Jones and Zane 1982) 138–42, 152–4 Roth, Mark 100 Roth, Moira 113, 124–5, 129, 136 Rubidge, Sarah 46 Rubinstein, Ida (1885–1960) 69 Sacre du printemps, Le (ch. Bausch 1975), 138–47, 158, 204, 207, 211 Sacre du printemps, Le (ch. Béjart 1959) 145, 204 Sacre du printemps, Le (ch. Hoghe 2004) 204–7 Sacre du printemps, Le (ch. Nijinsky 1913) 63, 71–5, 78–9, 81 Sacre du printemps, Le (composed Stravinsky 1913) 71–4, 79, 142, 160, 204–5, 209 Satie, Erik (1866–1925) 126 Satisfyin’ Lover (ch. Paxton 1967) 131–23 Saura, Carlos 48 Savage Dance (ch. Shawn 1913) 92 Schéhérazade (ch. Fokine 1910) 59, 68 Schlundt, Christina 96 Section of a New Unfinished Work (ch. Paxton 1965) 130 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 23, 27, 41, 90, 120 Septet (ch. Cunningham 1953) 125–6 Sert, Misia see Edwards, Misia Servos, Norbert 142–3 Set and Reset (ch. Brown 1983) 138–42, 144, 158, 208 Setterfield, Valda 127 Shawn, Ted (1891–1972) 3, 11, 21, 48, 85–98, 102, 110, 111, 121, 178, 196, 210, 211; and his Ensemble of Male Dancers 94; on jazz dance 88–9 Sherman, Jane 90, 93–5 Siegel, Marcia 3, 58, 86, 91, 101, 104, 115, 126–7 Silverman, Kaja 33, 44 Sleeping Beauty, The (ch. Petipa 1890) 42, 58 Smithereens (ch. Anderson 1999) 191–4 Sokolova, Lydia (1896–1974) 78, 210

232

INDEX

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1

11

11

1

11

Spear Dance Japonaise (ch. Shawn 1919) 92, 104 spectatorship 25, 41–6, 183, 187; African American 35; female 14, 31, 42–3, 45, 61, 70, 104; gay male 29, 35, 47, 61, 82; performer spectator relationship 36–7; the look and the gaze 33, 44; ‘the male gaze’ 14, 31–2 47, 54, 61, 187–8 Spectre de la rose (ch. Fokine 1911) 59, 63–5, 68–9 St Denis, Ruth (1879–1968) 2–3, 87, 98, 140 stoicism 17, 57, 93–4, 96, 102, 143, 208 Stokes, Adrian (1902–72) 43 Stravinsky, Igor (1882–1971) 72–34, 79–80, 142, 160, 204–5, 209, 210 Swan Lake (ch. Bourne 1995) 29, 56, 160, 177–80, 196 Swan Lake (ch. Ek 1992) 178 Swan Lake (ch. Petipa/Ivanov 1895) 42 Sylphide, La (1832) 25 Tarzan 21, 33, 88 Taylor, Paul 3 Tchelichew, Pavel 96 Terry, Walter 85 Theweleit, Klaus 50 Thomas, Helen 35, 54 To José Clemente Orozco (ch. Horton 1963) 114–15 Train bleu, Le (ch. Nijinska 1925) 84 Traitor, The (ch. Limón 1954) 113 Trio A (ch. Rainer 1966) 54

Tudor, Antony (1909–89) 47 Tudor, David 114 Ulrichs, Karl (1825–95) 69–70 Undertow (ch. Tudor 1945) Valentino, Rudolph 71 Valois, Ninette de (1898–2001) 3 Vaughan, David 128 Walker, David Hatch 102 Walters, Margaret 12 Warhol, Andy (1928–87) 128 Warshaw, Randy 155–8 Weeks, Jeffrey 60, 62, 96–7 Weeks, Melanie 28 Weidman, Charles (1901–75) 4, 97 Wengerd, Tim 103 West, Cornell 118 West, Rebecca (1892–1983) 64 whiteness 5, 15, 21–2, 33, 52–3, 88–9, 91–7, 99, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 123, 130, 158, 182–3, 208 Wigman, Mary (1886–1973) 3, 140, 166, 211 Wilde, Oscar 11, 28, 62, 109 Williams, Raymond 74–5, 97 Winter, Christopher 50 Wolff, Janet 17 Wollen, Peter 70 Wong, Yutian 123, 129 Zane, Arnie (1948–88) 135, 138–42, 152–4, 158, 159 Zimmer, Elizabeth 154 Zingaro, La (1840) 26

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