Queer Embodiment and Dance

Dance is both a performance and visual method of creating artwork. It has existed in many forms since humanity was born. Its techniques, especially the explicitly codified ones, produce what Randy Martin says is the opportunity to align bodies with social and governmental forces. Yet, where is the autonomy of the moving bodies in this idea? Do they have any or are they simply props for the regulatory forces which produce concert performance? As a mover I would fight against the notion that a dancer has no autonomy because the second one steps on stage we have the audience’s gaze in our grasp. This gaze places preconceived meaning upon the dancer’s body while it is simultaneously forced to witness the embodiment practice of the dancer in the way that dancer has chosen to present it. The dancer has the opportunity to break from presupposed inscriptions or reaffirm them. Before the early experimentation of modern and post-modern dance one may have said this potential for breakage was not a possibility. Even now, after both of these artistic movements have become codified and instilled with aesthetic importance, this assertion may seem naive. But, those who live their lives steeped in dance feel, at the very least, some inkling of bodily awareness that is more than just knowing a dance step.

Dance is not only a performance but a performative act. With each class, rehearsal or show the dancer engages in repetition of the self as mover. No dancer understands the movement put on them by a choreographer or director to be of their true self but they incorporate those movements into their manifold self with each repetition. Then, how does this practice of repetition of codified, choreographed or scored movement serve as an embodiment of the dancer’s self as mover and a gendered body? Dance is not a passive experience for the mover. Many dance theorists have discussed how an audience’s gaze transforms the work being presented but how does this work in the mind and bodily understanding of the dancer themselves?

Unlike most other cultural production, dance relies on the physical body to enact its own

representation. But at the very moment the dancing body is creating a representation, it is also in the process of actually forming that body. Put more simply, dancing bodies simultaneously produce and are produced by their own dancing (Albright, 1997).

Ann Cooper Albright says this in the introduction to her 1997 book Choreographing Difference. Her words remain true and poignant today in the world of dance and dance making. She says that dance is formed by the body and the body is formed by the dance- this can mean physical ability and strength- and is forming the body- it creates the physique, changes stamina and presentation of the dancer. Dance seeps into each aspect of the mover’s physical experiences. The body and the dance are playing a game of who can inform the other faster. Neither ever win. Embodiment in dance is thus a battle of sorts. This battle is ever-shifting and the audience is forced to partake in the current version of that battle being fought. The dancer has the option to choose how and when to display this constant forming of the self and the body.

Butler says this on the audience’s experience of a performance;

one can maintain one’s sense of reality in the face of this temporary challenge to our existing ontological assumptions about gender arrangements; the various conventions which announce that ‘this is only a play’ allows strict lines to be drawn between the performance and life. On the street or in the bus, the act becomes dangerous, if it does, precisely because there are no theatrical conventions to delimit the purely imaginary character of the act, indeed, on the street or in the bus, there is no presumption that the act is distinct from a reality; the disquieting effect of the act is that there are no conventions that facilitate making this separation (Butler 527).

These clear lines drawn in the mind of the audience are not so clearly drawn by the performer. As Albright brings up; the competing production from the body and the dance make these lines difficult to draw for the dancer. The rehearsal process maintains that this bending of physicality and gender play is with the performer every day. They awaken knowing they must inhabit the danced form of the self in rehearsal later that day. They rehearse that self while in the shower, before heading to bed, or on the street as they walk to the store. This all happens long before they enter the studio or walk onstage.

These internal physical performances are repeated each day both in and out of the rehearsal process, consciously and unconsciously by the mover. They can be seen as a subset of Butler’s performative repetition. I say subset because these repetitions are not put on without the dancer’s knowledge. They have trained for many years to capture these qualities and to understand the intimate workings of the rehearsal process. They believe themselves to have autonomy outside of the dance while understanding that the dance is a regulatory force in every micro-aspect of their lives.

This regulatory aspect of the dance governs how they interact with other bodies, the architecture around them and, for better or worse, their gendered selves. Butler says;

As a corporeal field of cultural play, gender is a basically innovative affair, although it is quite clear that there are strict punishments for contesting the script by performing out of turn or through unwarranted improvisations. Gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds” (Butler 531).

Butler sees the play not only between the powers of societal norms, daily life, the essentialized nature of gender and the punishments being risked by innovating in one’s gender but she also sees the play between the autonomy of the body acting and the inscriptions being placed on that body. The regulation of physicality through dance training echos many of these points. The dance influences how the mover inhabits their body in mundane everyday tasks as well as regulates what “Diana Taylor defines repertoire as “all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, non reproducible knowledge” (Mitchell, 38). Dance creates a new set of repertoire actions that can be performed by the dancer. Ballet being a prime example.

In ballet training the female dancer is taught how to move her head from side to side depending on where her arm is located in the space. She is taught how to gaze upon her male partner and to ignore the rest of the female corp de ballet, almost as if each ensemble member is performing her own solo. Each interaction between bodies is regulated down to the minute detail of how to turn your body when a man is assisting you verses performing a turn on your own. These gendered regulations prescribe ways of being that have the capability to carry over into the non-movement interactions in the rehearsal process and everyday life. Every dancer knows the sensation of turning their head while walking along the street only to have the muscle memory send their mind back to the performance. They adjust back into their routine of pedestrian walking, consciously removing themselves from the bodily experience of the dance.

How then, if dance is such a regulated and regulating force in the dancer’s life, can it be a site of gender and embodied play? Can the doing of dance wrong have the same consequences and liberating feelings for the body of the dancer as doing gender wrong can have for the gender queer body? Did the Judson era’s use of pedestrian movement and the invention of contact improv create a queered performance of dance? I would be inclined to say yes- up until the moment when both were codified and turned into a regulatory regime similar to ballet. Yet, do the new innovations of dance still give rise to new ways of performing gender on stage?

In her book Queer Dance: Meanings and Making Clare Croft says;

Queer is a wide-ranging set of notions and practices that collide: a state of conflicting, generatives modes of existence. Dance, with its poetic porosity and generative failure to convey direct meaning, engages productivity and provocatively with queer’s slippery, shapeshifting sensibility. Bodies never do one thing or mean one thing. By embracing messy, heterogeneous, even possibly contradictory queer dance forges community, not in spite of, but through and with challenges and contradictions (Croft, 2017).

Croft would undoubtedly say that the shifts in the making of dance today- examples being site specific work, or various forms of improvisational structures- help create new possibilities in how to do gender in dance performance. These new forms of embodiment on stage force the audience to see the performer’s body in ways that western society have not seen before in the realm of concert dance. These forms also force us as movers to experience our own somatic knowledge through avenues that feel confusing and create dissonance in the ways we were trained to experience our gendered bodies.

This play with embodiment and gender do not tend to remain passive for queer artists. In the past twenty years queer dance artists have not simply used and generated new movement forms and claimed those as queered embodiment but have engaged in queer politics on many levels both in and out of the studio. Artists like Miguel Gutierrez and Jen Rosenblit have been working with improvisational and site specific work to explore the realm of queerness and its intersections with race and spatial relations, respectively. This is a clear reduction of their work as it is multi-faceted and explores their own personal identities as well as the identities of their collaborators. Though, they situate themselves in the conversations being held in the dance world as well as in the queer community. Their embodiment practices through dance are conscious and well aware of the bodily inscriptions being placed upon them. They are actively doing what Stryker says the humanities are doing now with trans history; puting embodiment based knowledge in a central role. She says, “embodiment — that contingent accomplishment through which the histories of our identities become invested in our corporeal Space” (Stryker, 153). Their work is focused on situating openly queer dancers into the corporeal space of the concert hall and the dance at large. Let us look at one way these artists try and challenge the types of space and repetition so common in concert dance.

In an interview with Gutierrez he said that he rejected the “tyrannical choreographer” role that so many male identifying artists have embodied. He stated that he preferred to work collaboratively with his dancers and engage in a creative process built from improvisational scores and specified energetic spaces. He did admit he was aware that his work with improvisational scores came from a predominately white, male centric lineage but hoped the way he curated space with his fellow dancers would mean his work, in one way or another, challenged the primacy of that lineage for today’s queer artists. He never specified the ways he thought this form of the choreographic process played with gender and its previously embodied forms in concert dance. Though one can assume that the repetition of rehearsal — both those in and out of the studio- are changed by the dynamic built between dancer and choreographer when some semblance of equal ground is established. When movement is not solely generated by the choreographer to be put onto another’s body the dynamic between bodies changes. It changes how Gutierrez, as male choreographer, relates to the other bodies in the room. The construction of specified energetic and corporeal spaces through improvisation and not codified movement also changes how and when the repetition and danced and gendered self happens in the rehearsal process. Gutierrez only stated that this kind of dynamic play was his goal and did not specify more than this. He seemed to find comfort in the ambiguity of his work’s gendered performativity.

Gutierrez and Rosenblit are just two examples of artists actively working with the constant battle of cultural inscription and somatic understanding of the self in their choreographies. They are just two movers experiencing the gender play that Butler describes while purposefully situating themselves in a specific corporeal and energetic space. They are just two of the dancers moving the contemporary dance scene towards more actively queered embodiments. As a queer dancer I am intrigued to see how these two artists and artists of the coming generations push the knowledge of queer theory and dance studies to new places through ambiguously gendered and explicitly queered performance.

Bibliography

Albright, Anne, C. Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance.

Wesleyan University Press. New Hampshire. 1997.

Butler, Judith. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and

Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, vol. 40. №4. Dec. 1988

Croft, Clare. Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings. Oxford University Press. 2017.

Butler, Judith. Critically Queer. A journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Duke University Press.

1993.https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-abstract/1/1/17/9896/Critically-Queer?redire

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Martin, Randy. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Duke University Press.

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Mitchell, Gregory. Tourist Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazil’s Sexual

Economy. The University of Chicago Press. 2016

Stryker, Susan. Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity. Radical History

Review. Volume 2008, issue 100. Duke University Press. 2008.