Books
Dancing Female: Lives and Issues of Women in Contemporary Dance. By Sharon Friedler and Susan Glazer. Amsterdam: Harwood Aca- demic Publishers, ; pp.; illustrations. $. cloth, $. paper.
Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage. By Sally Banes. London and New York: Routledge, ; pp.; illustrations. $. cloth, $. paper.
Sharon Friedler and Susan Glazer’s Dancing Female: Lives and Issues of Women in Contemporary Dance and Sally Banes’s most recent book, Dancing Women: Fe- male Bodies in Performance have surprisingly little in common beyond similarities in their titles and in their overall subject. Friedler and Glazer’s book is a collec- tion of essays that are mostly short (one is two pages long, only four are over four thousand words) and cover a diverse range of topics including dance edu- cation, dance history, and contemporary practice. It is divided into two parts, the first dealing with mentoring and passing on women’s heritage; the second looking at physical knowledge, theory, and practice. I found particularly inter- esting some essays on women dancers and choreographers who, for differing reasons, have been marginalized and virtually forgotten—for example Ann Barzel’s “Portrait of Catherine and Dorothie Littlefield,” Stephanie Reinhart’s essay on Miriam Winslow and Renate Schottelius, and Cheryl Willis’s piece on African American women tap dancers during the swing era. Banes, by contrast, rounds up the usual suspects—including Balanchine, Fokine, Graham, Nijinska, Petipa, and Wigman—for a carefully crafted series of discussions of canonical ballets and early modern dance pieces, with a brief coda on postmodern dance. Banes takes as a central theme to tie these works together the changing ways in which marriages (or heterosexual relationships in the case of “abstract” ballets like Tudor’s Dark Elegies and Balanchine’s Agon) are represented in theatre dance. She is able to devote much more space and goes into more depth than the contributors in Friedler and Glazer’s book; and, as one would expect from a scholar of Banes’s stature, the result is exemplary for its minutely researched and thoughtful commentaries on the dance history canon. One thing which Banes’s book has in common with almost all the contri- butions to Friedler and Glazer’s book is a relatively conservative, humanist ap- proach to feminist scholarship. This may seem a surprising comment. When it was published in , Banes’s first book, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-modern Dance was ground-breaking in its contribution to dance scholarship and radi- cal in its alignment with postmodern artistic practice. In many ways her much admired collection Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism () contin- ued along the same progressive lines. Apart from the coda, the fact that Women Dancing is about mainstream theatre dance—predominantly ballet— only partly accounts for its conservatism. What I think these two new books show is a process of reassessment currently at work in dance studies, which
The Drama Review , (T), Spring .
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Gay Morris has recently suggested relates to shifts in the humanities as mod- ernist methods and concepts have given way to postmodern ones (:). Some dance scholars, worried at the seeming dilution of what they see as the specificity of dance studies through the use of methodologies imported from film theory and cultural studies, are beginning to articulate what could per- haps be described as a call back to the basics of dance scholarship. By that I mean descriptive dance analysis backed up by detailed historical contextualization and informed by a traditional belief in the aesthetic value of dance as art. For these scholars dedicated scrutiny is all that is necessary to grasp the intention of the artist as the work reveals it. In many ways a desire to go “back to basics” is a predictable reaction to some of the worst excesses of “political correctness.” I was surprised recently when, in the middle of a conversation, a co-presenter at a European confer- ence referred to the need “to reclaim ballet from the feminists.” I remembered this overgeneralized comment, however, when I read Carolyn McConnell’s dismissive rejection of ballet in Dancing Female. McConnell discounts and in- deed smears th-century ballet because she says rich aristocrats only went to it in search of mistresses (–), while “Balanchine’s emphasis on bones (read anorexia) made his revolution of American ballet in many ways more oppres- sive than traditional ballet” (). McConnell’s overall argument is that only postmodern dance is liberatory. This in itself is fine—and indeed many people hold the same opinion. The problem is that the reductiveness of her account of ballet makes one wary of the breadth of her alternative, libertarian vision. I therefore find myself very reassured when Banes states:
[I]f one starts neither with an assumption that all women are victims nor with the idea that they are all heroines, and neither with the idea that images of women are all negative nor that they are all positive, but rather, looks closely at the evidence of the works themselves, one actu- ally finds a much more complex range of representation than has previ- ously been suggested. (:–)
The one place where it seems to me that Banes does exactly this is in the coda, where she revisits her earlier work on the Judson Dance Theatre from the point of view of gender, pointing out that the work of Brown and Rainer is “not simply a reflection of feminist theory or political action” (–). This is a mistake that too many writers have made, including for example Roger Copeland in “Sexual Politics,” his contribution to Dancing Female. Banes succinctly observes: “Although the choreographers of the Judson Dance Theatre did not set out to create consciously ‘feminist’ dances—to claim that would be anachronistic—works by both men and women in the group reveal a protofeminist sensitivity to gender roles” (). Banes’s main concern in Dancing Women is not, however, with postmodernism but with challenging prevalent scholarship on representations of gender and ethnicity in ballet and early modern dance for a negativeness which, following Arlette Farge, she calls misérabiliste—having a political culture which she feels stresses victimiza- tion. In particular she attacks what she calls “anti-ballet feminists,” naming Christy Adair, Ann Daly, and Susan Foster. I cannot imagine anyone who has witnessed Foster’s witty and ironic performance of her essay “The Ballerina’s Phallic Pointe” (; which Banes cites) calling that work miserabilist; but there is, of course, no reason why Banes should agree with the often uncom- fortable radicalism of some feminists or adopt their methodologies. Often, however, when she disagrees with negative judgments about certain key ca- nonical works, Banes appears no more successful in her quest for a more com- plex range of representation than those she accuses of miserabilism. Indeed, it
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proves to be difficult to transcend the victim/heroine dichotomy, and some- times Banes seems to be merely asserting that the work in question cannot be presenting a negative image because it is an expression of female agency. In some instances this is convincing, for example the Bride in Nijinska’s Les Noces () and the Cowgirl in De Mille’s Rodeo (), but it is more prob- lematic in cases where feminists have pointed to the problem of sexual display and objectification of the female dancing body. Citing Ann Daly’s essay “The Balanchine Woman: Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers,” Banes rejects the application of feminist film theory within dance studies. Since it was published in this journal in , Daly’s es- say, one of the first American contributions to feminist dance scholarship, has acquired a certain notoriety and is often misrepresented. Daly does not, as Banes states, apply Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic theory of the male gaze in cinema to dance (). Mulvey’s essay was published in and was therefore already years old (and thus out of date) when Daly’s essay appeared and al- most a quarter of a century old by the time Banes “rejects the psychoanalytic model of the male gaze” () in both cinema and dance in her new book. And there is no psychoanalytic theory in Daly’s essay, nor does she actually cite Mulvey. It is to E. Ann Kaplan () that she refers, suggesting that the same questions which Kaplan “asks about the cinema can be used to probe the Balanchine ballerina. In the third theme of The Four Temperaments, how is woman represented? In a dance form that Balanchine called an instant love story whose desire is being played out? Who occupies the position of privi- lege?” (Daly :–). These may be dangerous questions to ask but they are surely not methodologically unsound. In seeking answers to them, Daly gives a detailed description and interpretation of the third theme of The Four Temperaments pointing out that the ballerina is continually dominated and controlled by her partner, often struggling and being directed to do difficult, off-balance movements so that she appears forced to submit to her partner. “It is as if the man were experimenting with how far he could pull the ballerina off her own balance and still be performing classical ballet” (). The desire expressed within this duet, Daly concludes, “belongs only to the man. About her own desire, the compliant third theme ballerina is silent” (). Banes says that Daly cannot generalize about the Balanchine ballerina with only one small example from the many hundreds of hours of ballet Balanchine choreographed (). When, however, one reads Daly’s essay alongside Banes’s discussion of Agon, similarities between the two ballets become appar- ent. Daly observes:
In the third theme, that objectified, impassive style [the unemotional style she identifies in Balanchine’s American ballerinas] renders the woman a prop in perversely exquisite imagery. She is a bell to be swung to and fro, a figurine to be shown left and right, or an instrument to be strummed. (:)
This last is surely a reference to a movement in The Four Temperaments () about which Arlene Croce has suggested: “Could Balanchine have been thinking of the bass fiddle the forties jazz player spins after a chorus of hot licks?” (Croce :). Banes herself cites Croce when she recognizes a similar movement in a pas de trois in Agon (). Where Daly suggests that the ballerina in the third theme is manipulated and controlled, Banes cites Arthur Mitchell, on whom the male role in the central pas de deux in Agon () was created, who remembers Balanchine instructing him in this role, saying: “‘The girl is like a doll, you’re manipulating her, you must control her’” (Banes ). This use of manipulation and control however is exploited in a distinctively
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different way in Agon. Agon means contest, and, as Banes observes, all through it, but especially during the central pas de deux, there is a tension and competi- tiveness between the male and female dancers, between male control and fe- male virtuosity. Banes quotes Robynn Stilwell’s interpretation of the pas de deux in Agon: “‘The implicit balance of power between the two of them con- stantly shifts. [...] In his attempts to manipulate her, she slips away and forms her twin image, seeming to force him to respond to her will’” (). Banes concludes that “In Agon the women are dynamic makers of art, driving forces and social agents as much as if not more than the men, not only through their technical prowess [...] but through the meaning of the choreography itself” (–). Here Banes is asserting the positive nature of a danced display of fe- male agency while discounting suggestions that this might serve heterosexual male rather than female desire. She has done nothing to answer Daly’s uncom- fortable complaint that the Balanchine ballerina’s technical qualities “seduce the male gaze, but the titillating danger—the threat—of her self-sufficient virtuosity is tamed by her submissive role within the interaction” (Daly :). By setting up Daly as an anti-ballet feminist, Banes misrepresents her. Banes says that Daly believes that ballet “both of the Balanchine and classical varieties, and even current modern dance should be shunned for all these genres contrib- ute to the exploitation of women in daily life” (Banes ). What Daly actually says, however, is that “the solution is not to abolish classical ballet” but to learn to look at it differently, offering what amounts to a manifesto for feminist dance scholarship and practice (Daly :). Daly is not anti-ballet, nor even straightforwardly anti-Balanchine—surely the fact that she is so well informed about him and his work and examines it so closely suggests a love-hate rela- tionship. What she is against are traditional ways of looking at ballet, which she warns are incompatible with a feminist critical position. Banes ignores this warning at her own peril. Banes takes a similar approach in her discussion of Sleeping Beauty (). From the point of view of meticulous historical research, social and political contextualization, and minutely informative interpretation, Banes’s long ( page) discussion of Sleeping Beauty may prove the most valuable part of Dancing Women. The way she locates the role of fairy tales within the oppressive politi- cal fabric of Tsarist Russia is fascinating, as also is her detailed discussion of shifts in women’s rights and status in late th-century Russia. In comparison, Banes’s disagreement with Christy Adair may seem trivial, merely a comment in a footnote. Adair recognizes that on the one hand the Rose adagio in Sleep- ing Beauty is technically extremely demanding and thus gives the ballerina an opportunity to display her virtuosity, but at the same time points out that it is an excellent example of a woman on display, which emphasizes the woman as object (Adair :–). Banes doesn’t explain her disagreement with Adair, merely asserts her own view: “My own feminist interpretation, acknowledging the strength displayed by both the dancer and the character in this section, dif- fers from that of the anti-ballet feminists” (Banes ). The point is that neither here, nor in her discussion of Balanchine’s Agon, nor in her discussion of Ruth St. Denis’s key early work Radha () does Banes discuss why she disagrees with the widely articulated feminist critique of the presentation of the female body in ways which allow it to be objectified as an erotic object for the het- erosexual male spectator. As with her discussion of Sleeping Beauty, Banes develops a very useful de- scription and interpretation of Radha. In the course of this, Banes considers Jane Desmond’s contentious discussion of this piece’s orientalism (Desmond ). In this Desmond brings out the internal contradictions in St. Denis’s overdetermined representations of oriental feminine sexuality. On the one hand, Desmond argues, this dance evokes ideas about the depth of Eastern re-
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ligious knowledge, which it links with Western th-century notions about women as guardians of religion and morality; on the other hand, by displaying an “Indian” woman it allows spectators to assume a quasi-ethnographic right to obtain knowledge about the colonized subject as Other—which in Radha becomes confused with heterosexual male desire to have revealed the secrets of female sexuality. Banes, however, argues that “what at first looks like a mixed message in Radha is not a paradox or contradiction, but rather, a new message to Western eyes: that sensuality and spirituality can to some degree be partners” (Banes ). Why is this new? What about the Song of Solomon, the ecstatic visions of medieval women saints, Bernini’s baroque church interiors, or indeed images of temple dancers in th-century orientalist paintings to which both Banes and Desmond refer? Banes doesn’t address the question of whether Radha objectifies the eroticised female body for male spectators, but turns instead to St. Denis’s female audience of society matrons, arguing that: “For a woman to show other women her enjoyment of her body was a femi- nist coup in ” (). Desmond is more cautious, asking:
Is the female appropriation of sexual display in live performance, even within patriarchal norms, an act that in some way threatens the hege- mony of patriarchy? That so much of the sexual pleasure in Radha is danced as self-pleasure (especially Radha’s self-caressing) on the one hand asserts a new self-empowerment for women and on the other belongs to traditional structures of pornographic viewing. (Desmond :)
Banes is not unaware of the possibility of pornographic viewing. Elsewhere in Dancing Women, in the context of Katherine Dunham’s Rites de Passage (), she observes that burlesque striptease in the U.S. “usually for a pre- dominantly male audience, tended to take place in economic situations that ex- ploited and objectified the female performer and her sexuality for profit by male entrepreneurs” (Banes ). For Banes, however, the expression of sexual- ity in dance as high art is completely unrelated to this. Where sexuality is ex- pressed in ballet and modern dance, she proposes that dancers “present themselves as sexual subjects with individual dignity rather than as sexual ob- jects” (). Banes does not shy away from the idea that (heterosexual) sexual- ity may be expressed in ballet. She identifies sado-masochistic moments in both Agon () and the Firebird and Prince’s pas de deux in The Firebird () (), and discusses erotic elements in Rites de Passage () and Radha. It is possible to deduce Banes believes that in none of these can the dancers be looked at as sexual objects, because she says elsewhere “what the audience is supposed to feel [is] based on the authorial viewpoint of the choreographer” (). Banes’s argument seems to be that Balanchine and Petipa were great artists and not por- nographers, and St. Denis was not a racist colonial propagandist; therefore, if audiences look at these works the right way, they can only see humanity within the roles these choreographers created. For Banes, Adair, Desmond, and Daly are looking the wrong way, and this explains Banes’s impatience with their am- bivalence. Desmond, however, thoughtfully articulates contradictions within Radha, creating a nuanced ambivalence where less subtle writers might reductively condemn; Banes, by contrast, tries to argue any contradictions away so as to be able to celebrate St. Denis’s unequivocal achievement in “find[ing] ways of moving and of asserting female agency on stage” (). The idea that artists as authors are necessarily consciously in control of every aspect of their work produces methodological problems when considering the social meanings encoded within works. The choice, however, need not neces- sarily be between, on the one hand, protecting the idea of the artist as genius by denying that there is any sexism or racism in his or her work; and, on the other
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hand, the postmodern idea of the death of the author and the condemnation of a special intimacy with a highly valued work of art. Balanchine, Petipa, and St. Denis were only human. They were influenced by and absorbed the socially constructed ideas of their historical periods, including ideas about race and sexu- ality. These ideas unconsciously affected representations in their works, just as we who see their work today may be reentering as spectators the white, heterosexist, and masculinist positions that predominated when these works were produced. Methodologically, Banes works with a model of spectatorship that does not permit this possibility. What is valuable in her book is the way she often provides historical detail that can be used to understand these processes. What is needed is a more sophisticated understanding of spectatorship. There is surely no one correct way of looking at a work of art, and audience members may well be distracted away from purely aesthetic concerns as they watch ballet and modern dance. I am not just thinking here of male porno- graphic desires. Adair, reflecting on her experience of watching dance, confesses:
My attention was frequently diverted from the choreography to the pre- sentation of “perfect” bodies with outstanding skills. I watched in the hope that I might be able to transfer that skill and “perfect” body to my- self. I frequently left performances transformed not so much by the com- munication of the choreographer’s vision but rather by the feeding of my desire’s dream for a “perfect” body. (:)
In trying to reclaim ballet (and modern dance) from those she calls anti-bal- let feminists, Banes produces some of the richest and most thought-provoking dance scholarship that has been written about these much discussed pieces. In places, however, this is at the cost of seeming to suggest that some of the in- equalities which feminists have identified in contemporary society are not a problem where dance as art is concerned. What is disappointing about Dancing Women and about most of the contributions in Dancing Female is not their writers’ rejection of radical feminist methodologies but their failure to offer a viable alternative to them.
—Ramsay Burt
Notes . Copeland: “Thus it seems reasonable to suggest that the austere, cerebral, anti-volup- tuous quality of the early post-modern dance created by women such as Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Lucinda Childs reflects these feminist concerns” (). . Roger Copeland, for example, commented: “If you’re looking for an article that merely berates Western dance artists for their imperialist/colonialist/sexist/racist/you- name-it attitudes towards the Eastern ‘Other’, then see Jane Desmond’s moronic read- ing of Ruth St. Denis’s Radha” (:).
References Adair, Christy Women and Dance: Sylphs and Sirens. London: Macmillan. Copeland, Roger “The Search for Origins.” Dance Theatre Journal , :–. Croce, Arlene After-Images. New York: Vintage Books Daly, Ann “The Balanchine Woman: Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers.” TDR , (T):–.
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Desmond, Jane “Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis’s ‘Radha’ of .” Signs , :–. Foster, Susan Leigh “The Ballerina’s Phallic Pointe.” In Corporeality’s: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power, edited by Susan Leigh Foster, –. London: Routledge. Kaplan, E. Ann Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New York: Methuen. Morris, Gay, ed. Moving Words: Re-Writing Dance. London: Routledge. Mulvey, Laura “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen , :–.
Ramsay Burt is the author of The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities () and Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, ‘Race’ and Nation in Early Modern Dance (Routledge, ; [reviewed in this issue]). He is Senior Re- search Fellow in Dance at DeMontfort Univeristy, Leicester, UK.
Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, ‘Race’ and Nation in Early Modern Dance. By Ramsay Burt. London and New York: Routledge, ; pp.; illustrations. $. cloth, $. paper.
Cultural studies has animated the best of recent dance scholarship from Britain, most especially the work of Ramsay Burt. As practiced by Burt, cul- tural studies means drawing on a wide array of theorists to challenge the aes- thetic ideology of dance studies and to probe the social consequences of dance works. Hence his first book, The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities (Routledge, ) argued that prejudices against the male dancer in th- and th-century Europe and the United States served to reinforce dominant norms of bourgeois masculinity. Now his new book, Alien Bodies: Representa- tions of Modernity, ‘Race’ and Nation in Early Modern Dance, shifts the focus from gender to ethnicity and nationality. Or, more accurately, Alien Bodies in- quires into the interplay between gender, ethnicity, and nationality in West- ern theatre dance from the period between the two world wars. In his new book Burt contends that the consolidation of a Greenbergian reading of dance modernism in the postwar period—the privileging of dance about dance—distorts performance history during the interwar years. Not only does the Greenbergian account highlight American developments and mostly ignore European developments but it also makes rigid the relatively fluid boundaries between ballet and modern dance and between dance as high art and as popular entertainment during the s and s. Offering a revi- sionist narrative, Burt argues that Western theatre dance between the two world wars staged “alien bodies” that represented a complex response to mo- dernity, for “what seemed alien about modern dancing […] was nevertheless uncannily familiar because of the extent to which individuals were themselves alienated by modernity” (). To make this argument Burt draws on the thinking of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer as well as on the thinking of contemporary scholars— Zygmunt Bauman, Richard Dyer, Andreas Huyssen, Patrice Petro—who in dif- ferent ways have engaged Benjamin’s and Kracauer’s reflections on modernity.
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