“We Rule the Waves” Athletic Labor, Femininity, and National Collective in Billy Rose’s Aquacade Yasmine Marie Jahanmir We’re gonna heal. We’re gonna start again. You’ve brought the orchestra, synchronized swimmers. — Warsan Shire, “Hope” (in Beyoncé 2016b)1 On 6 February 2016, Beyoncé shocked the popular culture world with her most explicitly polit- ical artistic work to date when she released a surprise video for her new song: “Formation.” The video begins with the image of Beyoncé lounging atop a sinking police car in post-Katrina New Orleans. At 1:23 in the video, rows of black women similarly dressed, all with their hair curly and natural, sit at the bottom of an empty pool and for the next 37 seconds, the beat car- ries the viewer as the video cuts in and out of the pool scene. Beyoncé appears in the second shot of the pool among the dancers, their biceps flexed in a bodybuilding pose. They sharply place their right, flexed arms above their heads for a moment before they lower their arms 1. Verse from the poem from Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade (2016b). Figure 1. Rehearsal for Billy Rose’s Aquacade. The embodied practice of coordinated stroking in rehearsal and performance helped to generate feelings of solidarity. (Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) TDR: The Drama Review 61:3 (T235) Fall 2017. ©2017 112 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00676 by guest on 23 September 2021 slowly and gracefully, their fingers fanning out à la Bob Fosse from their tightly clenched fists. The flowing arm interlude leads into a languid hip rotation. Their arm movements vac- illate between tense, quick poses and fluid, willowy motions. The music changes as the con- trolled choreography transforms into bouncing, hip-shaking, animated dance moves associated with Southern hip hop — but still synchronized. More women join the dance, forming a large X pattern on the black and white–tiled bottom of the waterless pool (fig. 2) — as the video cuts between the images of the female dancers and a group of men playing basketball.2 The synchronized swimming-esque choreography is an aesthetic counterpart to the other more definitively political scenes of the video, including: vignettes of policemen, hands up in front of a very agile black boy dancing in jeans and a hoodie; a graffiti scrawl spelling out “stop shooting us” in black; and voiceover by gender-bending New Orleans YouTube per- former, Messy Mya, who was shot and killed in 2010. The pool reappears at 3:47 with a seem- ingly infinite number of dancers in a line — one can count 16, but the camera is zoomed in to give the appearance that the dancers continue indefinitely beyond the screen. Beyoncé repeats the refrain “Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation” as the dancers lay on the floor, bend their knees and lift their legs so that they are perpendicular to their bodies — performing (sans water) one of the most iconic moves in synchronized swimming: a ballet leg (fig. 4). At the end of the video, Beyoncé is fully submerged in the water still atop the New Orleans police car. In creating the multivocal, politicized atmosphere of “Formation,” Beyoncé and her choreographers borrow synchronized swimming’s movement vocabulary, relying on the genre’s long history as aesthetic representation of collective, feminine political action. An inciting event in the establishment of synchronized swimming as the confluence of popu- lar entertainment and political communication occurred in the late 1930s when audiences flocked to see Billy Rose’s Aquacade. Like “Formation,” the Aquacade used the combination of femininity and athleticism, albeit in a very different context, to reshape the gendered dynamics of national citizenship and civic participation. Just as Beyoncé utilized the standard structure of a popu- lar music video to disseminate her message of black, female empowerment, the synchronized swimmers in the Aquacade and their female choreographer used a theatrical revue to position an active and public femininity as a necessary part of a prospering nation. In the Aquacade’s spectacular final number, men paraded across the stage hoisting banners for each of the 50 states and women carried giant sparkling stars, hundreds of swimmers rhyth- mically stroked in a circular pattern around women in star formations on surfboards. The static symbols of the states, stars, and stripes formed the periphery of the playing space and the cen- tral location of the splashy choreography suggested the centrality of the mobile female bodies to the representation of the nation. The athletic labor at the heart of Rose’s theatrical expres- sion of nation helped to normalize middle-class, white women’s growing participation in eco- nomic and cultural production, a participation that would realize its fullest expression just a few years later when women’s labor was critical to World War II efforts. 2. The title of this article, “We Rule the Waves,” is the first lyric in the opening number of the 1937 Cleveland Aquacade. All descriptions of the Aquacade come from two visual sources: War Footage (2014) and Wayne (1939–1941). Yasmine Marie Jahanmir is Assistant Professor of Drama at the American University of Kuwait. A lifelong synchronized swimmer, her dissertation “Bathing Beauties: Gender, Nationalism, and Space Aquacade Billy Rose’s in Theatrical Synchronized Swimming” identifies synchronized swimming as an important nexus of feminine labor, nationalist spectacle, and bodily display in American popular culture. She has published in Women and Performance, Theatre Survey, and The Living Dance: An Anthology of Essays on Movement and Culture. She recently completed her PhD in Theater and Dance with an emphasis in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. [email protected] 113 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00676 by guest on 23 September 2021 Figure 2. Beyoncé, “Formation,” 2016. Beyoncé and her dancers form an X pattern on the bottom of an empty pool. The camera’s bird’s eye view of the pattern and the dancers’ athletic fashion bolster the connection to synchronized swimming aesthetics. (From Beyoncé 2016a; screenshot by Yasmine Marie Jahanmir) The potency of the Aquacade choreography comes from the coordination of multiple bodies to make grandiloquent, embodied demands for societal revision. Beyoncé’s ability to individu- ally state “I slay” in the lyrics of “Formation” is intrinsically tied to the coordination of the vid- eo’s backup dancers and their ability to state “we slay.” In both cases, synchronized swimming posits feminine collectivity as a mobilizing force for political and social change. The existence of similar choreography in two artworks created 80 years apart provokes the question: Why is synchronized swimming an enduring trope when it comes to representing the political potential of the feminine collective?3 What is so powerful about being “in formation?” Existing at the fruitful intersection of sport and theatre, synchronized swimming offers two unique perspectives on the discussion of performance, particularly as it relates to gender: first, the dual legacy of synchronized swimming as theatre and sport brings to the fore a nuanced discussion of labor. Synchronized swimming performances highlight the actual labor per- formed as well as the discursive combinations of femininity and labor, because athletic move- ment is more readily recognized as labor than theatrical exertion. Secondly, the synchronization of female bodies makes visible a collective imperative to perform a particular kind of feminine belonging — which can be mobilized both in the service of national citizenship (the Aquacade) and political activism (“Formation”). Although there is very little academic analysis of synchronized swimming, viewing sport as performance is certainly not new. As part of a continued project aimed at creating a more inclu- sive field of performance and decentering the Western theatrical canon, Richard Schechner sug- gested the inclusion of sport as part of the broad spectrum approach to performance studies: “theater has more in common with games and sports than with play or ritual [...I]t is in these activities that people express their social behavior” ([1988] 2003:15). Schechner’s provocation was in line with concurrent work on sport in anthropology, most notably by Clifford Geertz (1972) and John MacAloon (1984). Geertz detailed the “deep play” of Balinese cockfights, rec- ognizing the cockfight as an art form that is “fundamentally adramatization of status concerns,” 3. Aquacade and Beyoncé’s “Formation” are just two examples among many that I discuss in my broader project. Synchronized swimming has been employed for entertainment in theatre, films from patriotic Hollywood musi- cals to avantgarde French cinema, and Olympic sport, as well as to celebrate political leaders such as Julius Caesar and the late Kim Jong-Il. For a small sampling, see Gibson and Firth (2005), Erdman (2007), Bathing Beauty (Sidney 1944), Million Dollar Mermaid (LeRoy 1952), Alphaville (Godard 1965), Bean (2005), Coleman (1993), and MSN (2017). Yasmine Marie Jahanmir Yasmine 114 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00676 by guest on 23 September 2021 an insight based on his notion that “art forms generate and regenerate the very subjectiv- ity they pretend only to display” (1972:18, 28). John MacAloon’s analysis of performance at the Olympics identifies the event’s nature as a “ramified perfor- mance type,” a multipronged performance extravaganza in which he perceives multiple genres of performance occurring at the Olympics: spectacle, festi- val, ritual, and game (1984:259). This careful distinction is an important acknowledgement of how sport has the potential to produce various types of perfor- mance, particularly at the mas- sive global scale of the Olympics.