The Male Dancer

Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities

Ramsay Burt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000537253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Tanz

This revised third edition of The Male Dancer updates and enlarges a seminal book that has established itself as the definitive study of the performance of masculinities in twentieth century modernist and contemporary choreography.

In this authoritative and lively study, Ramsay Burt presents close readings of dance works from key moments of social and political change in the norms around gender and sexuality. The book's argument that prejudices against male dancers are rooted in our ideas about the male body and behaviour has been extended to take into account recent interdisciplinary discussions about whiteness, intersectionality, disability studies, and female masculinities. As well as analysing works by canonical figures like Nijinsky, Graham, Cunningham, and Bausch, it also examines the work of lesser-known figures like Michio Ito and Eleo Pomare, as well as choreographers who have recently emerged internationally like Germaine Acogny and Trajal Harrell.

The Male Dancer has proven to be essential reading for anyone interested in dance and the cultural representation of gender. By reflecting on the latest studies in theory, performance, and practice, Burt has thoroughly updated this important book to include dance works from the last ten years and has renewed its timeliness for the 2020s.

1THE TROUBLE WITH THE MALE DANCER

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159926-2

‘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 (1812–1888) 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, 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 end of the eighteenth century in Europe, prejudices against the male dancer did not exist. From the nineteenth century onwards, these have developed and changed in response to a variety of social and historical factors. Beaumont’s lithograph 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 mentioned in polite company, can be a powerful incitement to prejudice. So what then is the trouble with the male 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.

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 masculine 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 masculinity represented in dance do not seem very relevant to one’s own experience of class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. 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 last hundred years, 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 doesn’t seem to realise 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 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. At issue 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 most 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; Kennedy 2017). 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. One factor contributing to the mid nineteenth-century 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 which 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 representations that choreographers and dancers create and perform are partly determined by their individual histories and experiences. History and experience also affect the kinds of interpretations that audience members make of the dance work 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 masculine 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 hundred years trying to overcome. ‘Modern’ ideas about men’s 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 men’s 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

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 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 pulls 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 within 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 men’s 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 newly wealthy capitalist class.² 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’ (Phelan 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 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 remark: 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 men’s 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...