Dance

The human body as instrument means that dance is always gendered. The dichotomy between mind and body, primarily though not exclusively a Western notion, has generally privileged the mind. The Enlightenment body was the locus of emotion, not reason. The danced body, with its elaboration of human movement using repetition and redundancy to heighten the experience, has particularly antagonized those who favor the mind, and more often than not, negative perceptions have centered on sexuality. The power of the body in dance stems from two different sets of attributes: One, dance has the capacity to generate a kinesthetic response in the observer; two, embodied forms speak through a variety of voices and channels, creating multiple meanings that may be ambiguous and contradictory. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1994 [1962]) describes the human body being in the world as the heart is in the organism; in this position, the body keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive. It breathes life into it, he says, and sustains it inwardly, and with it, forms a system.

Movement has always been controversial and associated with both goodness and evil. In the medieval notion of the Great Chain of Being, light, warmth, and movement are associated with the higher orders of beings. Ordered movement takes on even greater importance in the Elizabethan concept of the Cosmic Dance. In the Inferno, the poet Dante elaborates on life and movement. He puts the most evil sinners, the traitors such as Lucifer, in the eleventh circle of hell where they are frozen immobile for all eternity. They are forever removed from those angels who are moving, dancing, and singing around a God who is a point of light in constant motion (Royce 1984). In contrast, those whose sin was one of reckless passion are fated to be blown about forever by the ceaseless winds of the second circle, out of control after death just as they were in life.

The theatrical productions of the English dramatist Ben Jonson (1572–1637) reflected his conception of movement as the disposable shell of a masque, while the poetry of the text was its abiding essence (cf. Barish 1981). He gave form to his ideas by using formal, serene, mathematically perfect movement in the masques to portray goodness and a sense of proportion and jerky, backward, unnatural movements in the anti-masques to convey the opposite.

Dance reifies movement and the body, which is its instrument. It is useful to examine the presentation and perception of gender in dance by isolating three arenas. One is the arena of formal qualities, the technique and aesthetic choices that direct which forms, out of a vast range of possibilities, represent a particular genre. A second centers on the meanings or narratives implicit or explicit in a genre or in a dance composition. The third refers to meanings and assumptions that come from the larger context, which may be as narrow as a performance or as broad as society (Royce 1987b). None of these aspects exists independent of the others, but focusing on each, then on the ways in which they interact, reveals something fundamental about how cultures regard and manipulate the body.

FORMAL QUALITIES OF DANCE

Form can usefully be divided into body, technique, and style. Most cultures and virtually all dance genres have notions about the ideal body for dance, which may or may not be the same ideal for the body generally speaking. Even in societies in which everyone is expected to dance, such as some of the Tewa pueblos in the American Southwest, the featured dancers have bodies regarded as more pleasing for the dance than the corps. They are also regarded as "better" interpreters of the ritual. There is some relationship between the attributes of the body and the technique of the genre, but it is difficult to say which way the influence goes. For example, both Cook Islands and North African Muslim women's dances focus on the pelvic area, and the ideal form to show off the movements is a womanly torso, hips, and pelvis. But while the desired body type is the same, both the technique and the context are quite different. In Cook Islands dance, women and men dance together in opposing lines, whereas North African women dance for other women and not in the presence of men. Cook Islands women swing their hips from side to side, never in a circular fashion, and their shoulders remain motionless. Moroccan women rotate their hips in a series of circles that gradually involve the whole torso.

This "womanly" body, quite distinct from its male counterpart, is far from the one demanded by twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century classical ballet in which the ideal is the androgynous or gender-neutral body. The ideal state for the ballet dancer, male or female, is as instrument, athlete, abstraction—neutered and celibate. Whereas the classic "story" ballets have clearly designated male and female roles, the more contemporary repertoire does not rely on such narratives. The technique, then, for women and men, has become less distinct. With the exception of dance en pointe and to a lesser extent, supported adagio, women and men are expected to be equally at home in most of what used to be two separate techniques.

A resistance to the androgynous, thin, long-necked and long-legged, small-headed female ballet body so beloved by George Balanchine (1904–1983) appeared in modern dance as a symbol of its total separation from ballet. Coincidentally with the acceptance of a wider range of acceptable and gendered bodies came the declaration of equal status for women dancers. The American choreographer Twyla Tharp (b. 1941), who can best be characterized as a crossover choreographer and a rebel, created a company in which there was no standard body type. Any and all shapes and sizes were accepted so long as the dancers could master the grueling technique and choreographic demands. Her company looked like a cross-section of the American public. Indeed, some of her pieces invited local audience members to participate. She would also frequently choreograph pieces for a cast of three women, only to change the cast at a later performance to three men. While the bodies were gendered, the choreography was not.

The American company Pilobolus (named for a fungus) not only has no standard body type, in its fundamental repertoire all bodies are used as building blocks for a choreographic architecture that has little or no reference to gender. In its beginning years in the 1970s, the Pilobolus creators depicted the subhuman and the fantastic, not using the body as dance normally conceives it. Their choreography denied the shape of the human body as well as the body's capabilities when used independent of other bodies. The shapes were mesmerizing but not human (Royce 1987a). As the company developed, its members began creating thematic pieces that allowed the human body to reappear, although the gendered body still remained in both form and narrative subsumed in the humanity, rather than the humanness, of the choreography. Their themes, then, are those reflecting humanity—love, conflict, sorrow, happiness, relationship—and while they are interpreted by gendered bodies, the focus does not lie with the bodies themselves.

Men's bodies have often stood for both men and women. Prior to the late seventeenth century, men danced both male and female roles in the ballets of the French court. In Kabuki theater, women's roles are played by males known as onnagata. The development of the onnagata provides an interesting commentary on the interchangeability of men and women. Kabuki in the 1600s was a popular form of theater performed by women as well as men. By 1629, the rowdiness that Kabuki seemed to generate in its audiences prompted the government to ban women from performing. Young men replaced them. People continued behaving in a scandalous manner leading the government to ban Kabuki altogether in 1652. Kabuki was "reborn" by an implied connection to N? theater, a traditional and respected form of dance-drama, and, like N?, Kabuki was exclusively male. Onnagata regard their portrayal of women as somehow archetypical; they use gestures and postures taught to geishas, including slow, sculpted, deliberate movements, hips tucked under and forward, knees slightly bent and held together, and turned-in toes. It is a codified technique that signals "woman." It does this so well that it can be referenced when actors want to signal this kind of hyperstylized feminine principle.

Lindsay Kemp used the onnagata figure in his 1974 production of Jean Genet's Notre-Dame des Fleurs (1944; Our Lady of the Flowers, 1949) in order to make the audience comprehend immediately the transvestite nature of Divine. As he made his slow way across the balcony, dressed in a long, white, close-fitting gown, Divine did so with the sliding step of the onnagata—sliding the foot forward, raising the toes up, then pointing them down again, sliding the other foot forward. His hips were tucked under, knees bent, and his head cast down and to one side (Royce 2004). The power of the female contained in Kabuki onnagata technique, posture, and style conveys itself directly and with absolute clarity. Genet, in Notre-Dame des Fleurs, speaks to the elusiveness of masculinity and femininity in everyday gesture, when he describes Divine responding to a delicate lover by trying to be more masculine: "She tried for male gestures, which are rarely the gestures of males" (Genet 1963, p. 133). Kemp relied, not on exaggeration of ordinary gestures and movement, but rather on a form that everyone knows to be emblematic of woman.

THE MEANINGS OF VARIOUS DANCE MOVEMENTS

Formal qualities of the body and the movements codified into techniques and genres have a long history of dividing peoples into civilized and other—in cultural, class, and gender terms. While there are vast cultural differences across societies in terms of which particular movements are thought to be appropriate, some fundamental qualities of movement seem to have universal resonance. Ordered, economical, redundant, and inevitable—these are all qualities associated with movement that is pleasing, that is, civilized. Disordered and cluttered movement is unpleasant and a sign of a person or culture lacking discipline and aesthetic sensibility. One of the best demonstrations of this mode of thought comes from the Renaissance courts of Italy and France where to be a member of the court—a courtier—an aristocrat depended on the unmannered grace with which one moved through life. Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) describes this in his book The Courtier when he speaks about art, mundane and otherwise: "true art which does not seem to be art; nor must one be more careful of anything than of concealing it, because if it is discovered, this robs a man of all credit and causes him to be held in slight esteem…. Art, or any intense effort, if it is disclosed, deprives everything of grace" (in Royce 2004, p. 22). Sprezzatura, or nonchalance, was his term for this essential quality of the courtier class.

In the fifteenth-century Italian court, proper grace was the key to one's social standing. The children of the court were taught this in dance lessons, but it carried across all other areas of deportment. Those who moved without grace—effortless grace—clearly did not belong to courtly society. Clumsiness in movement was also equated with spiritual failing: Movements of the body mirrored movements of the soul. If one was clumsy so was the other, and clumsiness of the soul meant corruption, vice, ugliness, and evil. A distinction was made between the clumsy, ugly dances of the peasants and the grace-filled, noble dances of the court (Nevile 2004). Court dance was elevated to its high status not only because of its formal properties and general deportment but also because of its link to intellectual and moral engagement. Properly performed and based solidly in the humanistic philosophy of the court, dance achieved salutary moral results, unlike the rude and riotous dancing of the peasant class, which was totally divorced from any philosophy whatsoever (Nevile 2004). In one sense, the activities of the court humanists of the fifteenth century can be viewed as prefigurements of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1977) and his notions of making the body docile through discipline. Dancing masters of the courts molded their pupils' bodies into graceful, virtuous, moderate symbols of an ordered universe that saw those particular qualities as a pinnacle of accomplishment and their opposites as examples of the basest forms of life.

One of the paradoxes of this division into ordered, graceful courtly dance and lewd and rowdy peasant dance was that there was always an interchange between the court and countryside, with borrowings going both ways. The most famous example is that of the waltz. This dance was originally a variant of the German and Austrian ländlers, voltas, and wellers, all fast-moving, closed-couple dances done in the countryside. Aristocratic attitudes labeled these dances as sexually explicit because of the intimacy of the closed position and the rapid turns, which were thought to excite the passions of the performers. Under its late-eighteenth-century name, the waltz became a popular dance at court where the context of its performance, the wider stance between partners, and, above all, the ordered choreography made it morally and sexually acceptable. Eventually, when it left the courts and became the property of a broader class of people, it maintained this elite image, becoming a dance that was used to mark solemn occasions such as debutante balls, graduations, and weddings. By the late nineteenth century, waltzing societies sprang up as institutions whose members pretended to high social status. The members of these societies agonized over whether or not polkas could be included, the polka never having lost its rowdy, sexually provocative image.

Another dance that has undergone similar changes of status is the tango. If anything, it has become even more highly charged in terms of sexuality. The tango originated in the lower-class sectors of Buenos Aires in the 1880s. The population of these areas was primarily composed of descendants of African slaves. The tango became a popular salon dance by the 1920s when it was danced by middle-aged and older dancers as well as by the younger set. In this form, it was considerably more subdued and less sexually overt than contemporary tango performances. From the 1940s on, the tango has been exported around the globe—to France, to Japan, to Finland—while becoming a staple of international ballroom dancing. As it traveled, the sexual aspects were exaggerated—partners were locked in tight embraces; legs snaked in and around partner's legs and body; the famous "dip" with the women bent backward, head almost to the floor became an essential feature. These are also features of the tango as it is performed in competitive ballroom dancing. This form of tango functions as a nonverbal shorthand for unbridled sexuality and passion in advertisements, in films such as Last Tango in Paris (1973), Scent of a Woman (1992), and True Lies (1994), in touring companies such as Tango Argentina, and, in an early manifestation, Rudolf Valentino's signature tangos of the 1920s.

In this exaggerated form, the tango also stood for male domination and female submission. The man directs his partner who is expected to submit and follow. As a couple, they are as alienated as the Argentine notion of mufarse—dwelling on one's inability to affect anything and the sense of exile from self and society. As Julie Taylor (1998) comments, the tango was the perfect symbol of the long civil war that Argentines experienced: "The tango did not give us any rules or a representation of anything. It gave us a space to reflect on rules, to despair or to feel our bodies recognize, sometimes with a disconcerting solace, the way things are" (pp. 84-85). During these difficult years of civil unrest when one might simply "disappear" without leaving a trace of ever having been, the citizens of Buenos Aires were drawn to milongas, underground gatherings where one could dance tangos. These milongas were banned but continued to be held as underground, illegal gatherings. In this regard, tango has become a national symbol of Argentina both for the Argentines and for the rest of the world. Argentines, according to Taylor, understand the potential of the tango for self-indulgent reflection, but it is the tango form and its responses—"related meditations on exile, identity, cultural vitality, gender, and the various forms of death" (p. 44)—that she explores.

CULTURAL NOTIONS OF DANCE

Because of the power in the elaborated, dense, and multi-vocalic form of movement that is dance and because the body is the instrument of that power, dance has been viewed across time and cultures as inherently sensual. On some occasions, dance is allowed to function in that uncontained way—fertility rites, rituals of reversal in which the proscribed becomes prescribed, shamanic practices in which the body becomes a vehicle for the gods and the shamans are possessed, rites of passage, or celebrations of marriage that mimic the sexual obligations of the partners. These opportunities are not randomly distributed; indeed, they are carefully constrained, representing marked-off spaces and time. Their use is disciplined and allows societies to recognize human sensuality and sexuality in a manner that does not disrupt community.

When societies with minimal knowledge of each other come into contact, the cultural meanings and contexts of their dances are not understood, and the dances are seen for their form alone. In this way, missionaries, reacting to the hip-swinging dances of the Cook Islanders, clothed them in Mother Hubbard outfits (form-concealing long dresses), and admonished them not to dance. Polynesian societies in general learned rather quickly that the way to retain their dances, given the presence of Christian missionaries, was to define what they did as illustrating with hand and body gestures the hymns taught them. The ring-shout dances and "patting juba" of the Africans enslaved and brought to the American South were similarly ways to maintain important modes of expression while obeying the restrictions against dance. The ring-shout was a dance done in a circle and consisted of shuffling and parallel movements of the feet that stayed close to the ground; voices provided the music. "Patting juba" was a form in which the individual made music by patting her arms and other parts of the body while chanting.

So long as their feet did not lift off the floor or cross each other, as in the ring-shout dance, so long as they did not use drums, as in "patting juba" where the body itself became the musical instrument, what they did could be considered "worship" or harmless diversion. In a wonderful example of misperceptions on the part of both societies, the English who colonized vast regions of Africa were disgusted by what they interpreted as the flagrant sexuality of the multiunit torso form of much of West African dance, while the colonized Africans viewed as lewd the colonizers' closed-couple dances, such as waltzes, in which men and women danced together in close embraces. Africans' disgust with white European dances stemmed from the fact that men and women danced together touching each other, something not ever done in African dances where men and women danced separately. Similar reactions occurred in the early-twentieth-century United States when the multiunit torso of the African Americans met the single-unit torso of the North Europeans. Dances such as the black bottom, the Charleston, the big apple, and the turkey trot initially elicited shocked reactions on the part of white society (and were banned by the Vatican), but then were adopted by the youth who were the heart of the post-World War I enthusiasm for life.

Moving from the realm of social dance to theatrical dance in the United States, one sees the same cultural notions about what dance was ordered, civilized, and proper and what was not. Not surprisingly, gender and race influenced general perceptions and the responses to them. Comparing the responses of both public and critics to the dancer-choreographers Katherine Dunham (1909–2006), Pearl Primus (1919–1994), and Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968) reveals the effect of race and related ideas of propriety. Dunham and Primus were both African-American dancers who wanted to portray the dances of Haiti and the Caribbean, in Dunham's case, and of West Africa in the case of Primus. St. Denis, a white dancer from New Jersey, created oriental-style choreographies, based loosely on Indian, Egyptian, and Japanese themes. The public welcomed her flowing white costumes and highly stylized poses as the epitome of femininity, albeit somewhat exoticized. Despite undulating arms and hips, her dances were lauded as tasteful and elegant. Dunham and Primus were criticized for the sexuality of their dances and the "primitive" nature of their costumes. At that time in American theatrical dance, African Americans were relegated to tap, the Black Broadway musicals, and caricatures of themselves in early Hollywood movies. Dunham and Primus defied these categories and were criticized for it. Interestingly, their contemporary African-American male colleagues in dance, such as Asadata Dafora (1890–1965), and later, Alvin Ailey (1931–1989), were welcomed more uncritically both as dancers and choreographers (cf. Foulkes 2002).

CONCLUSION

Dance has been banned, feared for its power, criticized for corrupting morals, embraced as the symbol of the right order of the universe, lauded for providing release and entertainment, used as a medium for connection with the spirits, and seen as necessary for the efficacy of rituals of transformation, healing, and thanksgiving—all these being responses to the rhythmic, kinesthetic-appealing, ordered elaboration of movement known as dance. There are no neutral responses, no way to avoid reacting. We are tugged along despite ourselves. When the meaning inherent in the body and the form is compounded by explicit narrative meanings, and both of these are given additional meaning by the cultural context in which dance is performed, dance becomes a language much like that of ritual or prophesy. One can like it or dislike it, but one cannot argue with it. Dance exists in the moment, in the bodies of its performers, as designs in space and time. It does with us what it wills, and therein lies its seductive power.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barish, Jonas. 1981. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon.

Foulkes, Julia L. 2002. Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Genet, Jean. 1963. Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Grove Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1994 (1962). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. New York: Routledge.

Nevile, Jennifer. 2004. The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Royce, Anya Peterson. 1984. Movement and Meaning: Creativity and Interpretation in Ballet and Mime. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Royce, Anya Peterson. 1987a. "Limits of Innovation in Dance and Mime." Semiotica 65(3-4): 269-284.

Royce, Anya Peterson. 1987b. "Masculinity and Femininity in Elaborated Movement Systems." In Masculinity/Femininity: Basic Perspectives, ed. June Machover Reinisch, Leonard A. Rosenblum, and Stephanie A. Sanders. New York: Oxford University Press.

Royce, Anya Peterson. 2004. Anthropology of the Performing Arts: Artistry, Virtuosity, and Interpretation in a Cross-Cultural Perspective. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Taylor, Julie. 1998. Paper Tangos. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

                                        Anya Peterson Royce