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Native Motion and Imperial Emotion: Male Performers of the “Orient” and the Politics of the Imperial Gaze

Stavros Stavrou Karayanni

in When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders

Stavros Stavrou Karayanni challenges the Orientalist notion that belly dance was historically a female performance genre through an investigation of the 19th‐century male dancers of Cairo. Analysis ... More

Stavros Stavrou Karayanni challenges the Orientalist notion that belly dance was historically a female performance genre through an investigation of the 19th‐century male dancers of Cairo. Analysis reveals the breathless hypocrisy of travelers who had an “imperial gaze” (Gustave Flaubert, Vivant Denon, Gerard de Nerval) and who lingered over the performances of highly popular male belly dance performances in 19th‐century Egypt, at the same time pronouncing them obscene and indecent. Karayanni recuperates the art of these dancing bodies, which had been erased from history by scandalized colonial writers and postcolonial subalterns. Also considered are historical male dancers, as well as their contemporary counterparts whose choreographies continue to negotiate gender, sexuality, and imperial standards of masculinity.Less

Friendship Formation among Professional Male Dancers

Katherine Polasek and Emily Roper

in Dance and Gender: An Evidence-Based Approach

The purpose of this study was to examine the formation of friendships among 12 current professional male ballet and modern dancers. In-depth semi-structured interviews regarding the nature and ... More

The purpose of this study was to examine the formation of friendships among 12 current professional male ballet and modern dancers. In-depth semi-structured interviews regarding the nature and quality of their friendships with men and women in their respective dance companies were conducted. Four emergent themes are discussed: (a) relational challenges early in life; (b) sexuality and friendship formation; (c) culture of dance; and (d) competition among male dancers. The findings provide insight into the ways in which male ballet and modern dancers connect and/or disconnect with both male and female dancers and how gender and sexuality influences social interactions and relationships.Less

Negotiating Pressures in Terms of Gender: Male Dancers and Female Style Dance

Christina Sunardi

in Stunning Males and Powerful Females: Gender and Tradition in East Javanese Dance

This chapter explores some of the ways in which male dancers who performed female style dance (or had performed female style dance prior to the author's fieldwork) have been pushing at dominant ... More

This chapter explores some of the ways in which male dancers who performed female style dance (or had performed female style dance prior to the author's fieldwork) have been pushing at dominant conceptual and physical boundaries of gender and sex by expressing, embodying, and representing male femininity in diverse ways on- and offstage. It argues that male dancers, in so doing, have been contributing to the ongoing cultural production of tradition and maintaining cultural space for males to access and make visible the magnetic power of femaleness. The ways male dancers negotiated boundaries of gender are shown through the ways they talk about various cultural pressures, indicating ways they contend with official discourses of gender.Less

Taking the Lead: The Male Dancer

Julia A. Ericksen

in Dance With Me: Ballroom Dancing and the Promise of Instant Intimacy

This chapter explores how male ballroom dancers develop a dancing identity and learn to mesh it with their sense of masculinity. More specifically, it examines how male dancers learn to create the ... More

This chapter explores how male ballroom dancers develop a dancing identity and learn to mesh it with their sense of masculinity. More specifically, it examines how male dancers learn to create the kind of emotional connection that many people see as women's work, while at the same time retaining a strong masculine and heterosexual identity. It shows that men make most of the decisions in dance; they lead, and women follow. It also considers how gay men adapt to dancing heterosexual passion or romance and argues that issues of gender and the dancing identity are different for gay men. Finally, it discusses the dancing identity of male dancers from the former Soviet bloc and the motives of single men compared to married men for learning ballroom dancing.Less

The Dancers’ Experience

Karen Eliot

in Albion's Dance: British Ballet during the Second World War

Ballet companies were created to cater to the public need for morale-boosting entertainment. The expanded performing opportunities allowed women to continue dancing and to avoid being called up for ... More

Ballet companies were created to cater to the public need for morale-boosting entertainment. The expanded performing opportunities allowed women to continue dancing and to avoid being called up for military duties or national service, a waiver most appreciated. For male ballet dancers, though, the war was sometimes a more debilitating experience, and in many cases it highlighted their estrangement from the lives of their compatriots. For men, their historically marginalized status, their elite training, and, for some, their homosexuality made fitting in with their fellow Britons in the military a reminder of the exclusive world they had left behind. The years of lost training and experience took their toll. Ballet was the war work of women. While women dancing during the war found their capacities expanded, for men, the negative effects of the war would reverberate for decades.Less

Creating Homoutopia: Féral Benga’s Body in the Matrix of Modernism

James Smalls

in Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde

This chapter recovers the legacy and the person of Senegalese dancer and model Féral Benga, who became a focus for black and white artists in the 1920s and 1930s. It addresses the manner in which ... More

This chapter recovers the legacy and the person of Senegalese dancer and model Féral Benga, who became a focus for black and white artists in the 1920s and 1930s. It addresses the manner in which visual depictions of Benga's body allowed for a combined racial and gay liberatory presence and space within the aesthetic, political and cultural dimensions of modernism's racial hierarchization and alleged closet. It argues that Benga's corporeality functioned to centre ‘blackness’ and ‘gayness’ as embodied aesthetic and political categories. As well, that body highlights the tendency within primitivism and surrealism — the two dominant modern movements in which Benga's body appears — to exploit and marginalise racial difference simultaneously. These images and the homoeroticism that informs them force a reconsideration of what is historically conceived of as avant-gardist practice.Less

At Home and at Work

Nadine Meisner

in Marius Petipa: The Emperor's Ballet Master

After a description of Petipa’s home life and six children with his new partner, Liubov Savitskaya, chapter 7 continues the previous chapter’s subject of Petipa’s aesthetic. It examines his working ... More

After a description of Petipa’s home life and six children with his new partner, Liubov Savitskaya, chapter 7 continues the previous chapter’s subject of Petipa’s aesthetic. It examines his working methods, his dance language, the importance of the ballerina’s variation and her primacy in nineteenth-century ballet, to the point that women sometimes appeared en travesti. Petipa’s principal ballerina in the 1870s was Ekaterina Vazem, made prominent not only by her own talent, but by the decision not to invite foreign ballerinas. Although less important than the ballerina, the male dancer in Russia enjoyed more prominence than in the West. Even so, he was treated differently: where ballerinas fused the two components of dance and mime, for men they were often separated, the performer specializing in one or the other. Among the ballets, Mlada and its influence on La Bayadère are considered in detail. The chapter ends with Petipa’s ballet, Night and Day, for the coronation of Alexander III, following the assassination of Alexander II.Less

Rudolf Laban’s Dance Film Projects

Susanne Franco

in New German Dance Studies

Rudolf Laban was one of the leaders of Ausdruckstanz, and he has been studied as a thoughtful writer and theoretician, a talented choreographer, an inspired teacher, and a tireless organizer of ... More

Rudolf Laban was one of the leaders of Ausdruckstanz, and he has been studied as a thoughtful writer and theoretician, a talented choreographer, an inspired teacher, and a tireless organizer of schools, associations, and festivals. Less known are his mostly unrealized film projects, conceptualized for different purposes on different occasions. This chapter considers how film offered Laban yet another arena within which to promote his distinctive vision of dance. Laban was interested in using cinema as a tool to disseminate his ideas and to expand the potential audience for modern dance, ensuring its position as a respectable social practice, as a form of high art, and as a professional field. He understood the great economic potential that cinema, as a popular medium, could give to dance in supporting his enterprises. The chapter also wonders whether Laban's apparent turn away from film in the mid-1930s reflected his engagement with the National Socialist cultural bureaucracy and the opportunities it offered for his vision of mass dance.Less

Legends and Lessons: Laura and Loipa

Toba Singer

in Fernando Alonso: The Father of Cuban Ballet

The author interviews Loipa Araujó and Laura Alonso to learn about the current application of Fernando Alonso’s method. She reports their comments back to him, and he elaborates on their remarks.