Feminism and Modern Dance
23-7-15
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In contemporary study on the body, dance doesn't seem to receive the same critical or philosophical attention as the fields of art, literature and cinema. Yet dance would appear to be a natural starting point. It is one of the few art forms in which feminist theory is actually embodied.
Janet Wolf proposed in her essay Reinstating Corporeality, “Since the body is clearly marginalized in Western culture, it might appear that dance is an inherently subversive activity.”
Romantic and classical ballet, rather than celebrate a real corporeality, colluded a weightless, classical ideal of ‘Woman’ as a symbol of spiritual purity. Odette in Swan Lake is a bird rather than a flesh and blood woman, for example. In contrast, Modern Dance, since its inception at the turn of the twentieth century, has predominately been viewed as a breakthrough for women. Early modern dance repudiated ballet’s fetish for other-worldly swans and sylphs, firmly planting women’s feet on the ground.
When Isadora Duncan removed her corset and danced barefoot in a Grecian tunic, in the context of her day, she was as good as nude and people revolted. For Duncan, this physical and sexual liberation was necessary for women’s’ physical, spiritual and social emancipation. Duncan designed her dances to bring into being the “new woman” . . . “the highest intelligence in the freest body.” Twenty years later, German choreographer Mary Wigman concealed the gendered body altogether in The Witch Dance to emphasize the motion and tensions of time and space. Wigman’s contemporary Martha Graham rebelled against her own puritanical upbringing by creating works that celebrated iconic embodiments of female power.
By the 1960s and 70s, worried that the ‘sexual revolution’ might not have been so liberating after all, Judson Dance Theater dance-makers Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer mirrored the sexual restraint of second-wave feminism. Many of the Judson-era choreographers struggled with the dilemma of how one could display the body in an art form that relied on physical presence, without becoming an exhibitionist or mere object for the spectator. Choreographers subvert the voyeuristic “male gaze”, demonstrating they were more than bodies by wearing unisex outfits and performing often resolutely un-sexy, austere, cerebral tasks with deliberately blank, unemotional facial expressions.
In the 1980s, the ‘natural’ body of just a decade earlier became passé. In 1981, as the world witnessed the first baby fertilized in vitro, female dancers became muscle-bound dynamos. American dancer Mollisa Fenley made the glossy pages of People Magazine as the embodiment of the new “aerobic body.” Sleek, fit, and muscular she eschewed dance classes for Nautiliaus machines, calisthenics, and running. Choreographer Elizabeth Streb also achieved substantial recognition for herphysically brutal, androgynous “equipment pieces.” Her muscle-bound male and female dancers dressed in identical unitards, dove from great heights and threw themselves against walls; the impact of their hard bodies amplified for visceral effect. This was dance that spoke its politics through direct physical risk and force.
From the beginning of her career, Chouinard shared philosophical and aesthetic concerns with other artists of the 70s and 80s feminist avant-garde. These women forged new creative territories and shared Chouinard’s interest in the complexity of embodiment; performance as ritual or sacred art; the sensuous experience of the body as the source for movement and voice; and a belief in the body as a special medium or spiritual force. Chouinard began her work as a self proclaimed Body Artist. In the 80s, ‘the body’ was a focus of growing intellectual interest both within and without feminism. Body artists of the 70s and 80s used performance as a subversive means to question and expose the construction of the body in culture, to act outside of social expectations and to release energy contained by cultural taboos. During this period she created some of the most provocative and controversial choreography of the late twentieth century.
In 1987, Chouinard created a gender-bending performance—a solo that blurred biological, social, cultural, and historical boundaries. At the time of Chouinard’s performance, mainstream gender-bending had taken hold in North American culture with a politically charged vengeance. It was not natural or organic. It was fluid, variable, and could shift or change in different contexts. Chouinard’s performance reflected the cultural zeitgeist but, even from a dance history perspective, it was provocative.
Chouinard’s work can be experienced as a liberatory feminist vision.
Today, the feminist rallying cry “The Personal is Political” has been interrogated by a post-structuralist agenda that questions the political ground of subjectivity and essentialism. As a result the public revelation of a woman’s subjective/ personal/somatic/erotic/ spiritual experience is no longer seen in itself as necessarily a political act.
However, post-structuralism also demonstrated that whether a performance is political, and what it ‘means’, depends not only on content but context: who makes it, who sees it, where and when. It embodied the feminist project to emancipate women by subverting dominate cultural ideals of ‘appropriate’ behavior for both sexes: constructing new identities, new bodies and new feminist spaces. And in asia where women's rights are often ten years behind the rest of the world... Is modern dance the answer were looking for? Is this the medium we can use to shout our beliefs and move forward as leaders in the world of art?
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