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http://bod.sagepub.com `Death to the Prancing Prince': Effeminacy, Sport Discourses and the Salvation of Men's Dancing
Mary Louise Adams Body Society 2005; 11; 63 DOI: 10.1177/1357034X05058020 The online version of this article can be found at: http://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/4/63
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`Death to the Prancing Prince': Effeminacy, Sport Discourses and the Salvation of Men's Dancing
MARY LOUISE ADAMS
It's not the dancers; it's the dance. In 1960, British critic Alexander Bland dubbed the men portrayed in the classical repertoire a `limp lot', tending toward `prancing princes . . . [who] rely confidently on rank, elegant legs and help from the fairies'. Bland pined for `real blood', for male characters who, `in other circumstances . . . might have been given the sheriff's badge'. He wanted danseurs to perform bold and manly roles. He wanted to imagine them talking to `Achilles or Henry V or Robin Hood in their own language'. Bland admonished choreographers to banish weak-kneed lovers from the stage and to create roles for a strong, hard, 20th-century masculinity. As a committed balletomane, Bland saw no contradiction in his prescription. Yet, in popular discourses, in both Britain and North America, the idea that male dancers could be drawn from or could portray a `two-fisted breed' (as Bland put it) had been largely inexpressible for almost a century. Presumptions of effeminacy among male dancers have been widespread since at least the late 1800s, both inside and outside the world of dance (Burt, 1995). While artistic pursuits were once seen as compatible with upper-class European
Body & Society 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 11(4): 6386 DOI: 10.1177/1357034X05058020
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and North American masculinities, they had, by the 20th century, become thoroughly feminized within all classes. Among all the arts, dance seems to have been considered especially inappropriate for men, as Carolyn Parks noted in Dance Magazine in 1953:
The American public has always looked at art in any form as suitable for its girls, but sissy for its boys . . . most shocking of all seems to be the idea that any boy should put on a pair of tights, and thus brand himself a fop. The American father howls his indignation at the thought . . . he declares he'd rather see his son dead than up on the stage cavorting with those fools . . . (1953: 42)
This is the attitude to which dance writers refer when they discuss the `problem of the male dancer'. While definitions of the problem have varied does the effeminacy lie in the dancer or the dance? there has been strong agreement about its consequences. The feminization of dance has resulted in a tremendous gender imbalance among both dancers and spectators and, following from this, limited public support for the art. Alexander Bland's intervention is just one of many that appeared in dance magazines or newspaper dance columns throughout the 20th century (for examples see: Friedman and Lansky, 1934; J. Martin, 1935; Everett, 1943; Manchester, 1950; W. Martin, 1960; Tobias, 1977; Youskevitch, 1981). In their work, dance writers have rarely defined effeminacy or the tougher versions of masculinity it is thought to counterpose a shared understanding of both categories has been assumed. Most writers on this theme have seen their task not as defending or validating effeminate characteristics but as challenging the attribution of these to male dancers. To do so, dance writers have borrowed heavily from discourses of sport and male athleticism. Sport, as many sociologists routinely point out, `is one of the most important sites of masculinizing practices' (Whitson, 1990: 28). Garry Whannel argues that it remains the most clearly gendered element of popular culture (2002: 10). Historically, the making of men has been at the centre of sport discourse. What better tool for reframing men's dance? Sport has been valorized, at least in part, because it allows men to produce hard muscular bodies that set them apart from women, bodies that are both representations of and literal repositories of male power. The similarity between the sporting body and the dancing body has been offered by dance writers as evidence of the manliness of male dancers. Male athletes are considered manly; dancers look like athletes; therefore, dancers must be manly too. In this equation, effeminacy and strength are mutually exclusive, and the shape and feel and look of bodies are seen to be key to gender identity and gender status. `True masculinity', writes Connell, `is almost always thought to proceed from men's bodies
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to be inherent in a male body or to express something about a male body' (1995: 45). The dance writers considered in this article would no doubt agree. In attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of men who dance, writers have argued that male dancers need to adopt a more athletic image, and that dance (especially ballet) needs to be recognized not only as a performing art, but also as an arena of physical exertion and toughness. Male dancers, it seems, need to advertise their bodily hardness. In this article I am concerned with discourses about men's bodies and the relationship between these and men's actual bodies. I rely on an equation in which masculinity and the male body gender and sex are mutually constitutive, socially constituted categories (Butler, 1990). I take up the material body as a cultural artifact. As Susan Bordo writes, we need to recognize the body:
. . . [as] as a cultural form that carries meaning with it . . . when we look at bodies (including our own in the mirror), we don't just see biological nature at work, but values and ideals, differences and similarities that culture has `written,' so to speak, on those bodies. (1999: 26)
Ideas about men's bodies and what they should or should not do give shape, quite literally, to the bodies in which men live. Men's bodies then become promotional devices, reinforcing those same ideas. For instance, the notion that physical flexibility is a feminine characteristic has contributed to many men living with hamstrings tighter than they would be if flexibility were considered a desirable measure of manliness. These discursively produced tight muscles then confirm visibly and physically the commonsense `fact' that it is not normal for men to be limber, and thus they make the limber male dancer seem unmanly and strange. At the risk of pushing the flexibility analogy too far, it is important to remember, as Shilling (2003) advises, that bodies are not simply discursive entities: clearly there are men whose own limberness can't be contained or overcome by even the most insistent cultural prescriptions toward muscular bulk. There are also men who, as a form of resistance to gender norms or in pursuit of physical competence and pleasure, will develop and use the whole range of their physical capacities, including those deemed to be feminine. In this latter example we see the possibility of bodies not just responding to culture, but producing it. Bodies, writes Shilling, are both `the location on which society imprints itself' and `an ongoing source of society' (2003: 206, 207). We can see both these processes at work in the historical phenomenon that is men's dance. In the discussion that follows, I look at discourses about gender, bodies and sexuality that have made possible historical understandings of the male dancer as fey. I then look at efforts to challenge this understanding, specifically at attempts to conflate dance with sport and to draw on the potential of dancers' hard bodies
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to fashion a mainstream masculinity where, popularly, it is thought not to exist. In dance writing about men, one sees the centrality of strength and physical prowess to dominant images of masculinity. As Connell writes, male bodies are thought `to drive and direct' particular (manly) types of actions, for instance, behaviours said to be rooted in `uncontrollable' male lust or in men's `natural' proclivity for aggression. To these one might add actions rooted in men's `natural' drive for physical achievement and for mastery of the body itself. This is the drive that is thought to result in the technical fireworks of men's dance. Virtuosity, as some dance critics would argue, is a product of truly male bodies (and, therefore, is rarely attributed to women). But, Connell reminds us, commonsense ideas about men's bodies stipulate not just what those bodies can do, but also what they should not or do not do. They should not, for instance, have sex with other men; they do not nurture infants (1995: 45). And, we might add, they should not participate in ballet. In their ongoing failure to take up questions of what men's bodies are not supposed to do point their toes, make sweeping movements with their arms advocates for men's dancing have colluded with dominant heterosexual discourses, and thus they have had only partial success in their attempts to reframe popular perceptions of men's dancing. Athleticism and muscularity were to have brought male dancers mainstream acceptance and respect. That they have yet to do so at any but the most elite levels tells us a lot about the importance of the context in which bodies appear and move, about the limits of masculinity and about the complexity of gender as an embodied identity. Dance: No Place for a Man? What is it that makes so many men nervous about dancing watching it or doing it? The biographies of male dancers, including Rudolf Nureyev's (Stewart, 1995), are littered with stories of fathers troubled by their sons' interest in dance. Young Billy Elliotts, prepared to defy family and friends for their love of dance, remain the exception and not the rule. Artistic and sporting pursuits exist at opposite ends of a masculine continuum. While sport tends to confirm the gender and sexual identities of boys and men, art opens these to question. As musicologist Philip Brett has put it, `All musicians, we must remember, are faggots in the parlance of the male locker room' (1994: 18). Stereotypes of the gay artist/dancer/musician remain widespread; in North America almost nothing marks a man or a boy as effeminate like an interest in the arts and hence any male who wants to appear straight shuns them. Among the 90 students enrolled in the dance programme at the Etobicoke School of the Arts (a public secondary school
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in Toronto) in 2001, only seven were boys. That same year, a well-known private dance school in Toronto counted only seven boys among its 330 students; apparently none were enrolled by their fathers. Another Toronto school offers a year's free tuition to get boys through the door.1 The late Tom Waddell, an American Olympic decathlete and founder of the Gay Games, began studying ballet at the age of 17:
. . . something became obvious to me right away that male ballet dancers were effeminate, that they were what most people would describe as faggots. And I thought I just couldn't handle that. It suddenly occurred to me that this was real dangerous territory for me I'm from a small town and I was totally closeted and very concerned about being male. . . . I realized I had to do something to protect my image of myself as a male . . . so I threw myself into athletics. . . . I wanted to be viewed as male, otherwise I would be a dancer today. (cited in Messner and Sabo, 1994: 114)
Some of the nervousness about men and boys dancing is about the context in which they do it surrounded by girls, often taught by women. The more significant concern is with what they actually do. Male dancers challenge expectations of how men should use their bodies. Dancers stretch, they hold themselves erect, they use the body not for its own sake, nor to demonstrate its capabilities and `improveability', as sports typically do, but to express feelings, including desire. As Brett writes about music:
Nonverbal, even when linked to words, physically arousing in its function as initiator of dance, and resisting attempts to endow it with, or discern in it, precise meaning, it represents that part of our culture which is constructed as feminine and therefore dangerous. (1994: 12)
Dancers, like musicians, are feminized by masculine ideals that prioritize emotional restraint, rational thought and instrumental corporealities ideals that are at the root of modern sport. It's no wonder, then, that advocates for men's dancing have tried to emphasize the athleticism of male dancers, rather than their artistic or expressive accomplishments. Not only does the male dancer express feelings in public, more unmanly than this, he puts his body on display. `Women may dread being surveyed harshly', writes Susan Bordo. They may dread `being seen as too old, too fat, too flatchested but men are not supposed to enjoy being surveyed period. It's feminine to be on display' (1999: 173). As a generation of feminist art and film critics have pointed out, Western cultures have been more likely to display women's than men's bodies. Moreover, when displayed, women's bodies have been more likely than men's to be presented explicitly as objects of the gaze, maintaining the stereotypical active/passive and masculine/feminine binaries of heterosexuality although such representational strategies are changing, as evidenced by new forms of advertising and music video, and by the popularity of television
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make-over programmes like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and magazines like Men's Health or Men's Fitness (Alexander, 2003). In his book, Hard Looks, Sean Nixon (1996) documents a significant shift in representations of male bodies that occurred in the late 1980s as a result of changing commercial practices in the retail fashion industry and in mainstream magazine publishing. In an attempt to expand consumer markets, these industries developed and promoted a new category of male consumer that came to be known as the `new man'. The new man was a fellow concerned with image and style, a reader of glossy male fashion magazines. He was represented in advertisements by models who were clearly meant to be looked at by other men, both gay and straight. In these advertisements, men were explicitly represented as the object of the gaze. They were not playing golf nor washing the car or steering the yacht. They were not oblivious to their audience. They were, therefore, not like their predecessors. While the status of these models as objects marked a substantial shift in forms of masculine representation, Nixon argues that we shouldn't take this publishing trend to suggest that bodily conventions changed for the average man on the street. Indeed, even the publishing industry quickly grew shy of their own sexually ambivalent (because of being looked at) creation and the heyday of the `new man' was short-lived. By the early 1990s, publishers of men's fashion magazines had already begun to reduce the ambivalent sexuality in their imagery, to reframe the meanings that could be made of their models. It wasn't long before `new men' were replaced by `new lads', representatives of a more clearly coded heterosexual masculinity. The gaze towards these men, says Nixon, was tempered by their heterosexual positioning in relation to women and to signifiers that marked them as well within the bounds of dominant masculinity (1996: 206). Of course the new man was off the scene for only a short while his utility to marketers being too great to pass up. Present-day images of men in popular culture represent a whole range of masculine categories, from the new man's offspring to the most traditional patriarch, the various groupings representing distinct markets in a culture where identities are increasingly based on consumptive practices. But again, following Nixon, it is important not to confuse representational strategies with the everyday practices of men on the street. The whole premise of a show like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is that it remains outside the norm for heterosexual `guys' to be concerned about their own appearance or the appearance of other men to be so concerned, that is, to admit to looking or to being looked at, is gay. The look at another can be both a privilege and an instrument of power, potentially a tool of mastery and degradation. Television critic Margaret Morse (1983) has written that the strong cultural inhibition against `the look' at the male
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body has been rooted in a reluctance to turn the male body into an object of desire, particularly into an object of homosexual desire. Steve Neale makes a similar argument in a discussion of men in mainstream cinema: any `erotic elements involved in the relations between the spectator and the male image have constantly to be repressed and disavowed' (1983: 15). Garry Whannel claims that the `cultures of hardness' that are pervasive in sport are a consequence of this disavowal. The `muscular invulnerability' (2002: 69) that many male athletes aspire to is, at least in part, a way to `preserve fragile [sexual] barriers and to police heterosexual masculinity (2002: 68). Morse says that a strategy used by sports broadcasters who design programming for a predominantly male audience to counteract the potentially homoerotic look at the male athlete is to focus on statistical and technical details. Viewers are invited to engage with the male bodies on their screens not as objects of desire but as exemplars of human physical potential (1983: 4466). While it is not within broadcasters' power to determine the way viewers actually take up the images on their TV screens where you might see a statistic in action, I might see a terrifically sexy body such attempts to frame what we see are pervasive in televised sports. In dance there is no broadcaster or journalist available to interrupt or to reframe the variety of meanings spectators may make of the dancer. Left to their own interpretive frameworks, spectators might very well end up looking at bodies and not at technique. What might it mean for a man to subject himself to the gaze of women? What might it mean for a man to invite the gaze of other men? What might it mean for male spectators to watch men perform, particularly when they are engaged in an activity popularly seen to be effeminate or gay (in part because of the performance)? The potential for homoerotism in the relationship between the male spectator and the male dancer certainly plays some part in the reluctance of many straight men to attend dance performances, and in the reluctance of men and boys to participate in dance. Dancer Igor Youskevitch writes:
. . . a male ballet dancer should strive to create a `role' in everything he dances. The concentration on purely dance steps may compel a male dancer to display his body as a principal goal of his dance which would move him dangerously close to a female interpretation. (1981: 91)
To the non-dancer, the distinction made by Youskevitch is a rather fine one. Were the average North American ever to see a live dance performance, their first response would likely be less about men's roles than about their tights and the taut trained bodies the tights are designed to reveal. Unlike speed skaters, or runners or swimmers, who also wear revealing clothing, dancers' costumes are designed expressly to show off the bodies within them. The display of the
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dancer's body is not a consequence of something else for instance, a competitive need for an aerodynamic profile it is intentional, an end in itself, and much of the point of the whole performance, despite Youskevitch's suggestion to the contrary. `For the public at large that sees a performer in leotard and tights', says American choreographer Bill T. Jones, `dance is about display and seduction. And most believe men should be watching it, not doing it' (cited in Laine, 1985: 23). Dance historian Ramsay Burt has argued that, in a cultural situation `in which it [has] seemed "natural" not to look at the male body', it has also been `problematic and conflictual for men to enjoy looking at dancing' (1995: 13). By corollary, it has seemed somewhat transgressive and odd for men to dance on stage. It wasn't always so. Expectations for appropriate forms of gendered behaviour change historically. From the history of ballet we can see clearly that the meanings ascribed to men's public deportment and to male movement have changed profoundly since the 1700s, when, for instance, ballets were performed in Italy by all-male dance groups. In France, during the same era, the king himself initiated and performed dances before the court. According to Burt, prejudices against European male dancing did not arise until the 19th century (1995: 10). With the invention of the strengthened pointe shoe (used only by women), female dancers appeared weightless and other-worldly. Cast as ethereal creatures in narratives shaped by 19th-century Romanticism, women came to define the feel and potential of the balletic imagination; they became the ballet's main stars. Female dancers became objects of desire for male spectators and, thus, male dancers `seemed hardly necessary, and even unnatural' (Bland and Percival, 1984: 10) they got in the way of the male spectators' enjoyment. Men on stage were seen as `mere attendants, sturdy but dull, perambulating pedestals for the display of the ballerinas' charms. . . . The new fashion resulted in the eclipse of male dancing for a hundred years' (Bland and Percival, 1984: 1213). By the late 1800s, men had become so marginalized that some theatres were casting women en travesti to perform male roles. As dance came to be seen as a feminine art, prejudices grew up around male dancers. Burt argues that these prejudices initially had nothing to do with homosexuality or effeminacy, as they do now, rather they were rooted in class difference during a period when bourgeois norms were gaining prominence. What was at stake with male dance performances was `the development of modern, middleclass attitudes towards the male body and the expressive aspects of male social behaviour' (Burt, 1995: 12). Criticism addressed toward male dancers focused on the inappropriateness of bourgeois men allowing their bodies to be put on display, of allowing their bodies to give visible meaning to feelings. Moreover,
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while their physical strength made male dancers seem akin to working-class men, their costumes and their lack of regard for middle-class norms aligned them with `the degenerate style of the old aristocracy' (1995: 25). In either case, Burt writes, it was `the inability of the male ballet dancer to represent the power and status of men in bourgeois society which was proposed by one nineteenth-century writer as being the trouble with the male dancer' (1995: 24). In mid to late 19th-century Britain, the playing fields and sports clubs frequented by middle- and upper-class boys and men were one of the primary sites for the consolidation of male bourgeois power and status (see Mangan, 1981). By the turn of the 20th century, the British model of men's sports had been exported to Europe and North America, as well as to British colonies around the world. Proponents of sport argued that, without harsh exercise and intense competition against other males, a boy might grow languid and effete. Sports and games were the antithesis of dance; in these activities boys and young men learned how to conceal and subdue emotion, to become tough and strong. They engaged with other males. They learned to use their bodies instrumentally rather than expressively. The effort and discipline of team sports were meant to forge men who would be appropriate representatives of their class; they would meet the exigencies of Empire and never be overshadowed by women or by men lesser than themselves. In the late 1800s, sport was strongly promoted as a means of preventing effeminacy among schoolboys and in the culture at large. For instance, in a lecture on manliness given at the London YMCA in 1857, the Reverend Hugh Stowell counselled boys not to become brutal, effeminate or demoralized. He itemized a list of manly sports and exercises explicitly precluding dance which, he said, could `scarcely be pronounced manly' that would bring to young men `bodily hardiness' (Brown, 1857). The effeminacy at issue here was not the same effeminacy mocked in present-day sitcoms. Stowell's worry was not that boys were finding their way into each other's beds, but that they were too soft and too weak and that they spent too much time in the company of women. Sports would cure both afflictions. Joseph Bristow (1995) and Alan Sinfield (1994) have each written about the evolution of effeminacy as a concept. Sinfield argues that before the trials of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s, effeminacy was more likely to be seen as a sign of excessive leisure and luxury, or as a sign of a man being overly fond of women (including in the sexual sense), than as a sign of homophilic attraction. But in the extensive coverage of his trials, Wilde's effeminate aesthetic and behaviour, and his homosexuality, were conflated. Once Wilde became the public homosexual in Britain and in many parts of Europe and North America, effeminacy came to be `the main stigma attached to male homosexuality'. This is the version of
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effeminacy that keeps present-day fathers from registering their sons in ballet class and that determines the overwhelming femaleness of ballet audiences. So how was it that this now familiar version of effeminacy came to be linked to dance? It was not until the early years of the 20th century, with the arrival of Serge Diaghilev's Ballet Russes in the West, that the problem of the male dancer became an effeminacy that led to presumptions about his homosexuality. Diaghilev re-introduced men to the Western ballet audience. But while the traditional Russian repertoire featured princely roles and emphasized masculine strength, this was not the repertoire performed by the Ballet Russes. The men of Diaghilev's company represented a much broader range of masculine identities. According to dance historian Lynn Garafola, they `traced a spectrum of male roles that transcended conventions of gender while presenting the male body in a way that was frankly erotic. Ballet after ballet celebrated its physique, dramatized its athletic prowess, and paraded its sexual availability' (1999: 246). Diaghilev reversed the trend of the feminized ballet, promoting the men in his company at the expense of the women. In his productions, men were the stars. Some of them, including Vaslav Nijinsky, were also his lovers. Garafola writes that before Diaghilev there may well have been individual dancers who were homosexual, and there may have been homosexuals in the ballet audience, but ideologically and socially ballet itself remained heterosexual. Diaghilev's work changed that:
. . . ballet in Western Europe, no less than in America, became a privileged arena for homosexuals as performers, choreographers, and spectators. It was a feat unparalleled in the other arts, and for gay men (to use a modern term) it was a revolution. (1999: 2467)
But, as with the successful creation of gay cultural spaces later in the 20th century, the visibility that would have been a draw and an invitation to some men, would likely have been for others, perhaps in greater numbers, a source of fear. Although dance has provided a home for many gay men, there have certainly been others who have shunned it, not wanting the exposure that might come with association. While the visibility of Diaghilev and his lovers did much to make possible the equating of dance with effeminacy and homosexuality, the equation depended on more than this. Prior to the first decades of the 20th century, such an equation would have made little cultural sense it could not until (a) homosexuality existed as a popular concept and (b) it was linked conceptually to effeminacy. As historians of sexuality have repeatedly pointed out, the notion that humans have essential sexual identities that shape our individual capacities is a modern one, only put into circulation toward the end of the 1800s (Weeks, 1989). The notion
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didn't work its way into popular discourses until well into the 20th century. In earlier times, same-sex acts were seen as sinful activities that anyone might engage in, much the same as adultery. Once again it was the trials of Oscar Wilde that helped to spread the idea, at least in Britain, that the homosexual (and, conversely, the heterosexual) is a particular type person, and that homosexuality is more than a simple case of who one might choose as a bedfellow. Wilde's mannerisms, his dandyish style of dress, his aesthetic interests, his effete demeanour, came to be read as marks of homosexual inclination. His effeminate version of masculinity was no longer understood to be a cultural, political or aesthetic choice, but a physical mark of his homosexuality. Effeminate behaviour came to be seen as the male body's way of displaying the homosexuality lodged within it, of displaying an abnormal constitution. Ironically, the performer who did the most to elevate the status of the male dancer also contributed the most to the link between effeminacy and male dancing in popular commentary. The great Vaslav Nijinsky was a huge star, despite being described by critics as both androgynous and feminine. His dancing was said to be erotic and feline. In their book, Men Dancing, Alexander Bland and John Percival refer to him, with obvious regret, as `notably unmasculine'. His body was not suited to the traditional aristocratic male roles and he was unconcerned with the bravura performances and technical proficiency audiences would eventually come to expect from men. Instead, Nijinsky was obsessed with developing his body as an `expressive instrument' (1984: 103). A spellbinding performer, Nijinsky drew tremendous crowds, including many people who were new to ballet. Some critics were able to accept Nijinsky's unorthodox performances and unmanly eroticism by labelling him a genius. For others, particularly in the United States, his emotional, seductive style of dancing was altogether too feminine and his `effeminate quality' came to be seen as `almost inseparable from the male Ballet dancer' (Studlar, 1995: 110). In the post-Nijinsky era, many male dancers have spent their careers trying to construct for themselves an image more manly than his. As numerous writers have pointed out, this task has often resulted in a `macho overcompensation', as men have tried to prove just how tough ballet is, or how similar dance is to sport (see Acocella, 1985; Burt, 1995). In their efforts to cast a new image for themselves, many dancers have turned to mainstream discourses linking sport and manliness the very discourses by which they were marginalized in the first place. They have tried to manipulate signifiers of dominant masculinity athletic prowess and bodily hardness as a means of destigmatizing men's dance.
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Ted Shawn and the Athletic Male Dancer The man most often associated with efforts to masculinize the image of the male dancer is American Ted Shawn, founder in 1933 of the first all-male dance company in the United States. More than anyone else, Shawn tried to dissolve the boundary between his art and sport in a bid to bring respect to male dancers. Shawn studied and taught with, and eventually married, Ruth St Denis, one of the pioneering women of American modern dance. After their separation in 1931 caused, at least in part, by both of them falling in love with the same man (Foulkes, 2001) Shawn focused his energies on promoting dance for men. He began to offer dance classes to male physical education students at Springfield College in Massachusetts. It was from these students that he recruited the athletic young men who would form his new company, eventually known as Ted Shawn and His Male Dancers. Between 1933 and 1940, the company gave 1250 performances in 750 cities. The main goal for the company was to raise the status of men's dancing in the United States, to eliminate the kind of opposition that had greeted Shawn's own decision to dance in the 1910s: `I wanted to try to sell the public . . . on the legitimacy of dancing as a serious career for men. It was considered to be an effeminate, trivial, and unworthy occupation for the strapping and well-muscled male' (cited in Barnes, 1991: 106). In Shawn's many essays, he blamed the widespread presumption of effeminacy in dance on two things: first, a misunderstanding of the importance of dance and art in American culture; second, a failure to choreograph specifically for the `natural' qualities of the male body. In other cultures, Shawn claimed, dance was an important, and therefore male, activity in which women simply clapped accompaniment or sang along (1926: 878). He hoped to re-establish male dominance in modern Western dance and, while he did not explicitly acknowledge the detrimental consequences of this for women dancers, he made it clear that their proper place was in a lesser role. `Men have always done the big things, the important things in life, being quite willing to let the embroideries and ornamentations be the work of women.' And so it will be in dance, he wrote, when it is once again considered an opportunity for great artistic expression (1926: 93). In his misogynist view, dance could never reach that position as long as women were in the forefront. Shawn strongly believed that there are natural, fundamental differences in male and female movement. He writes:
. . . if we can get these specific qualities of masculine and feminine movement separated, it will be like breaking up white light into the colours of the spectrum. . . . We shall then be able to split up our orchestra of dancers the percussion and brass for the men and the woodwind
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and strings for the women, each sex contributing a different but complementary quality of movement to the enrichment of the art of the dance as a whole. (1974: 123)
He thought that a healthy respect for sex differences would make the virility of men's dance obvious to the American public, and thus make it easier for men to watch do. and Men, Shawn writes, make big movements; women make small movements. Men use their whole bodies. Their arm movements `are a continuation of the body movement, as for example, the movement of a man using a scythe'. Women's movements are smaller, they use `a great deal of arm and wrist movements of a small range . . . the little, fluttery movements of the wrist and hands are legitimately a woman's movement'. Shawn described men's movements as `positive, aggressive, forceful, definite, explicit'. Women's movements, by contrast, are `tender, protective, conservative, conciliatory, delicate and tentative' (1974: 118). On posture, he writes, `The man's stance is the forward thrust, the woman's the concave receptivity' (1974: 119). The point is that differently shaped bodies are supposed to make have the capacity to make different kinds of movement. The music these bodies dance to should reflect these differences. Appropriately masculine music is defined by a rhythmic rather than a melodic stress. It should be written with a time signature of 4/4 or 2/4 to emphasize men's big steps and movements. It should be slow and heavy, marked `forte', and written in a major key, with `abrupt and rough' phrasing. Women's music, by contrast, should stress the melodic line. It should have a 3/4, 3/8 or 6/8 time signature to highlight women's less weighty movements. It should be light and fast, marked `piano', and written in a minor key, with legato phrasing (1974: 121). Are certain movements or styles of movement masculine or feminine? Does it matter if an arabesque is performed by a man or a woman? Certainly other writers, since Shawn, have agreed with him that they are and it does. An article from the 1950 edition of the British Ballet Annual worries that boys with female teachers might develop a female rather than a male elegance (Manchester, 1950: 99). On the one hand the assumption is that gender difference is natural, but on the other hand, there is a fear, in the case of men especially, that it is not as fixed as it could be. In the mid-1970s, Russian teacher Nikolai Tarasov pressed the same point when he cautioned that boys must be taught so that they don't develop `that gracefulness so welcome in girls, and so unwelcome in males' (1985: 68). Yet, Tarasov also claimed that male and female styles of movement are distinct and inherently different. Surely if that were the case, there could be no fear of boys developing feminine characteristics? Tarasov writes: `With boys, the movement has more resolve, physical force, simplicity, terseness and vigor in
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performance. If a boy and a girl execute an identical turn of the head, the boy will do it with more definite resoluteness than will the girl' (1985: 68). Is this a natural tendency or something that boys must be taught? Tarasov seems to suggest that it is both and, therefore, he recommends that boys not be taught by women. Ted Shawn made similar arguments, claiming, on the one hand, that gender differences in styles of movement were natural, and, on the other, that men and women should follow separate training regimes to make sure that the men did not develop an effeminate style, full of soft, pretty movements instead of vital and dynamic ones (1974: 117). In separate classes, writes Tobi Tobias, a New York Times critic, men can focus on jumps those all-important signifiers of masculinity while women and girls can focus on `fluidity and finesse of line' (1977). Is the point to create gender difference or to work with it? Many contemporary dance companies, especially ballet companies but others as well, continue to train men and women separately. Not simply because men and women are expected to perform and therefore need to learn different techniques, but because these techniques and the images the dancers present depend on the development of obviously different kinds of bodies. Men, for instance, are regularly expected to train with weights to build their upper bodies. Their bare chiselled torsos are now a regular feature of dance company advertising. Of course, the same upper body development is not demanded of women, indeed in many cases it would be forbidden too many arm, shoulder or back muscles would spoil the required look. In a 1988 interview, feminist choreographer Johanna Boyce talks about the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dance company, saying that she finds the women in the company masculinized by the kind of strength they are trained to develop: `I feel that Bill and Arnie have asked them to develop certain musculatures that you don't see so much in women's normal dance repertory. And that's predominantly the arm work . . .' Although Boyce admits that gendered styles of movement are not natural but learned social phenomena, one gets the sense that she doesn't quite approve (Boyce et al., 1988: 98). Why label something that is obviously within women's capabilities the development of upper body strength as masculine? Choreography reinforces this notion that there are specifically male and female styles of movement. If a choreographer believes that male and female styles of movement are inherently different, then she or he will design for each sex different steps, which, of course, will reinforce the original notion. Shawn, for instance, claimed that one had to respect the limitations imposed by male and female bodies: `Never under any circumstances should I require either sex to project through themselves the movement quality of the other sex' (1974: 119). How does one project `sex' qualities through movement? The usual conventions
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for men are to emphasize weight, muscle, hardness. Men are supposed to sink into the floor while women float over it. Men use diagonals to cover space while women more frequently perform from a single position on the stage. Men's dancing is expected to be more explosive, more powerful, more aggressive. And if the choreographer is concerned with such things, it will be. Definitions of maleness change over time, and styles of male movement and male body development change with them. Dancer Bruce Marks, who performed with both the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and with the American Ballet Theatre, says that in the mid-1950s, the differences between men's and women's technique was very pronounced:
For instance, for a man to lift his leg higher than hip level in extension just wasn't done. A man's leg was to be kept at a forty-five degree angle. And men were not to stretch. . . . Men's legs now go up very easily in a stretch. There was no one who could do a split on the wall like Misha [Baryshnikov] does, when I started studying ballet no men. None of them wanted to. The first year I danced, I remember Pierre Lacotte came from the Paris Opera and stretched constantly. I had never seen a man so stretched; it was considered taboo. We made fun of French male dancers for that. They were considered effete because they were looking for a kind of line that was forbidden to us as men. (cited in Hanna, 1988: 171)
As the French dancer violated the movement norms of the American dancers, so American dancers violate the movement norms of men on the street, and this is key to the presumption of their effeminacy. Gender is about limits, about not having a free range to act or look or behave in any manner whatsoever and male dancers seem to push against those limits by, for instance, being flexible. Choreographers concerned about staying within the bounds of appropriate gender norms have tried to close the gap between the capabilities of dancers and the everyday movements of non-dancing men, as we can see in the example given by Bruce Marks, above. Marks was taught a certain way of moving or, rather, of not moving that would minimize the difference between dancers and other men. Ted Shawn's approach was even more direct. He borrowed movements from non-dancing men, especially from men's work, and men's sports. Moreover, he choreographed pieces that were explicitly about men's work and men's sports. Shawn's was a perfectly binary view of gender that corresponded with the prevailing attitudes of his time. But even he knew that it wasn't enough simply to define an acceptable range of movements for male dancing; without shifting the context of those moving bodies, they could still be pegged as effeminate. Strongly influenced by the Muscular Christianity movement, his goal was to see dance move from the proscenium to the gymnasium. To speed along the transition, Shawn's own company was made up of experienced athletes who were trained by him to be dancers. His goal was for dance to `reach again the position it held among the Greeks as the most perfect athletic accomplishment, and the
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finest means of physical training' (1926: 97). Shawn wanted dance to be read through a sports discourse, indeed he wanted it to be seen as a sport. And to achieve that end, he so scaled down the range of what a male body might do, the themes it might address and the kinds of emotions a man might express publicly he was fond of aggressiveness, competitiveness, the emotions of warriors that his work did generate a certain respect for male dance (Burt, 1995: 108). Shawn said that he wanted to remove the taint of effeminacy from male dancing, to reassure American men that dancing was not just for homosexuals. The irony is that Shawn and many of his dancers were homosexual. What they really needed was some way of expanding the limits on how men could look and move and express themselves, and on their choice of sexual partners, and they needed the metonymic link between these to be broken. In other cultures, in other times Shawn was particularly attracted to ancient Greece where men did sports and danced and got to have sex with other males acceptable forms of masculinity had room for homoeroticism and for men to be artistic (for excellent discussions of Shawn's views on sexuality see Foster, 2001; Foulkes, 2001). In Shawn's pre-Second World War United States, standards of masculinity were tightening. The rise of office work, an increasingly corporate (as opposed to entrepreneurial) culture, and the perceived softness of urban life, had led to fears that the American male was being emasculated. In this context a no-nonsense, unquestionable toughness was becoming the preferred mark of manliness. At the same time, the increasing influence of psychoanalytic theories meant that what we now call sexual orientation was coming to be seen as a critical aspect of gender identity. Furthermore, sexual object choice rather than gender inversion was coming to be key to the definition of homosexuality. No matter how tough he was, a man who chose to have sex with other men could not rightly be seen as manly (as he once could have been). There was no possibility for same-sex behaviour to be acceptable, even if done by the most macho of men. Indeed, gender ideologies suggested, quite simply, that such behaviour was precluded by machoness, a fact Shawn hoped to turn to the advantage of his company. Athleticism would work as a protective closet for him and for his dancers. Are Dancers Athletes? Does it Matter? Throughout the 20th century the dancer-as-athlete theme remained popular in attempts to legitimize men's dancing, drawing on popular assumptions that athletic men and effeminate men are mutually exclusive categories. `See, we're just as tough as those other guys' is the tone the argument takes. The hope is that physical prowess will be enough to win the respect of, and perhaps even some
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converts from, regular guys and their sons. If dads could only see how hard dance is, they might allow their sons to take lessons. At the very least, this argument makes clear the power of sport discourse as a means of understanding and defining masculinity. Of course, the comparison is limited by the matter of context. While it is true that sports are created from particular kinds of physical activities, it is the meanings we give to these activities that make them into sports. Sport is very much about the context in which bodies move. As Toronto sports journalist Jim Proudfoot once said of synchronized swimming, if it `were a legitimate sport . . . there'd be a men's division' (1992). Gene Kelly's 1958 television special, Dancing is a Man's Game, is probably the most famous piece of evidence for the dancers-are-athletes-too argument. As the show opens we see well-known male athletes exercising in a gym. Mickey Mantle slides towards a base. Sugar Ray Robinson punches a bag. Tennis player Vic Seixas hits a few balls. Football player Johnny Unitas warms up his throwing arm. Kelly's goal is not simply to show that dancers are as tough as athletes, but to show the similarities between popular sports and dance. All of these men, he tells the audience, have something in common: `skill in physical movement and more important than that, physical movement in rhythm . . . each must discipline his body and keep it firmly at his command to react the way he wants it to'. Dancers, he says, use the same movements athletes do, they simply extend them and exaggerate them `for artistic effect'. Of course, the artistic effects in dance are exactly what make it seem effeminate to many North American men. One only strives for artistic effect if one wants to be watched. While a baseball player or football player may momentarily look beautiful as he hangs in mid-air, poised to catch a ball, beauty is not his stated intention, being on display is not assumed to be his goal however much it may be the case, however much he might enjoy it winning is. As Susan Bordo puts it, `men may display their beauty only if it is an unavoidable side effect of other "business"' (1999: 198). The beauty that sometimes arises in sports is (usually) a pleasant consequence of good technique. But, if a clumsy, awkward-looking throw would have sent the ball further down the field, then that is how Johnny Unitas would have thrown it. Kelly asks each athlete to perform a typical movement from his sport and then Kelly and a group of male dancers repeat the movement to music. With his shirt untucked the famous dancer means to look like a regular guy, but the precision of his movements, the exactness of his posture, the control he is able to exert over every part of his body constitutes a tremendous difference between his performance and those of the athletes. His consciousness of his whole body sets him apart. Where Kelly hopes to demonstrate similarity, the viewer sees difference. Kelly tries to make ballet more guy-friendly by relating it to fencing and to a
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time `when men were fighting for their lives'. He explains that dancers wear tights so that we can see their line, just as divers and gymnasts wear uniforms to reveal their forms too. He eventually goes on to show the way that American styles of theatre dance have developed, emphasizing the point that because they are not foreign imports, they are appropriate for rugged American men. In these examples one can read the concerns he is addressing: ballet is for sissies, tights are inappropriately revealing for men, dance is just for effete foreigners. Dance Magazine gave the show a thumbs-up review (Barzel, 1959). In the United States, in the 1960s and 1970s, efforts to present an athletic image of male dancers were helped enormously by Jacques D'Amboise and Edward Villella, soloists with the New York City Ballet, vocal heterosexuals, and keen promoters of male dancing as athletic and virile. Writing in the Village Voice, Joan Ross Acocella calls Edward Villella `Exhibit A for the case that dance is a form of athletics and that male dancers are therefore not (as one piece baldly puts it) "mostly sissies and queers," but real men' (1985: 79). Villella had appeared in Gene Kelly's television special. Later he went on to star in one of his own with an identical theme. He was the subject of feature articles in magazines and newspapers, including a prominent one in Sports Illustrated called `Encounter with an Athlete' (Kram, 1971). The 1971 article talks about the conversion of author Mark Kram, a sports fan who had grown up in a working-class `waterfront' neighbourhood, to a fan of ballet. Villella was key to the transformation:
I had never seen such sheer human force generated before, never seen the physicality of a body expressed so completely as it was done by Edward Villella. For 40 straight relentless minutes, he used every muscle, every fiber in his small body, leaping (at times over six feet), jumping, twisting, running, all of it with a constancy of grace and control that in sport is seen only in fragments. (1971: 96)
Kram was awed, and rightly so, but still, he knew Villella's physical proficiency on its own could not win over Sports Illustrated readers. His profile of the dancer includes a string of cues to help us see Villella as a normal guy. For their first interview, Villella opens the door with a beer in his hand. His face is, apparently, not pretty. He talks about an upcoming AliFrazier fight. He confronts the issue of homosexuality head on, confirming his heterosexuality. He tells of his athletic history, of his $100,000 a year salary, of the effort it takes to complete a performance, of the fatigue and the injuries. The underlying subtext: see how normal, how tough and successful, how straight he is? Kram's narrative strategy is meant to make it okay for men to watch dance and okay for men who want to dance themselves. It is also a means of protecting those men already involved: straight men, of course, and gay men who might
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benefit from being closeted. And while I doubt it was Kram's intention, articles like his help to protect the institution of ballet itself. But there is a trap in focusing only on a well-known, well-paid performer like Villella. His story is so text-book perfect former working-class boxing champion and military academy graduate, turned star dancer that he can easily be seen as an exception. Indeed, he is an exception. A number of educational videos from the 1980s try to make dance more palatable and accessible to boys without focusing on male stars. One of the tapes relies on comparisons with sport to make dance seem less outside the experience of ordinary young men (Wide World of Sports and Dance, 1984). A rehearsal is just like a team practice. The leader of a dance company is just like a coach. Dancers, like athletes, train every day and they warm-up before they practise. Dancers, like pole vaulters and gymnasts, need balance. Dancers, like soccer and basketball players, use their feet. Dancers, like wrestlers and gymnasts, need flexibility. Dancers, like members of other teams, work together. Choreographed dances are almost like games. Some of the dancers in the video wear track-suits, and when they perform together they wear white gym shorts. There is some mention of dancers trying to communicate or express something through their movement, but it's brief. Obscuring even further the fact that dance is a performing art, some advocates for men's dance have argued that dance classes are best promoted as a means of helping boys excel in other sports. But the question remains: what happens when a boy arrives in his dance class to find that there are quite a few differences between dancing and his favourite team sport? The music, the clothes, the expressiveness, the not-so-sportlike movements? The artistic context? When Ted Shawn taught dance to male physical education students at Springfield College in the 1930s he did everything he could to minimize these differences. He wanted both to impress and to exhaust the students with physically taxing exercises. He emphasized sportlike movements and provided choreography well within the bounds of acceptable masculine behaviour. By his own account, the strategy worked. More recent writers, even those with an awareness of gender politics and a good understanding of the prejudices that keep boys from dancing, talk about the need to use sports in some way to get boys interested in dance. Recognizing that it will take more than the efforts of dance teachers to reconfigure deeply entrenched gender expectations, John Crawford writes, `The challenge is to structure movement experiences that create a sense of gender identity without enforcing rigid stereotypes.' In a culture where normative gender identities are based on rigid binary stereotypes, one wonders how this might be possible. But Crawford continues:
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Speed, power, and scale of movement should be chosen to reflect boys' interests as well as girls'. . . . Boys can be challenged to jump higher, shift weight faster, move bigger and balance longer in dance experiences as well as sports activity. (1994: 42)
So, while boys and girls might learn similar movements, when read, as they inevitably will be, through the more familiar discourses of sport, boys will get to perform these movements in ways that count for more. The basic message here is to give boys what they know. What they know is clearly limited. Crawford is one of the few writers to suggest that he knows the implications for girls of comparing dance to sport. Most of the films and articles that adopt this strategy do not even mention girls or women, as if acknowledging them might remind boys and men of the actual context of men's dancing, which is generally in studios where they are vastly outnumbered. A 1987 video comparing dance and sport illustrates the problem with this perspective: in this video all the dancers are women, all the athletes are men (Comparing the Attitudes of Dancers and Athletes, 1987). And, that is really a key assumption underneath the dancers-are-athletes argument. Even within the dance world, female dancers are not seen or promoted as athletic. Their injuries are not referenced to show how tough they are, their ability to dance straight out until the final curtain is not offered as evidence of their physical prowess. They are not profiled in sport magazines. New York Times dance critic Clive Barnes comes right out and says it, in two separate articles, written 12 years apart, `Personally, I think dancing is more natural for men. . . . There is a great deal of pure athleticism in dance and men are better athletes' (1971: 54; see also, 1983). Ted Shawn could not have said it better. Hard Bodies and the Limits of Masculinity Despite their bulging calves and well-defined pecs, male dancers remain well outside commonsense definitions of masculinity, as enrolment figures from almost any community dance programme will show. While hard bodies epitomize contemporary North American masculine ideals, dancers' bodies, chiselled and taut as they are, don't seem quite hard enough. The stationary physical body represents only so much. Once that body starts to move off the square, in curving lines once it raises its arms over its head, dresses itself in revealing tights, engages with music, surrounds itself with women, all the muscles in the world can't save it from ideologies of gender that define not just what bodies should look like, but what they should and should not do, and where they should and should not be. Hard bodies are meant to do hard things. They hit other hard bodies. They move heavy objects. They score goals. They are subjects rather than
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objects of desire. They desire women. The discursive and physical context in which bodies appear and perform is critical to the meanings we attach to those bodies, no matter how predetermined by their materiality their meanings might seem. Hardness, it seems, is produced not just by muscles but also by the context in which those muscles work. In an article about the embodiment of male gender identity, Tony Jefferson also makes the point that hardness is not just about muscles. He borrows a definition from Feldman to elaborate: `hardness is an interiorized quality extracted from risking the body in performance' (cited in Jefferson, 1998: 81). What is at issue here is a mental or emotional quality of the personality that is expressed through a man's physicality. Hardness, Jefferson writes, requires physical toughness, yes, but also the courage that permits a man to put his body in the way of pain or injury. This is the reason, Jefferson argues, why male body builders are not seen, despite their profound hardness, as exemplifying the hardness so many men desire for themselves. Body builders use their hard muscles only for display a feminine objective, as we learned from Igor Youskevitch, above. Body builders, it seems, risk no harm as they perform. It is a notion of risk that remains consistent with the privileging of bodily strength as part of masculine identity. It simply extends that strength behind the muscles. Jefferson's concern is with the iconic male athletic body and so he doesn't pursue the question of whether the notion of hardness he presents works in different contexts. Is it only available to athletes? Does it only work in contexts that are already defined as masculine war, dangerous physical labour? Take those two required qualities mental and physical toughness and transfer them to the ballet stage and, once again, dancers don't fit the equation, despite the fact that they are strong and they regularly risk injury and pain during performance. Risk is not generally a concept through which we make sense of dance. Indeed the discourses through which we tend to read performing arts obscure the risks performers take. Even when risks are there, they are not necessarily seen as such. In sport performances, by contrast, spectators look for and cheer on the risktaking. Is it possible for hardness, the quality identified by Jefferson, to be produced (and celebrated) in discursive contexts where it is not expected? By the end of the 1970s, the era of the so-called `dance boom' in North America, dance magazines had begun to wax optimistically about the changing gender order in society and its positive effects in dance. Nureyev had defected. D'Amboise and Villella were already well known. Audiences were growing. Things could only get better. And, to an extent, they did. But the basic attitude towards male dancers has not yet been overthrown. We don't need to go any further than Bart Simpson to hear the view from the street. When he balks at
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having to dance in a school performance, his teacher commiserates: `I know you have a great conflict Bart. You love ballet and yet you fear the boys will laugh at you, no?' Bart says, `No, I fear the girls will laugh at me. I fear the boys will beat the living snot out of me.' Bart is quoted in an Australian article called `Real Men Do Dance' (Van Ulzen, 1995: 17) not to be confused with an American article called `Do Real Men Watch Dance?' (Fleming, 1993). A feature in the Toronto Globe and Mail refers simply to `Ballet's new men'. The subhead reads `Straight Talk: The Stereotype of the Gay Dancer is Fading as More and More Athletic Young Men Take up Ballet' (Kelly, 1996). Bart wouldn't be so optimistic. He'd know too that `real men' and `athletic men' are straight men, and that articles of this ilk keep appearing because male interest in dance is still thought to be a mark of effeminacy in North America, where to be effeminate is one of the biggest transgressions a man can make. Rather than being a means of drawing male dancers into the fold, as dance writers have been arguing for decades, sport discourse marginalizes them, as it marginalizes so many men who cannot or who choose not to adopt the dominant versions of masculinity it helps to constitute. Dancers need less sport in the world, not more. The extent to which dance is now considered a legitimately masculine practice is not, I would argue, a product of the advertisement of male dancers' physical prowess and hard, muscular bodies, but an effect of 30 years of feminism and the various queer liberation movements that have shifted norms of gender and sexuality. When being likened to a girl or a woman is a pleasure and not a shame, it will be okay for boys to take dance class. When it is okay for men to be gay, to look gay and act gay (whatever that might mean) in dance and elsewhere men's dancing will have it made. Notes
This project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Thanks to Eric Mykhalovskiy and Karen Dubinsky for reading earlier versions of the article, to Susan Shea, Tamara Ferguson and Kristi Allain for research assistance, and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. 1. Thanks to my sister, Barbara Adams, for collecting this information for me. All figures refer to 2001.
References
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