Androgyny: Expansive Possibilities for Reading the Human Figure in Contemporary Dance

Peggy Baker (2012)

Between 2002 and 2005, I passed on six solos, each of them to two dancers at a time, through an initiative titled The Choreographer’s Trust. Whether or not the dances would be performed by men was a consideration for each of the six works. And though it struck me initially as a cursory, pragmatic, or even rhetorical question, when I contemplated it more deeply this consideration opened up some fascinating and mysterious lines of enquiry.

 As a female choreographer creating works to dance myself, I found myself wondering: are these necessarily dances best performed by women? When are the subject matter and vocabulary of my dances informed in some crucial way by my female persona and the yin aspects of my character and physicality? When does the ambiguity and neutrality of my rather androgynous physique – broad shoulders, small breasts, narrow hips, big feet and hands – play an important role in defining the choreography itself? Does the loss of the tension between yin and yang traits undermine the choreography when the dance is performed by a woman with a more typically female physique and physicality? Does that tension dissolve when the dance is performed by a man, or does the fact that the choreography was driven by a female sensibility sustain the tension? What is the effect if the male dancer taking on the role is, himself, somewhat androgynous? What part does costuming play in creating or eliminating the tension of androgyny?

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Contemporary dance in the early twenty-first century traces one important thread of its origins to Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Loie Fuller. These were western women who looked across the globe and back through history to images that expressed the powerful sensuality of the female form. Their dancing unleashed the full force of the quintessentially female body and physicality onto the concert stage: sensuous, sensual, maternal, majestic, exotic, erotic. In the next generation, Martha Graham’s work explored the conflicting impulses and tensions of female sexuality. Along with all of the women in her company, Graham wore dresses of her own design that clung tightly to the torso across the shoulders, breasts, and belly right down to the crease of the hip joint, revealing the coiling spirals of the spine, high arches through the chest, and deep thrusts of the pelvis that drive every gesture in her choreography. When, eventually, she added men to her company, they played their opposing masculine role, dressed in trousers and shirts or simply in loincloths. Meanwhile, Doris Humphrey dressed her dancers as community members, citizens – men in pants and women in simple, modest dresses with wide skirts – and set them in dignified, ecstatic, grieving, celebratory motion, fulfilling musical and choreographic structures. Later, Alwin Nikolais, who also composed the music and designed the extraordinary lighting for his choreography, had his dancers climb inside huge tubes of stretch-fabric and use their bodies to shift the contour of the material. It was almost impossible to tell the men from the women, and the distinction rarely mattered. Merce Cunningham presented his virtuosic company of dancers simply as figures in space. His choreographic interests were purely abstract, focused on movement invention with exacting timings and precise spatial patterns disrupted by strictly imposed chance procedures. Although he consistently paired only men and women as duet couples, he dressed all of his dancers alike, most often in leotards and tights or unitards, costuming that, despite revealing the contour of the body in great detail, created an illusion of gender neutrality.

Minimalists Trisha Brown, Laura Dean, and Lucinda Childs dress their dancers in unisex costumes – flowing pants and tunics or sleek trousers and shirts, with the men and women dancing exactly the same steps. Lar Lubovitch, Mark Morris, and Bill T. Jones routinely switch up gender roles in their dances, pairing men with men and women with women. Lubovitch often features men in lush, lyrical choreography and women in aggressively athletic roles. Morris portrayed a woman in his Dido and Aeneas, and wore a dress, without affecting any femininity, for his solo Dad’s Charts. He added a solitary woman to the ensemble for Death of Socrates (a dance for and about men), and had men and women alike dance in pointe shoes for his snow scene in The Hard Nut. He often doublecast roles with a man and woman sharing the same part. 

Marie Chouinard loves to push gender tension to the brink, employing extreme vocals and costuming (including the phallus/horn of the faun – only ever performed by a woman – in Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune). The sexually charged movement sequences in her dances shatter some gender stereotypes while adamantly reinforcing others. Like Chouinard, Dave St. Pierre uses wigs and nudity to confound, shock, and titillate the audience, setting into motion (sometimes irreverently) erotically charged or sexually naïve characters.

For Joe, Jean-Pierre Perreault dressed women and men alike in trousers, overcoats, fedoras, and heavy boots, creating a sea of anonymous humanity in which the range of extremely subtle differences among the dancers was enhanced by the female presence. In Four Towers, Christopher House dresses both men and women in kilts and sleeveless undershirts to perfectly balanced androgynous effect. He achieved a similar tension and sexual democracy through costuming and unorthodox casting choices in Vena Cava, Severe Clear, and Chiasmata. James Kudelka’s In Paradisum double casts men and women in the same roles, and costumes one and all in long heavy skirts and plain sleeveless tunics that give the impression of monks’ robes.

It is also possible to create the exciting tension of androgyny without wearing clothing usually associated with the opposite sex. Louise Lecavalier’s muscular body and ferocious movement quality is gender-bending even when she wears a corset and sheer tights. During Serge Bennathan’s directorship, the women of Dancemakers mastered a raw, virtuosic physicality rooted in the yang qualities of grit, courage, and stamina.  Wen Wei Wang, José Navas, and Alvin Erasga Tolentino all include essentially feminine qualities in their choreography for themselves and for other men, regardless of the subject or theme of their dances.  

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The dual word-tags female/male, feminine/masculine, and yin/yang identify clear and definite sexual and gender identities. However, the embodiment of an actual, individual identity is infinitely more complex and nuanced. While this overview of choreographers’ approaches to gender is an incomplete smattering of examples, it serves to illustrate my belief that one of the great strengths of contemporary dance is the tremendous scope it offers in terms of gender identity. Like the great cultural legacies of literature – poetry, plays, memoir, and biography – and visual art – drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, and installation – that so deftly reveal the complexity and subtlety of sexual identity and expression, so too contemporary dance offers extraordinarily diverse images of gender, raising questions and considerations that aid us in navigating the personal and societal spheres, and in understanding and appreciating the world we inhabit.

Photo credit on Collected Essays - Androgyny:
Brute (1994)
dancer and choreographer: Peggy Baker
photo: Cylla von Tiedemann