Dance studies
Alexandra Kolb, Professor, Dance, School of Arts, University of Roehampton, London, United-Kingdom
I am Professor of Dance at Roehampton – a London university – and teach dance studies in its contemporary and historical aspects. Having a dance background myself, in 1999 I embarked on a Ph.D. about dance and literature in early 20th century Germany at a British University, drawing heavily on feminist and gender theories. I recognised gender studies as an apt methodological framework for my project yet was initially reluctant to engage with it, fearing I might discover some uncomfortable truths about gender relations – especially in Germany which at the time was known for conservative gender attitudes and low women’s employment rates.
Beginning with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter as recommended by my supervisor – complex and highly influential books published earlier in the 1990s – I was intrigued by her linkage of gender to performance and performativity (the ‘enactment’ of gender ideals), her theories on the fluidity of gender and its distinction from sex, and gender’s connections to sexuality. Dance, of course, uses the physical body as its main instrument and thus heavily profiles gender identities. Butler’s theory can usefully illuminate and help analyse gender representations in dance, especially as it is so closely connected to performance – although, importantly, Butler’s concept of performativity is different as gender is not consciously acted out.
I also read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which was groundbreaking in its rejection of a causal relation between sex and gender – and other French and German theorists. Yet it was only when encountering early 20th century authors who advocated what was later called gender essentialism – the view that men and women have innate and fixed essences due to their biological nature prior to the imposition of culture – that I truly appreciated the conceptual shift implied by Butler’s claim that gender is socially constructed. Essentialism is now much maligned, in dance studies and beyond, but in the early 20th century women were often literally seen as insignificant ‘others’ to men, and had to establish an identity for themselves. Early modern choreographers cast off conventional balletic images of femininity, such as nymphs or fairies whose dance vocabulary reflected female gender stereotypes (for instance by using small and delicate steps). Some performers sought authentic expressions of an innate femininity along essentialist lines, including Isadora Duncan whose dance was grounded in the specificities of the female body and psychology. Other, such as Valeska Gert who at times drew on male-connoted movements (e.g. boxing), evinced a notion of gender as more artificial – akin to Butler’s. Others again, such as Mary Wigman, are difficult to categorise.
Since my doctorate, I have often returned to gender theories as central and inspiring analytical tools: for instance in essays on post-privacy, sex and intimacy; on Mata Hari and exoticism; in regard to state or governmental politics; in examining female pleasure in ballet (rebutting one-sided claims that it is a misogynist form); and in work on the characteristically female figure of the witch. Gender’s application value to dance is wide-ranging, as choreographers variously reinforce or undermine gender binarism in their works, parody notions of gender identity (e.g. the Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo), and use movements to express heteronormative or LGBTQ sexualities on- and off-stage. I suspect gender will remain a contested and historically contingent notion, whose deployment depends heavily on an individual’s or wider society’s perspective. The difficulty with applying gender theories to dance is that one is tempted to impose them upon the dancing body, rather than letting the body itself find its own voice. In practice, the ways bodies move on stage do not always reflect clear-cut theoretical positions, and thus they remain wonderfully – or vexingly – ambivalent.
Cite this item: Alexandra Kolb, “Gender”, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177831
