Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality

7. In Dialogue with Firebird

[7] in Dialogue with Firebird Dialogue Magazine for the Arts, May/June 1992. With its powerful combination of visual and romantic subtexts, the pas de deux is the cornerstone of classical ballet. Traditionally, this duet sequence is marked by an elaborate attention to the ballerina. The male dancer partners the female dancer so as to display her technique; his steady hand helps her extend into an arabesque and his lifts help sustain the illusion of her ephemerality . his presence frames the ballerina in three critical ways: physically, with his partnering; visually, with his gaze; and narratively, with the story of his desire for her. one consequence of this structure is that the danseur’s sight becomes a lens which directs the audience’s own way of looking. We see not only what he sees, but how he sees her as well. in addition to being eroticized in this fashion, the classical ballerina is also frequently framed as an enticingly elusive creature from another world and thus becomes exoticized as well. When an African-American ballet company stages these classical pas de deux in the 1990s, the implications of this doubly—erotically and exotically—objectifying gaze are foregrounded in important ways. in their recent Cleveland season (State Theater, March 11–15), Dance Theater of harlem presented two ballets: Dialogues, a contemporary choreography by glen Tetley, and Firebird, a reconstruction of the famous 1910 collaboration between igor Stravinsky and Michel Fokine for Diaghilev’s Ballets russes. Firebird is a fairy tale about the triumphs of good over evil that begins with an elaborate pas de deux between a magical half-woman, half-bird creature and her captor. While Fokine’s movement vocabulary infused the classical idiom with expressive gesture, his choreography maintains , for the most part, the double gaze embedded in the classical duet form. Staged by Dance Theater of harlem in a mythic jungle environment, this version of Firebird reflects back on itself, highlighting the cultural situatedness of its own representation. in other words, by watching a black ballerina dance the role of Firebird, i become aware of the ways in which classical ballet has traditionally both eroticized female bodies and exoticized black bodies. in Dance Theater of harlem’s production, this history of the gaze is made obvious and subverted in interesting ways. Even though it is based on a series of four pas de deux, Dialogues manages to shift the dynamic of the gaze in order to physically articulate a mutu- in dialogue with firebird 41 ally interactive pas de deux based on the equal exchange of seeing and being seen, moving and being moved. The ease with which the dancers in these duets respond to one another also suggests the possibility for a different viewing relationship between the performers and the audience. The juxtaposition of these two ballets within one program both allows for a critique of the hegemonic structure of the pas de deux, and offers an alternative vision of this particular form in classical ballet. Dance Theater of harlem was founded in 1969 by Arthur Mitchell, an African-American classical ballet dancer who had trained with Balanchine and danced in the new York City Ballet, and Karel Shook, his ballet teacher. Mitchell’s original goal was to form an all-black dance company in order to prove to the rarefied and Eurocentric world of ballet that African Americans could successfully dance the classical idiom. in addition, he set up a school and a series of public outreach programs to attract and train young black dancers. Mitchell believes that art is a realm that can speak to many cultural traditions and that ballet provides a sort of universal language with which to speak one’s own experience. Yet the specific context of that experience, especially of an African-American dancer, suggests the possibility of making that universal language speak in a different way. The range of Dance Theater of harlem’s repertory, which includes jazzinspired and Afrocentric dances, as well as several neoclassical works by Balanchine, and traditional narrative ballets such as Giselle, Swan Lake, and Firebird, reflects this breadth of experience. When he produces traditional ballets, Mitchell strategically alters the settings and costumes in order to incorporate the company’s cultural heritage. Thus, Dance Theater of harlem’s version of Giselle is set in a southern creole community, and their version of Firebird is staged in a mythic jungle environment. Their production of Firebird begins with a young man walking stealthily across the stage. he is...