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[11] Mining the Dancefield Spectacle, Moving Subjects, and Feminist Theory Contact Quarterly, Spring/Summer 1990. I in her film The Man Who Envied Women, Yvonne rainer steers clear of a troublesome pothole in feminist film theory—that of imaging a female body—by simply removing the visual presence of her main female character. Trisha appears to the audience through another kind of presence—that of her voice. Sometimes her voice is the film’s conscience—a sort of distant everywoman’s voice. Sometimes her voice is like that of a close friend, whispering a story to you at a crowded party. The human voice has a paradoxical quality. it comes from inside a person and its textured cadences bespeak individuality, yet the voice flows beyond the person, spreading out into the space around her. As a voice, Trisha cannot be caught on the screen by the conventional gaze of an audience. This is, of course, precisely rainer’s strategy. it affords rainer a much greater mobility for her character. Without a visual body, the character cannot be objectified in the usual manner; that is, glamorized or idealized in the camera’s and the audience’s eyes. This slipping out of the filmic framing also gives Trisha a subjectivity rarely found in female characters—she is a speaking subject. it seems, then, that by removing the screen image of Trisha, rainer has evaded the problem of representing female characters in film. hers is, perhaps, the ultimate feminist film coup. i wonder, however, about the limits of this maneuver. Are we to assume that the only way to present the subject-ness of a female character is by erasing her object-to-be-looked-at-ness? And does this feminist strategy really confront the issues of spectacle that surround the representation of the female body? of course, rainer’s film is much more complex than i have suggested so far, and its multiple layerings address several theoretical issues— political, aesthetic, psychoanalytic, and feminist—at once. As a phantom presence who floods the film yet is nowhere to be seen, Trisha inhabits a different kind of space—one which lies just outside the frame, influencing mining the dancefield 65 how we see the images inside it. This space of possibility Teresa de lauretis calls the “space-off.” in her latest book, Technologies of Gender, de lauretis discusses this space as a vital place of feminist revisioning—the place of “the ongoing effort to create new spaces of discourse, to re-write cultural narratives , and to define the terms of another perspective—a view from ‘elsewhere .’” By using Trisha’s disembodied voice to fracture the conventions of the filmic gaze, rainer envelops her audience in this “elsewhere.” interestingly enough, rainer hints at another “elsewhere” in her film. Projected above the head of Jack Deller, Trisha’s husband in the film, is a fleeting glimpse of a film by Trisha Brown, the choreographer, dancing Water Motor (1978). The dance is a series of quirky energetic movements, where flung limbs and off-balance suspensions hang briefly in the air before sliding back into movement. The dancer’s body is never still and her head is as loose as her arms are, tailing behind the movement like the last person in a game of “crack the whip.” Seen for less than a minute, this film clip is enough to give the viewer a lasting visual impression of strong, personable aliveness in a female moving body. it is ambiguous whether this dancer is, in fact, a representation of the film character of Trisha, her alter ego, or merely a figment of Jack’s imagination. Yet the dancer’s spectral presence shares, in my mind, a certain ubiquity with Trisha’s voice. For in this moment rainer has targeted a visual experience that breaks through the traditional syntax of looking at the female body. As elusive as Trisha’s voice, this dancing body cannot be controlled by the camera’s image of her. her movements seem to pour out of the frame to engulf the whole space of the theater, locating the physicality of the female body both in the film and in the space just outside of it—the “space-off.” it is this visual flash of dancing footage, or rather the possibilities it suggests , that i want to explore here. For it seems to me that contemporary dancing (like that in Trisha Brown’s Water Motor) finds ways to rupture the traditional representations that objectify the female...

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