Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities on and off the Stage (review)

Jane C. Desmond was wise to discard a provisional title, "Queer Theory and the Dancing Body" (14), in favor of the more breathy and suggestive Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities on and off the Stage. Many of the essays within this anthology delve deeply into the erotics of physical and artistic labor and the spectatorial pleasure that audiences experience. These analyses of performers, their work, and their sexualities are often liberating, evocative, and downright sexy. Like the scholars involved in Dancing Desires's final section, "Reflections and Extensions," readers are able to choreograph their own movements through the anthology, creating—like the pair of Mark Morris dancers on the volume's cover—strange and beautiful couplings with partners comprising theorists, histories, and ideas about future studies and performances of dance and sexuality.

In her introduction, Desmond articulates her desire to make dance analysis visible within the growing critical fields of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory, and she calls attention to the necessity of considering histories of sexualities in the study of dance. Including Desmond's introduction, the seventeen well-theorized essays in this anthology cumulatively trace a history of dance performance and dance scholarship in the twentieth century, participating in ongoing discussions of, for example, male gaze theory, the place of pleasure in dance analysis, and the intersections of race and gender on the dancing body. Each contributor uses diverse methodologies and weaves together multiple sources—ethnographies, historical case studies, films, literature—with theory drawn from a similarly wide range of disciplines, to investigate a particular performance or space where the relationship between the dancing/choreographing body and sexuality is on display.

Dancing Desires is organized into three sections: "Theatrical Theories," "Social Stagings," and "Reflections and Extensions." In the first section, Desmond presents an ensemble of seven essays that both "revision dance history queerly" (12) and "make history dance" (14). Queer readings of Charlie Chaplin are juxtaposed with fetishistic inquiry about Nijinsky's slave roles and with Ted Shawn's nationalism and performance of masculinity in the homophobic 1930s. Of particular interest is Susan Leigh Foster's novella-like "Closets Full of Dances: Modern Dance's Performance of Masculinity and Sexuality," a lengthy essay that examines key movers in modern dance along with contemporary identity theorists and sexologists, creating bizarre pas de deux with the likes of Merce Cunningham and Alfred Charles Kinsey. Foster's genealogic essay illustrates the shift in the nature of modern dance's closets. She concludes with an elegant comparison of Matthew Bourne's all-male Swan Lake and queer theory of the 1990s, both of which have the project of finding at last "a critical place from which to assess the workings of heteronormative cultural values" (194-95). In this section of the book, Foster and her colleagues address at length how important these closets (whether vacated or not) are to an art form that relies on meaning through public display of the human body.

"Social Stagings," the second section of the anthology, is populated by readings of the queer dancing body in other venues. In assembling these essays, Desmond champions a wider consideration of the venues where dance is performed and studied, the social stages "embedded in specific material and ideological conditions of possibility" (13). While these essays continue to meld history and theory, they are fresh and surprising (as perhaps all good dances are) in their scope. Paul Siegel looks at dance and legislation in "A Right to Boogie Queerly: The First Amendment on the Dance Floor." Jonathan Bollen recounts queer Mardi Gras dance parties in Sydney. Gestural freedom is at the heart of David Gere's "29 Effeminate Gestures: Choreographer Joe Goode and the Heroism of Effeminacy." In the essay, David Gere not only describes (an imperative in this script-less medium) and analyzes Joe Goode's 1987 solo investigation of performative posturing...