The Choreographic Interface: Dancing Facial Expression in Hip-Hop and Neo-Burlesque Striptease

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Facial Choreography in Performance

About face. Face-to-face. In your face. Game face. Blank-faced. Face-off. Lose face. Long face. Two-faced. FaceTime. Blackface. Face down. Face up to. Egg on your face. Poker face. Facebook. Pram face. Shit-faced. Baby face. Arse about face. Face the facts! As a discrete body part, the face possesses potent social and symbolic meaning. Within the expressions above, the face conveys a broad range of ideas and practices that include spatial orientations, social interactions, physical dispositions, psychological states, personality traits, sporting terminology, social standing, communications systems, and a call to action. The head in general claims physiological importance, as the brain and four of the sensory organs are located here, and, since Plato, Western philosophy has conceptualized the head to be representative of nobility, reason, and leadership (Brophy 1946; Coates 2012; Magli 1989). The face in particular acts as the primary site through which humans communicate, and it signifies a putative expression of a unique identity (Brophy 1946; Kesner 2007; McNeill 1998). It constitutes a transcendental signifier through which the inner self is purportedly revealed; hence the eye automatically goes to the face as a privileged site of meaning.

Given the Cartesian preoccupation with rational thought that has ensured a philosophical division between the head and body, dance practice and its associated scholarship have focused on the re-integration of the two. Consequently, as an isolated body part, the head is rarely addressed in dance research. In this article, however, I call upon the discipline of dance studies and its commitment to movement to conduct a study of the “dancing face.” In spite of its neglect, the face participates choreographically in the realization of the aesthetic codes and embodied conventions that pertain to different dance styles and genres. Even a superficial comparison between the intricate facial motilities of a Kathakali dancer and the sexualized facial contortions of Latin American competition dance, or the huge glistening smile of a Broadway chorus girl and the solemn disposition of a Graham performer, indicates that facial expression is not left to chance. I therefore conceive facial expression in dance as “choreographic,” whether set or improvised, in that it is designed and revised according to performance norms. While we expect to see a striptease artist wink, it would be jarring for a classical ballet dancer to do the same.

Although scholars have sporadically addressed the composition of the face in performance,¹ there is neither in-depth exploration of the face within dance practice, nor consideration of the theoretical apparatuses that could elucidate “facial choreography” as a performance strategy. While this study exists as part of a larger research project, here I focus specifically on the French continental philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) and their theory of “faciality.” First I examine Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotic conception of the face and its application to dance practice through the smile of the Busby Berkeley chorus girl. I then consider how Deleuze and Guattari’s work on the face presents a critique of universalist theorizations of facial expression, as well as how my study of facial choreography offers a revisionist understanding of the face as a haunting aporia within dance studies. I move on to develop the notion of “facial performativity” through a selection of scholars who consider the performance of identity within configurations of facial expression.

I introduce the concept of a “choreographic interface” to explore how facial expression enters into a choreographic relationship with other dancing faces and bodily territories, and which acts as a site of meaning-construction. While some “facial choreography” simply mirrors other expressive traditions or masks the labor of other body parts, I suggest that the choreographic interface also offers the potential to rewrite the face in relation to the body as a mode of critical commentary. With this in mind, I explore two dancing bodies that engage the face in ways that complicate existing modalities of facial expression. Notably, both are dance practices located within...