Dancing toward Queer Horizons

Dance studies’ central premise, that bodies and physical relationships are both socially produced and producers of the social, makes dance an apt partner to queer studies and queer activism, sites that also value the body as a force for making meaning and change. That said, I was drawn four years ago to begin a project I call Meanings and Makings of Queer Dance because of my uneasiness with queer studies’ frequent use of “the body” more as metaphor than reality, and at the field’s elevation of writing over more embodied reckonings with queerness.

Meanings and Makings of Queer Dance (MMQD) is a multiyear project that will be published as a book and website in 2017. The project includes a series of performances I’ve curated and documented, and a hybrid book/web project that includes artist manifestos, scholarly writing, performance documentation, and interviews with artists. It’s been exciting to imagine what generative questions the notion of queer dancing might produce, while also honoring that queer dance is not a new set of questions. Queer dance draws intensely on feminist art-making, activism, and scholarship, and black dance, black dance studies, and activist projects—the intellectual and artistic fields, among others, that have been cornerstones of dance and dance studies’ political investments.

I am not interested in queer dance as definable category, but rather—drawing on something that choreographer Peter Carpenter said to me in one of the project’s interviews—MMQD takes up queer dance as a challenge or an aspiration. The question that extends from this provocation is then: What does queer dance challenge us toward? In this short reflection I want to consider three ideas that have been generative challenges throughout my curation of MMQD, and then mention two ideas that have arisen in the course of the work.

One productive idea that queer studies borrows from feminism is the one that the personal is indeed political. In this vein I want to share a story. This is the story of the first time someone called me “queer,” and how that moment in an Alabama dance studio helps me think about the desires and potentials of queer dancing futures to consider the radical possibilities for thinking with bodies; the relationship among politics, gender, sexuality, and dance; and the lived experiences of LGBTQ people living, learning, and creating work within the dance community, past and present.

I am 8 years old and sit with a group of young dancers in a studio in my Alabama hometown. We are awaiting our turn to rehearse that year’s recital, a version of Agnes DeMille’s 1942 ballet Rodeo. My dance teacher’s version (as well as DeMille’s original production) followed the female protagonist, the Cowgirl. This feisty heroine cavorts with the cowboys on a Western ranch, but then realizes that her tomboy behavior fails as romantic enticement, particularly on the arrival of the Rancher’s Daughter, a vision of upper-class white femininity. The newly arrived beauty’s cross-legged curtsies evince the appropriate physical image of femininity, trumping the Cowgirl’s wide-legged cartwheels. By the ballet’s end the Cowgirl abandons her wild leaps and overalls for a fire-red dress and curtsies, leaving behind her gender-bending ways to get the guy.

I loved the Cowgirl, and I wanted to be the Cowgirl. Her space-eating movement, playfulness, and manipulation of physical codes of masculinity and femininity thrilled me. Expressing my love for the Cowgirl out loud is what got me in trouble that day. I remember the 11-year-old’s face in front of me demanding, “What did you just say? Are you ‘queer’?” I did not know what the word queer meant, nor, I suspect, did my interrogator.

Buying time to decide how to reply, I leaned back against a wall, placing my head just under a poster of American ballet’s heterosexual icon, Mikhail Baryshnikov. With his legs teetering on my tiny head, I said: “Well, I guess if ‘queer’ means ‘strange,’ then, yes, I’m ‘queer.’” “You don’t know what ‘queer’ means,” she countered. “It means strange. I’m...